Featured Product at Zazzle: Mythical Willow Pattern Card

Well I just had another one of my products awarded with a Todays Best Award on Zazzle.com I seem to be making a habbit of this :) Saying that I do have a small folio of designs which I originally did for greetings cards etc so I've been going through that and uploading the best designs.

I also uploaded this car design called VROOM!! Which I suppose is somewhat reminiscent of Roy Lichtenstein. The car design is something I made up I kind of based it on a 57 Chevy, but kind of crossed with a Ford Anglia, though there is a little bit of red Corvette thrown in for good measure :)

I wish they still made cars with fins, perhaps I should get in touch with Volkswagon and get this made up :)

Featured Product at Zazzle: Herd of Elephants Postage

I just got a message from the people at Zazzle telling me this custom postage stamp "Herd of Elephants Postage" which I created today with one of my paintings has been awarded as one of today's best designs :) Which means it will be featured on the today's best page and appear in the featured products as one of the best on Zazzle :)

I do like doing designs for these custom stamps. It's a pity there isn't a UK version though. However I also have this picture available as a greetings card.

It can be seen on Zazzle.com here: Herd of Elephants Postage

Simon the Cat. 5¾ ins x 6¼ ins, Oil on Acetate.

I did this little painting quite some years ago now. Simon was a cat we owned back in the 1980s along with another cat called Jasper. Unfortunately Simon became very ill and had to be put down. We don't know what happened really there wasn't any marks on him to show he had been in any sort of accident but the vet said it looked like he had been either crushed or maybe someone had kicked him :( It was very sad to lose him like that. our other cat Jasper also missed him to, they were very close and I suppose he must have wondered where Simon had gone.

I originally started this painting just wanting to paint a cat, but it ended up as a portrait of Simon. I think I did this painting to have something to remember him in happier times, wide eyed and bushy tailed and perhaps still stalking the birds in kitty Heaven. :) But I do kind of think cats are immortal and sometimes an aspect of immortality seems to exist in my own paintings, at least to me, fooled by my own art, perhaps? But I suppose it's like a memory made flesh and maybe that is all we are at the end of the day.

Smoking Robot on Mars. 18ins x 14ins, Acrylic on Canvas

This is another painting that I did a while back, 2004 to be precise, so not quite so early as yesterday's painting, but a few years old. I went though a bit of a phase of being interested in retro toy robots and even bought one on eBay which I have an an ornament in my living room. This is a painting of the classic "Smoking Robot" which I put in an imaginary Martian landscape . Of course we now know the sky is actually blue on Mars, but even NASA have been known to practice a bit of artistic licence, they call it science LOL. But a bright red sky does look quite striking I think.

Actually the reason I put this painting up today is because I have just made a high resolution image of it, which is now available as a print from Zazzle.com It can a purchased as a full size print as a small poster (which is quite reasonable in price) or you can also have it printed on canvas and framed in your choice of frame.

Actually I think it looks rather nice in a simple wooden frame and probably doesn't need an inner mount (matting) Bearing in mind the original is on stretched canvas. But it also looks nice with a white mount. Though obviously the more one adds the more pricey it gets :)

The Dolphin and the Crab were Friends

I did this painting as an illustration for a children's book around 1992. Being intended as an illustration it was painted on clear acetate over a pencil sketch, which proves layers were not invented by Adobe. :)

Well it's bit different than my usual work, but I thought I'd put it in my daily painting blog since it's interesting to put something different in, and because I haven't been doing quite so many paintings lately because I have been busy making some of my designs, illustrations and paintings available on various products including Posters, framed prints, greetings cards on a new custom products site called Zazzle.com

So that's another reason why I hunted out this illustration. I thought it would make a nice greetings card So I have made it available both as a greetings card and as a small print

The picture on the left is how it might look as a framed print. Although there are millions of other ways to frame it. :)

Trees, Bute Park. 4.5ins x 6ins. Oil on Board

Another painting of Bute park. I decided to do some park landscapes, mainly because I went for a few walks in the park and partly because I needed a change from still-lifes.

I originally wanted to do this painting an alla prima style but I wasn't happy with the initial results so I wiped it all off and started it again. The second time I did an under painting in raw umber and white and let that dry for a day or so before using colour in the over painting stage this worked very well.

Of course doing underpaintings does tend to make paintings take a bit longer so isn't that practical if one is trying to do a painting a day. That said of course I could have have used acrylics in the under painting which means you can work on the over painting fairly soon since acrylics dry quicker than oils. However I do prefer using oils even in the under painting stages.

Red Path 4.5ins x 6ins Oil on Board

This is a painting of a path not far from the River Taff in Bute park. Its 4.5ins x 6ins and painted Oil on Board.

Mangoes. 4ins x 6ins, oil on board

This is a painting of some mangoes that were in a box in my local supermarket. I thought they looked interesting in the box like this so I managed to snap a quick photo.

Actually I'm always a bit wary of taking pictures in shops, having once been asked to leave a branch of Sainsburys for taking photos. Though given I was using a 35mm SLR at the time I suppose it looked a bit conspicuous. However I dare say these days with mobile phones and small digital cameras many of which are quite sophisticated as camera's go and perfectly capable of taking indoor shots, photography in shops is not as unusual as it once was.

Stairway. 4.5ins x 6ins, Oil on board

I was thinking of calling this painting "The Institution". However it is actually a view of one of the stairways in the small low rise block of flats I live in, so I didn't really want to give people the impression they have carted me off to an institution just yet LOL.

Actually one reason it has chairs on the landings is because it was originally intended for people over 55 and although they dropped the age limit to 45+ in more recent years obviously there are still one or two more senior tenents. Of course I suppose one reason they dropped the age limit is precisely because of the stairs. Why they thought building accommodation originally intended for senior citizens with stairs, no lifts and no wheelchair access boggles the mind. Not that I'm complaining I'm very pleased to have got a flat in such a nice building. :)

Anyway I noticed the sun was shining in through the window one day after going out to check my electricity meter and what with the 1970s style vintage chair, empty but as if someone may have just got up from it and the sunlight casting beams and shadows down the wall I thought the scene would make a lovely painting and is perhaps somewhat reminiscent of Edward Hopper, who has to be the most influential realist painters ever, given that I find it difficult to look at anything without thinking I've seen it in a Hopper painting. Arrgh! Though not such a bad thing really I do love realist painting of that style and never tire of looking at paintings like that, in fact I managed to see most of Hoppers major original works in a big exhibition in London back in the late 1970s when I was in Art College so I guess he was pretty influential in my development as an artist :)

Pears. 4.5ins x 6ins, Oil on Board

I did this painting of pears last week, it took a little longer than I had expected. Actually it's surprising how challenging pears are to paint if you want to get all the detail of their texture in.

I don't buy pears very often, but one thing I did learn is they seem to taste best when they look like they are beginning to go over, so you can leave them a week before eating them at which point they go beautifully soft sweet and juicy and seem to have tons of flavour, whereas if you eat them too early they often seem not to have much taste. So one can afford to take a bit of extra time with a still-life painting and still enjoy the pear at it's best. :)