Little Flower Girl

Little Flower Girl

5x7 inches

Coloured Pencil on drafting film

Oh what fun I had doing this piece, especially after doing a few graphite works. I just loved doing the colours and textures and was quite happy with it until I started on the legs, where I struck a few problems with the darker shadows. Not to worry - I have decided to frame and keep this piece (something I rarely do) because the colours make me happy. A huge thank you to Juno Kughler Carlson from Artist Friends Network for supplying the gorgeous reference photo. :)

Mini Portrait - Reece in Acrylics

Reece

8cm x 11cm

Acrylics on RTX300 Rtistx Panel

Recently my nephew, Reece, expressed disappointment that there wasn't a portrait of him on my website, so with his birthday looming soon, I thought it was a good time to remedy the situation. Still experimenting with acrylics, I dug out some Rtistx Panels that I bought a year ago to do watercolours on. For anyone who hasn't come across these panels before, they are an absolute delight to work with. They come in four different surfaces, and the ones that I purchased were the RTX300 which are suitable for Oils, Acrylics, Pen & Ink and pencils. They are sturdy 3mm boards with the finest tooth surface, and I have to say I am a bit happier with the end results of the acrylics on this board over the colourfix paper. For more information on Rtistx visit http://www.rtistx.com/.

The Little Fossicker

One of the problems I experience as an artist living in Australia is the lack of available materials and resources we can access as compared to the US and UK. When I first started painting miniature watercolours 3 or 4 years ago, I wasn't happy with traditional watercolour papers and so the search was on for a surface that would allow me to produce fine detail, and also allow for some reworking. I stumbled across Fredrix Watercolor Canvas and loved what this surface enabled me to do with watercolours. But paintings done on this surface don't reproduce into prints very well as they tend to have quite a grainy appearance. At that time, I couldn't find a quality Illustration board in any of our local artshops, and whilst I could have ordered some from the US, this isn't always practical when it comes to ordering large sheets.

The other day, I stumbled across some Crescent Illustration Board in one of our local artshops and decided to redo a little painting of one of our boys when they were young (one of my favourites). The painting on top was done two years ago on the canvas, and the one below was done on the illustration board. Some of you may prefer the canvas, but I must admit I was much happier with the results on the illustration board. We head off tomorrow for our holiday and I will definitely be packing the watercolours for more experimenting.