Work in Progress - February 2020

I’ve been working away on the new paintings for Westport, I’m fairly happy with them but a couple will need a glaze or a couple of highlights scumbled in later. That’s it as far as the studio goes really, just painting away.

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In Heritage House the Cork & Canvas nights are going well, we’re going into the fifth night of them this week and we’ve started running workshops in painting for senior citizens, after school workshops for children aged 7 to 12 and starting this week there will be workshops for teens. I think they will all run for about 6 weeks. They’ll run along side the school terms so I think we’re going to try another batch of 6 week blocks until the summer.

Work in Progress - June 2019

I spent June finishing off the sketch to a point where I’d be happy to put it on canvas, there’s a few more bits that I want to put in but I want to start getting paint on canvas so I’ll add the extras later. I’m running a little later than I was expecting with the painting because I ran into a few problems with the painting last week and had to re-stretch the canvas twice so I’m hoping it’ll go smoothly this time, the first problem was with the preparation itself, the next time I ran into trouble transferring the drawing onto the canvas. I was back in Photoshop preparing a couple of other images to add at a later stage too.

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I ordered the frame from the Milliken Brothers in County Down, their frames are really well made and sturdy and with this being a much larger painting than what I have been working on lately and also due to the shape of the canvas I wanted to take precautions to avoid any potential warping further down the line.

I ran the workshops at Heritage House for Cruinniú na nÓg (images below) and the 4 day painting workshop too and they went well. The Cruinniú na nÓg was just a case of people participating as they called in and there was a steady crowd. The 4 day workshops were a little slow to fill up but ended up close to full in the last few days before they started. I planned out a lot more than we could’ve fitted into each day just to make sure that we weren’t going to be left with a window of having nothing to be at.

June felt fairly busy but I think I was just focusing on two or three things fairly intensely and trying to aim for a few deadline set by myself and workshop dates and then there were a few problems I had foreseen with the canvas.

First day of the 4 day workshops when the group did colour theory

Work in Progress - May 2019

I spent part of May planning workshops that will be held in Heritage House, Abbeyleix. They are mostly paint based with a bit of lino print to finish up on the last day. The workshops are planned for June 25th and will run until the 28th. All the details, such as price, numbers and a more detailed breakdown of each days classes are over on the Heritage House Facebook page and you can message us to book a place from there if you’re around Abbeyleix or know somebody that would be interested in taking part. When I finished work on Friday there were 8 places available.

The planned breakdown is:

Tuesday June 25th - Colour Theory, Wednesday - Portraiture, Thursday - Still Life and Friday - Lino Print

On the 15th of June I will be running a quilling workshop as part of Cruinniú na nÓg. This will be running from 12pm to 2pm at Heritage House and there will be loads more going on at Heritage House for Cruinniú na nÓg so again if you’re around Abbeyleix call in. The reason I decided to try a quilling workshop was because the date is so close to the painting workshop if anyone came to both I didn’t want it to be too repetitive.

In the studio I’ve just been working away at the drawing and have it fairly close to finished so I’m hoping to get it onto canvas in the next two weeks. I lost a week because I wasn’t happy with the tree over on the right so I decided to cover it over and redo it and I’m happier with the result. There are a couple of small bits to add to it still but I can start painting and add them later.

Just for a bit of a break from the drawing I was playing about with a small lino print and it’s something that I would like to do more of at some stage. The paper I was using was fairly think and I’d like to try a thinner paper and take my time doing it. Just because it was a bit of play I rushed it a bit and didn’t have the ink very even. I found the best result was on the damp paper but I had too much ink on the block and lost some detail, but I was happy enough with it.