Adornment - sketches

I am currently working on a couple of paintings but it takes a while to finish them, especially seeing as the one I am doing right now is my most massive one (size wise) yet!

So I thought that I would post sketches that I have done in the mean time :)

These sketches are ones I did while looking at 'adornment' in India...

Discord

This is another A-level piece, this time for my exam. It is a whole lot less prettyful but for some reason it is one of my favourite paintings.

The title of the exam was 'Discord' and I decided to look at discord between Man and Nature, but more specifically, in the sky. So I compared human flight machines...planes...and natural flight machines...birds. Simples.

Cue a trip to the Science Museum: that massive hall where there's millions of planes and cars and weird stuff. And then to the Natural History Museum to take pictures of creepy stuffed birds. And then I combined the two together to create a kind of mechanical bird, as you can see here. It is an oil painting on canvas, but I stuck little tiny bolts around the edge of the 'metal plating' and I went mad in Hobbycraft choosing feathers to stick on as well. It makes it more interesting to have real stuff on the painting so I always try and add something 3D.

The background is very influenced by Picasso, as is most of my stuff, really. I loveee cubism because of the bright bold colours matched with dark dark black and because it is so fun to make curved rounded shapes more interesting my breaking them up with lines. Very geek and very paintbrush!

Adornment

This piece was one I did as part of my A-level coursework. It was the product of manyyy long nights sat up watching Bollywood DVDs to keep me awake while I did each individual section of the patchwork design..

It basically started off as a project looking at the human imagine..which involved life drawing (eek!) and I used one of the drawings I had done in the sessions and stylized the shapes. By doing this, I created a pattern in which to put my different fabrics and beads. You can spot the initial pattern if you look closely at the dark blue lines on their own...see it? Clue: it is a male form, with one leg folded and one knee up, and one arm is stretched out and resting on the knee. Massive clue but you'll need help finding it!

I then focused on a more specific part of the human 'image': adornment. This was largely inspired by a trip to India where I went mad shopping for fabrics, trims, sequins and beads. The shop was amazing..tiny and packed full of so much different stuff...rows of tubes filled with fancy coloured gems and buttons and ribbons and everything! I also looked at paintings of indian women, and how jewellery is SO important in India...and the fact that even the poorest woman will be wearing a brightly coloured sari. All of this made me want to try and convey the colour and richness and texture through a painting, and so this was the result!

Each section is made up of stuff that I bought from that shop or something I designed and made myself. So one section is a batik painting (you dribble hot wax onto fabric and then dye it with ink, and when you iron the wax off it leaves your patterns behind), a few are just paintings I did on watercolour paper, some are beads I sewed onto fabric...a whole mess of stuff.

It now has pride of place in my lounge...my Mum loved it and it fit with the colour scheme so there we go!

Ganesh

This was my first venture into selling my work, and is a kind of painting of a real-life object. As with all my paintings, it is an oil on canvas, slightly larger than A3.

The story behind this is kind of funny...I made friends with a boy called Akash last summer, and when he saw some of the artwork I had done, he showed it to his then-employer, who I shall call Bob-the-Builder. Bob was so impressed with the picture that he asked me to reproduce it on canvas for his house, which I did. But then lots of drama happened involving a bathroom and Bob vanished, never to be seen again. So I still have this painting, which he was going to pay £75 for...