quadraptych (?)

[devi]

I have a day off today. It's glorious. So:





This is what I've been up to the last couple of weeks. I've been wanting to paint something for ages, but could never settle on what. Then one night I sat down with one of a set of four canvases (cheap from The Works. If they'd been expensive canvases I'd never have picked up the brush) and told myself I was just experimenting with using paint and mixing colours. I deliberately didn't have a goal in mind, I just gave the brush its head and waited to see what happened, and the whole thing was such fun that I went on and did three more.

On the downside, my laptop now has tiny speckles of black paint on it due to overenthusiastic brush-flicking. I feel like Brian from Spaced. "I paint... fear! Aggression! Pain!"

Capital One spammed me today. "You could have this [spectacularly awful] credit card in your wallet! Look, we know you're an idiot - you must be if you're considering applying - so to choose which design you want, all you have to do is peel off one of these little credit-card-shaped stickers and stick it on the application form! You can have a piggy, a monkey, a puppy, a tigger or an England flag!" I threw the rest in the bin but kept the stickers. I might send them out with the next Wasted Epiphanies as an Ironic Comment on the Debt Culture, innit.

Comments

[yiskah.livejournal.com]

Oh, those are awesome! Especially the top left one.

[shewho.livejournal.com]

oooh, beautiful colour combinations!

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

Those are really good! I think I like the top right one best...

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Heh - that's the last one I did. It figures. Thank you.

[dyddgu.livejournal.com]

ooh, the brown on top right is gorgeous!

[ladymoonray.livejournal.com]

Wow, those are beautiful. I feel all inspired now :)

[taimatsu]

they're fab. Top two especially. :)

[ki.livejournal.com]

lovelovelovelovelove the top right one. and the bottom left one. and well. all of them. but.. ooh! i love the top right one. great job, you rock!

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

...and that was the first one I did. Hmm. Thanks!

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

Mine! I spoke first! <grins>

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

Apparently you have the same tastes as me :)

I think it's the colours I like in the bottom left one.

Um... is it just me, or are they, in both shape and colour, pretty much equivalent to the four elements? Only I can see flames and clouds and earthworms :)

[dyddgu.livejournal.com]

fite! fite! fite! ;-)

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Thank you. Do you paint or draw yourself?

I just went to your interests to see if you mentioned painting, and now I want lemon drizzle cake!

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Ding! Though it wasn't intentional. I'd been thinking of doing four element paintings for ages, but when I started the brown one I'd decided not to and to just paint colour combinations my eyes liked. Then the brown one came out earthier than I'd thought, and the purple one turned out bluer and more watery than I'd imagined it, and by the time I got to the fiery one I'd resigned myself to painting the four elements whether I liked it or not!

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Cheers. The orange/blue one actually makes my eyes flicker and buzz when I look at it in real life.

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

Come an' 'ave a go if you think you're 'ard enough!

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Nice, a bit Leger-esque. What size are they? (My vote goes for the top left one FWIW.)

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

<laughs>

The gods will have their fun ;)

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Cheers. It's interesting how people mostly like the top two, as the brown was my first uncertain attempt and the blue/grey was me getting possibly overconfident, trying to mix colours and ending up with something smudgier than the rest.

How's the typography work marathon going?

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

12 by 12 inches. And I hadn't really taken note of Leger's stuff before, but I did have a big thing for cubism when I was last doing art (back at school). Actually, who I think I'm being more derivative of is Mainie Jellett (http://www.crawfordartgallery.com/Paintings/MJellett.html).

[taimatsu]

It's bloody hard to draw loaves of bread. That's about where I'm at at the moment. Tetrapaks of milk are easier, though. (I am producing a leaflet explaining how to make breakfast.)

[ladymoonray.livejournal.com]

*falls over laughing*

Sorry about that! The best lemon drizzle cake is that made by sushidog, you know :)

I'm a fairly hopeless artist, but I'm trying to teach myself to draw. Because it's something I've always wanted to do.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

jinty's is delicious too. Mmmm cake.

How are you going about teaching yourself? I'm trying too - I'm okay with abstract stuff but whenever I try to represent something real, the perspective and the proportions are all wonky. So far my self-teaching method has involved freaking out old men in pubs by sketching them and then refusing to show them the results because they were embarrassingly bad.

[taimatsu]

I think one of the things I like about the top two is that they have a consistency of line-thickness that the bottom two don't have, and so they let you focus more on the colours and patterns.

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

Mmm, colour. I want to force those lines to tessellate, edge-to-edge. But that would be too easy.