art

Maud Lewis

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Maud Lewis was a Canadian artist who created beautiful folk art despite suffering terribly from rheumatism. The film “Maudie” detailed her life. I think it’s still on Netflix.

She was a talented folk art painter even going to the extent of painting every surface of her tiny one room home. Her entire house is preserved inside the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. There’s even a virtual tour which is worth looking through.

On WetCanvas, which is still alive despite the owners, we have a monthly challenge in the acrylics forum. The theme for May’s challenge (I know I know I’m late posting but I don’t think anyone is reading this, blogs seem to be passe but I’m good with talking to myself!) was to either do a study of one of her paintings or do your own inspired by one of her paintings.

Folk Art seems easy but funnily enough more people had a hard time with this than with other genres or subjects in past challenges.

These are mine. The first one is based on her “Snow dog” but instead of her white dog I used my Tallie. This is 2.5 x 3.5 inches.

A happy folk art painting of a yellow labrador retriever, dog, in a garden of tulips with plum blossoms overhead
Tallie in the Tulips

The second is a copy of “Eddie Barnes and Ed Murphy Going Fishing” 13.7 x 12.5 inches. I used some crackle on it as I had a tonne left from another project.

Folk art painting of a ship going out to fish. A landmass with a lighhouse and several other buildings can be seen in the background.
Study of Maud Lewis’s “Eddie Barnes and Ed Murphy Going Fishing”

The big one is 20 x 16 inches and is the top half of the inside of her storm door as seen in the museum. I had fun painting the canvas to look like wood!

Folk art painting of a door with a painting of a blue bird and flowers in a red vase.
Maud’s Door.

I enjoyed this challenge so much. Folk art is a genre I rarely do but appreciate more than any other.

I hope you enjoyed looking. As always, if you have a question, please ask in the comments below.

©Virginia Spencer, thepurpledogpaintingblog.com, 2022

Techno!

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No, not the music kind. I do love that though.

Thwomp thwomp throw your arms around! thwomp thwomp (that’s me dancing to the beat)

Anyway…

I received a new Ipad and Apple pencil. I’m quite enjoying them. I downloaded both Procreate and ArtRage. I haven’t tried ArtRage much yet but I’ve been having fun with Procreate.

Procreate has a symmetry option which I’ve been having fun with.

digital artwork showing a symmetrical line work image of doves, swans and fish kissing
Kissing Kissing Kissing
digital art image of a colorful snowflake on a black background
Snowflake in pastels
Digital art image of a mermaid ticking the chin of a friendly sea dragon.
SeaPet

To create something similar.

This is what I did.

Layer 1: random color splotches then used a Gaussian blur to smooth the edges. I saw one lady online used the smudge tool to make it looks like those ones we used to do in school with colored pencil under crayon, I liked the smoother vellum sort of look. You could really do anything or even one bright color.

Layer 2: filled with a dark then set the drawing guide to whatever symmetry option and then used the erase tool to draw.

I like the monoline brush for these it gives a nice smooth edge.

Hope your enjoy!

Any questions? Comment below and I will get back to you ASAP.

©Virginia Spencer, thepurpledogpaintingblog.com, 2022

Abstraction and impressionism

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This whole year has been an abstraction and I’m not impressed with it but I hope it’s finding you well.

I did these as part of a challenge over at WetCanvas. I got right in there with fingers and palette knives and large brushes. These all started out as innocent sheets of 12×18 watercolor paper, they ended up being various sizes depending on how much I tore the paper. I ruined a couple of brushes and one shirt but it was thoroughly entertaining.

These are some of my favourite places.

“The landscape”
“Water’s Edge, Niagara”
“Horseshoe Falls, Niagara”
“Sailing”
“The beach”
“The field”

Let me know in the comments what you think. If you’re on Instagram, give me a shout over there, so I can follow you, I mean that in a general Instagram way not like a deranged stalker or anything.

Stay safe and healthy.

©Virginia Spencer, thepurpledogpaintingblog.com, 2021

Some odds and ends

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I’m still getting used to the new editor on WordPress, It’s been around for while but I’ve been using the Classic option which seems to have disappeared. I have to say, I very much dislike this block editor.

Anyway, I’m still missing Sammy. I think I probably always will. My sketchbooks are full of small sketches of him. I turned one into a small embroidery.

While I’ve been crocheting more than anything, I have also been having fun collecting Victorian drawing books. Many of them are out of copyright and some companies have been reprinting them or pieces of them. I love looking at the old drawing prints. I tend to leave a good bit of white space or implied backgrounds, you know a few squiggles here and there. It’s a bad habit. The Victorians are the opposite, looking at their prints reminds me to fill things in, not every thing but some things.

I started this, which is a fairly small drawing, in a fairly small sketchbook. It’s a tree, thought I’d tell you that in case you didn’t recognize it as such. (I think I’ve using emojis too much, I so wanted to put a little face with it’s tongue sticking out there.) (oh no and then I wanted to follow that parentheses with a rolling eyes emoji!) Anyway, I digress, this tree is enormous, It’s one of the biggest trees I’ve ever seen. You can see in the background what I mean by an implied background, a few squiggly things here and there. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s only that I tend to do that every time.

I’ve also been on twitter too much this last year. Now it’s not what you think, I do occasionally get sidetracked by the political drama for sure but mostly I follow the museums and archeologists and such. They put such fascinating things out into the twitter world. Lately I’ve been looking at old Roman coins. It’s interesting how modern and stylized the designs are.

This is a drawing from a coin that was minted in Lyons around 330-337 BCE. It’s the Wolf with the twins Romulus and Remus (the founders of Rome who as infants were sent down the river in a basket to drown, instead they were found by a wolf who suckled them and a woodpecker who fed them until a shepherd arrived and took them in as his own).

I’m going to make an embroidery out of this as well.

I hope you are all safe and healthy.

©Virginia Spencer, thepurpledogpaintingblog.com, 2021

Hello..it’s me..

~ thepurpledogpaintingblog ~ 1 Comment

I was wondering if after all this time
You’d like to see my blog…

I have been neglecting the old blog, there’s all sorts of cobwebs and paintbrushes laying about in here.

Sampson the purple dog is doing well. He is 13 now.  He had to have surgery on his leg to remove a tumor but it was benign, thank goodness. It was a ruff operation but it didn’t take him long to get back into his yoga routine.

He’s been pretty lonely since Zeus passed away. He grew up with three cats and Zeus of course was his nonstop companion. He was having fits every time we left him alone and let me tell you terrier fits are very very loud so in March we got him another friend.

This is Tallie, she’s a little girl lab. She loves Sampson so much even though she finds his chipmunk obsession bewildering. He seems to find her entertaining too.

She’s growing quickly and is already bigger than Sampson. She won’t get as big as Zeus was but she’s big enough now that she can reach the countertops and that has been loads of fun.

Arts and crafts wise I was so sure, I’d have all sorts of time with the quarantine to do stuff but nope, Life was like “Hey! You! Busy! Busy!”.

I did make a few animals. This is from a pattern on “All About Ami“. She has such great patterns. Check her site out.

This turtle is a combo of a few different patterns.  I really wish I had written down what I did but I think it’ll be easy enough to redo. The hat I made up with scraps.

I’ll be back soon with some experiments and such that I’ve been doing. Until then pass this lemon Bundt cake around and I will talk to you soon.

Recipe from King Arthur Flour’s website. Check out their advice on making Bundt cakes, if you’ve never made one before. I doubled the icing recipe because why the heck not.

©Virginia Spencer, thepurpledogpaintingblog.com, 2020

 

 

 

 

 

Return of the eagles.

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The eagles are back!

I live in an area where bald eagles flock to breed. They come back every year in the hundreds.

I haven’t been taking too many photos as my camera’s shutter seems to be wearing out but I did take these while I was walking Sampson. This one seemed very interested in Sampson.

This one did too. His claws are in such sharp focus.

I was playing with some white ink on black paper. The paper seemed a bit soft, it wanted to absorb and absorb which ended up working in my favor, I was able to put many layers. Now in my first eagle here which is about 5×7, I went a little too crazy with my top layer and lost some of the shading.

This one is better. I would have continued down the shoulders but it ended up in a card frame for a friend who likes eagles. The one thing I love about ink, is that it tends to look complicated but it’s all just little dots and lines. Pretty relaxing to do.

I used a dip pen with a G nib on it. I buy the ones that are marketed towards anime online. They flow well and you can make thick or thin lines depending on how much pressure you use.

Since I mentioned Sampson, here’s a quick one of him in white ink on card stock.

I also did a squirrel in the white and grey ink who looks a bit of a know it all.

I did a polar bear too but had to weigh down the paper afterwards as it buckled. He looks like he’s fretting, given that the icecaps are melting fast, I can’t say I blame him.

If you have questions, please ask in the comments.

©Virginia Spencer, thepurpledogpaintingblog.com, 2020

Ink ink ink…

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I recently bought some dip pens and have been playing with them. I love the G Nib though for some reason it’s hard to find in my area. I ordered some online since I’ve already killed the one I had.

A fish.

A quack.

A grrr.

A hedgehog with a little teeny tiny woof and a flower.

The sausage woof that I live with.

©Virginia Spencer, thepurpledogpaintingblog.com, 2019

Zinnia Madness

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And wouldn’t that be a great band name..

I love to plant zinnias. They’re beautiful, they’re easy and best of all they attract these beauties.

A white garden butterfly, some call it a cabbage butterfly. They are so fast!

Another speedy one, a Silver Spotted skipper which is a pretty fancy and deceptive name. I would say that that spot is white but who am I to rain on someone’s parade.

Another kind of skipper, it’s either a Sachem Skipper or a Zabulon Skipper, I don’t know enough about them to tell the difference but both are super fast and surprisingly cuddly looking.

My, what big eyes you have…

An American Lady Butterfly, what a beauty. She’s a subtle one but stunning nevertheless.

It was a big difficult to take a photo of this Red Spotted Purple Admiral. As you can see her wing is damaged and she was quite rightly spooked. They mimic the Pipevine Swallowtail which are poisonous but someone grabbed her. She still flew quite well though.

This is not on a zinnia, this is a hummingbird hawk moth on a lilac. The colors on this one were so cool and again very cuddly looking. Maybe that is why they are all so fast, everyone would hug them to bits if they could catch them.

This one is not for hugging, they can bite when annoyed. She’s also not on a zinnia but such a beautiful color and she looks so wise, I think that’s known as the Jiminy Cricket effect.

Green Katydid.

Please don’t spray!  And please watch out for caterpillars and worms, many of the creepiest and ugly turn into these beauties.

 

©Virginia Spencer, thepurpledogpaintingblog.com, 2019

 

 

 

 

 

 

Art by the Foot Project

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We are still reeling from the unexpected loss of Zeus. We have lost family, friends and pets before as many of you have but this loss was such a shock. We still find ourselves reeling from it. We all miss him terribly.

Poor Sampson is of course devastated. They hadn’t been apart in over ten years. We know it will take him some time to adjust but for now we are taking extra care with him, the poor guy.

I did this acrylic of Zeus, it’s a foot square and will be on display at the Figge Museum in Davenport as part of a community art project.

This piece is also on display. It is again on a one foot foam square. The museum gave each artist two to paint on. This is a mixed media piece with acrylic, a linoprint and pen drawing.  It is the lino print of the north wind but reversed from the one I showed you in a prior post. I added it to a stormy acrylic sky with a pen and ink drawing of the man that the Sun and North Wind were toying with.

I did it at the last minute over another painting so I hope that it holds up on display. I’m a bit nervous about it.

If you’re in the Quad Cities area,  The Art by the Foot exhibit is open and it displays art made by artists of all ages and abilities from the Quad-City area. The works were collected this spring and were required to be made on boards provided by the Figge. All of the works will be on view in the Mary Waterman Gildehaus Community Gallery from June 20th to September 1st.

I have to say, I love this idea and I thought it so clever of the museum to give artists this chance. I also love that it ranges from professionals to small children. That sort of encouragement is priceless!

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©Virginia Spencer, thepurpledogpaintingblog.com, 2019