Making a Mark

Alfred Heaton Cooper and The English Lakes

2008-07-25T07:44:00.008+01:00

I bought a book recently "The English Lakes" because it contained 75 paintings by Alfred Heaton Cooper (1863-1929). When they were young, my parents used to walk a lot and enjoyed visiting the Lake District to walk on the Fells. At home and we used to have small reproductions of paintings by the Heaton Coopers (Alfred and William) hanging on the walls when I was little. Alfred Heaton Cooper

Symbolic Colour

2008-07-24T10:40:00.005+01:00

Colour has meaning. Colour is symbolic. Colours remind us of things. Local colour is the colour which we see, while symbolic colour is the colour we need to interpret. This post provides an overview of some of the meanings of different colours - and the origins of some of those meanings. Colour is often thought of as being a universal language but it's important to realise that the symbolic

Feedburner drops its own email subscribers from count

2008-07-24T09:05:00.004+01:00

If any of you think your subscriber statistics are looking a little odd this morning, you'd be right. Feedburner appears to have dropped all the people who subscribe to my blog via Feedburner emails from the subscriber count widget (top right) Funnily enough, if I go into my Feedburner account I've got 852 subscribers (from all sorts of sources) so this is a new one on me - a widget which is

Visual artists and Copyright in the Knowledge Economy

2008-07-23T16:55:00.005+01:00

Copyright applies to all art but there can be exceptions. Three questions: In future, might your art be deemed orphaned and not eligible for copyright protection because your ownership data is removed from a digital file? Will we be able to continue to see digital versions of art on the Internet - for free?Will you be able to access great works of art in museums and art galleries for blog

The art of economising - on art materials

2008-07-22T09:23:00.007+01:00

Swimming against the tide 8" x 10", coloured pencils on Saunders waterford HP copyright Katherine Tyrrell Every morning I glance at the headlines in the paper that I read online. This morning's headline jumped off the screen at me - Economy: 80% fear we are heading for recession - ICM poll. As a result 60% are trying to spend less, with clothes and fuel costs heading the list of cutbacks. But

Find out about the history of botanical art

2008-07-20T14:00:00.006+01:00

1) Iride 2) Viola porporina Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli - Biblioteca digitale - Dioscurides Neapolitanus I've always been really interested in the historical aspects of botanical art but I've been finding out more and more about it ever since I visited the new Shirley Sherwood Gallery at Kew in April and saw, for the very first time, botanical art which had been drawn or

20th July 2008 - Who made a mark this week?

2008-07-20T14:00:00.005+01:00

Many congratulations to Gayle Mason (Fur in the Paint ) who has had work accepted into and shown at the National Exhibition Of Wildlife Art (NEWA) on the Wirral in Cheshire for the second year running. This is the biggest wildlife art exhibition in the UK outside London and competition to get accepted is getting increasingly fierce. Even well known animal artists are finding it more and

The CafePress perspective on who's going to win the American Election

2008-07-19T08:00:00.011+01:00

Who needs the political pollsters? All you really need to see to work out who will win the next election is the CafePress "what's hot" meter devoted to the American election. This provides graphical presentation of sales data for items related to the various candidates for the American election. If the 6.5 members of CafePress and their buyers are anything to go by, then Obama has this

Colour Schemes: Split Complementaries, Triads and Tetrads

2008-07-18T09:56:00.012+01:00

The Pocket Colour Wheel copyright The Colour Wheel Company Colour schemes are not just for interior designers, they also help visual artists to achieve unity, harmony as well as contrast and impact in the design and composition of paintings. I've already highlighted the characteristics of complementary colours and analogous colours and in this post I'll be highlighting three other colour

Local Colour and Realism

2008-07-17T13:00:00.001+01:00

Before I move on to discuss strategies for colour schemes in producing artwork, it struck me that I needed to explain about 'Local Colour' and its role in art. Try looking for definitions of 'local colour' on the web and you'll often find explanations rooted in literature, where interestingly it often seems to mean introducing aspects of local life which are distinct and different. Here are a

Analogous Colours

2008-07-16T14:00:00.001+01:00

Sissinghurst Fields 8" x 10", coloured pencils on Arches HP copyright Katherine Tyrrell Analogous colours often don't get adequate coverage in many art instruction books or, as I've discovered, in websites generated by a browser enquiry. The information made available is often basic in the extreme. This post is an attempt to redress the balance - but it also recommends other sources of even

Complementary Colours and mixing neutral colours

2008-07-15T15:00:00.011+01:00

Complementary Colours are conventionally described as colours which are on the opposite sides of a colour wheel. However, as I demonstrated in Describing a colour space - there's more than one colour wheel! more than one shape has been used to describe colour relationships in space - and there's also more than one colour wheel. So how do you work out what are complementary colours? An exercise

Drawing Trees with Sarah Simblet

2008-07-14T11:44:00.007+01:00

On Saturday, I did a National Gallery workshop with Sarah Simblet on the Anatomy of Trees - exploring the structure and dynamics of trees and approaches to drawing trees. I highlighted this (and my full size drawing) in yesterday's post and today have two posts - this one about the workshop and another on my Travels with a Sketchbook blog which explains how I developed the largest drawing (as

13th July 2008 - Who's made a mark this week?

2008-07-13T11:00:00.021+01:00

St James Park - the Lake View, with trees 32" x 12", coloured pencils in double page spread of sketchbook copyright Katherine Tyrrell I did a workshop at the National Gallery yesterday - the Anatomy of Trees with Sarah Simblet. After the talk in the morning, we went out into St James Park yesterday - which was crawling with tourists of just about every nationality - and I christened my new 12"

How to make it easy for people to link to you - and how to sketch a cat!

2008-07-12T07:17:00.012+01:00

Two topics today about how to do things quickly: How to make it easy for people to link to a blog post you've written - and send visitors to your blog How to sketch a cat in 30 seconds30 second sketches of Cosmo # 1,2 and 3 pencil in sketchpad copyright Katherine Tyrrell Make it easy for bloggers to link to that ace blog post you wrote. To my way of thinking, if somebody has gone to the trouble

Mark Leach PS, President Elect of The Pastel Society - an obituary

2008-07-11T09:00:00.005+01:00

Back Home (a moment for reflection) 70x82.5 cm, Pastel on canvas copyright Estate of Mark Leach On 29th March this year Mark Leach was elected to be the next President of The Pastel Society in 2009. Last Friday, on 4th July 2008, he passed away. In this post I'm going to comment on his work, point you to places where you can see it still and intersperse my comments with extracts from Mark's

Describing a colour space - there's more than one colour wheel!

2008-07-10T18:59:00.002+01:00

Philipp Otto Runge’s Color Sphere (Die Farbenkugel). The two two images show the surface of the sphere, while the bottom two show horizontal and vertical cross sections. Over time, many people have tried to develop ways of thinking about how colours relate to one another in space. I've been trying to learn more about this and also trying to find a way of making it all make sense to me.

A Colour Round-Up

2008-07-09T14:30:00.002+01:00

Top row: Rose Welty Color! Color! and Ann Nemkosky Color! Bottom row: Images from Sharon H - Using analogous colors to darken This is another version of a colour wheel! My apologies to those people who've been prompted to take a look at some aspect of colour by my colour project - I completely forgot to do the round-up of all posts about colour at the end of June So here's a look at

CafePress acquires Imagekind - what next?

2008-07-09T08:34:00.007+01:00

I woke up this morning to find that CafePress has acquired Imagekind. Below you'll find links to the announcements on their respective blogs and my initial thoughts - set out as pros, cons, observations and queries. While reading all of this just keep in mind the relative size of the memberships - CafePress has 6.5 million members and Imagekind has 50,000 members - and I'm one of them. Here

Hues - a systems perspective

2008-07-08T07:32:00.008+01:00

Sir Isaac Newton's colour circle showing the colours correlated with musical notes and symbols for the planets. Wikimedia I touched on various systems for analysing colour in Colour - a scientific perspective. This week I'm going to try and cover the systems perspective in terms of: Hues: primary, secondary and tertiary coloursHow to represent colour relationships in space - how many

Drawing what's not there

2008-07-07T13:11:00.005+01:00

Life Class 3rd July - first pose 12" x 16", pencil on Daler heavyweight paper 135lb copyright Katherine Tyrrell I've spent this morning notifying people about and replacing what's not there - namely the number plates on my car. Finding out what you need to do if your number plates are stolen is not easy - but it gets worse as you find out just how many people you do then need to inform and

6th July 2008: Who's made a mark this week?

2008-07-06T08:57:00.016+01:00

I took the new Blogger widgets out for a spin this week. As a result I've implemented the new Blogger blogroll widget on this blog for my regular reads and a couple of other sections so far. The benefits are: I can now see when people have updated the latest updates automatically rise to the top plus it saves having to open up Bloglines to see who has updated! However it also identified: when

Changing Perspectives on Privacy

2008-07-05T11:33:00.011+01:00

Privacy - totally relaxed or head in your hands? 12" x 16", pencil on Daler heavyweight paper 135lb copyright Katherine Tyrrell Earlier this week I commented on privacy and data protection law in the UK and the rest of Europe (see Art societies and art galleries - data protection, privacy and you). It's very apparent to me that levels of data protection awareness are much lower in the art

I'm celebrating - I'm now a Giant Squid!

2008-07-04T11:00:00.006+01:00

I'm committed to drawing and sketching AND writing AND sharing information about art. I'm passionate about providing information as a resource for both artists and art lovers - and, as of this week when the graduating class of June 2008 was announced - my passion has produced tentacles! I've just become one of the latest set of Giant Squids on Squidoo! :D "Giant" badge: Giant Squids are

Fine artists in decline in the USA?

2008-07-03T14:15:00.004+01:00

Artists are part of the workforce - but are they in decline? It's recently been reported in parts of the arts press that nearly two million Americans are artists (1.4% of the US workforce) and they earn $70 billion annually. Wow!!! That's a very large number of people......and it excludes all those who list being an artist as a secondary source of income - that's another 300,000 people!