Thanks for joining me!
Hi and welcome to my Blog……Thank you for taking the time to look at my website.
I hope you enjoy looking through my work, I will be posting regular updates about new ideas and artwork in progress as well as some film clips showing how I experiment with different techniques.
Saturday 24th November
Evening all…..I’m now available to follow on Twitter! I will be posting updates about my work and the work of other artists that I love…..look forward to seeing you there!
Thursday 30th August 2018
Good evening….it’s been a while since my last update but we’ve had a busy summer both at work, finishing off the school term and during the holidays. I managed to finish a painting of the Rose window at Durham Cathedral whilst staying with my parents down in Portsmouth…we were there for a month so it must of been quiet when we left! We had a great time though and enjoyed the southern heat wave.
I took over their conservatory to paint and always had my faithful companion watching my every move!
He’s so gorgeous….
Friday 4th May 2018
Afternoon! The sun is shining and it is Bank Holiday weekend! Need to get outside and get some vitamin D while it lasts so just thought I’d quickly show you the finished stitch and paint piece of Portsmouth Guildhall. I’ve experimented with a more muted palette of greys and blues for a darker look.
Here is another animation showing how the layers of paint build up…….
The sun has inspired me so am going to start a larger version of the Guildhall with a more close up view of the beautiful architectural detail before we go back to work tomorrow……
Friday 20th April 2018
Have started to create work on one of my favourite buildings from back home…Portsmouth Guildhall. I used to walk past this building everyday when I was a student at Portsmouth College of Art and was always impressed by it’s beautiful architectural detail.
I wanted to create a detailed drawing to start off with which would help me to understand the angles and features of the building so used pencil and biro pen……
Thursday 12th April 2018
Hi…..Well the Easter holidays have just about finished and we are back to school next week 😥😭😫 …..but I’ve been experimenting again with finding ways of creating larger scale pieces on stretch canvas frames with stitch work. This is more difficult than it sounds as you only have a small area to put the fabric through on the sewing machine so it has to be stitched before it is put on the frame. Below is an animation showing how the layers of paint are used over the stitch work to build the final image, I love how it looks like St. Paul’s Cathedral throughout the changing daylight.
Saturday 17th February 2018
Afternoon! Have been experimenting with colour and texture working on a sample piece for a large painting of the blossom trees in Newton Hall, Durham. I took some photographs last year and have been deciding what to do with them.
I created a collaged paper, stitch, paint piece that I wasn’t totally happy with so cropped four different areas of it which gave me some interesting details to work from.
Below is a short film showing how I stitch into paper……
Friday 9th February 2018
As you can see I love to use a variety of media to create my work and experiment with the sewing machine to ‘draw’ with stitches, then apply paint in layers of colour to enhance the texture and form they make.
I love looking at the work of other artists and studying their techniques and processes. Recently I’ve been inspired by the work of Italian artist Giorgio Morandi who specialised in still life painting, particularly simple everyday objects.
Giorgio Morandi, Natura Morta 1952
I’ve been teaching my year 9 students about him and put together an oil pastel drawing of a still life set up in my classroom which demonstrates the use of muted colours to capture the line and tone of each object.
This piece was drawn with blended oil pastels on a background collage of white cartridge paper, red sugar paper and brown parcel paper, (you can just about see these different papers under the oil pastels).
The short film clip below shows a basic oil pastel blending technique which is very similar to painting with oil because you can merge the colours together with the lovely soft texture that oil paint gives you. I used brown paper collage to show how the colour changes over the different surfaces.
Sarah Gregory 