Art Fayre in the Lighthouse – 2 weeks to go – exciting, exciting, exciting!

Only 2 weeks on Saturday till our very first event! Crab Apple Arts’ inaugural Art & Design Fayre. Things are hotting up and marketing is about to start both for Crab Apple Arts and for The Lighthouse Christmas Programme.

We will be organising a pop-up Gallery, featuring 3 artists from West Kilbride; demonstrations and workshops in origami, digital art embroidery, life drawing, jewellery making and other exciting media.

There will be many practicing artists taking part in our event and it is definitely one not to be missed – plenty of wonderful art to choose from for those hard to buy Christmas presents. Gifts as small as artist designed and made keyrings, stained glass work, textiles and jewellery to pen and ink drawings to large scale paintings and digitally embroidered pictures. Something for everybody!

We can even offer our customers a free glass of mulled wine, or a drink for the children and some Scottish Shortbread. So, come along for a great Christmas event at Gallery 1 in The Lighthouse, Mitchell Lane, Glasgow on 17th December from 10.30am till 6pm.

Canny wait!

May
xxx

Book Cover Design

I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel for my cover design for a friend’s new book. I have never designed a book cover before, so this has been a learning curve for me on many fronts.

Firstly, I abandoned my attempt to use oils to paint the cover – my preferred medium – in favour of painting digitally, using photoshop. I was pleasantly surprised by the control and the outcome of the initial portrait I produced using a wholly digital approach.

I have enjoyed experimenting with the new mixing brushes in Photoshop CS5 – with the help of Lynda.com. The use of ‘textures’ is helping me with my background for the project and, hopefully, the writer will be happy with the completed work. I still have some tweaking to do with the background and still have one, very important, character to add to the picture, but it’s looking good now and I have a new lease of life after a rather stagnant period of uninspired uncertainty.

I think that this situation was caused by the inexperience of both the writer and myself  - some positives can be drawn from the whole process for both of us. I am now using the project as a catalyst for learning more about the software and techniques to produce digital paintings.

Another positive – whilst searching for information on digital painting, I found a video of a fine-artist-come-digital-artist who used 3D software to reconstruct a town that had disappeared in order to paint pictures of it as it had been in the early 20th century. I found this technique amazing and am now looking into using it in my own practice – more learning! At least I have a little experience of using Maya to help me start this new process.

I’m off now to continue working on my book cover – will check in when I have something concrete to show you (don’t want to post a picture until I’m happy with the outcome).

Till the next time…

May