Hi Everyone!

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas! I am just popping in to post a couple of photos of Ammy at Christmas. He certainly enjoyed himself as you can see with his treats and toys..although still taking it easy while playing!

Did Santa bring anything nice for you all this year? Nick bought me a Wii with the Wii Fit Plus with the balance board which is just so much fun! I have been running, cycling, flying like a chicken, hula hoping, kung fooing, boxing skateboarding, and having snowball fights too! There’s so much to do on there, and there’s the serious side too so I have been doing yoga and core exercises too mixed in. Even Ammy has been on the board..well he sat on it at least!! Nick also got me Snowboarding for my birthday (yes another year older..but wiser!) and I love snowboarding games so thats been great fun too.

I have also had some amazing cookery books from my family and friends, my new years resolution is to cook even more this year. I try to make all our meals from scratch with fresh ingredients, and I had a Nigel Slater and two Hugh Fernley Whittingstall books which will really help. We’ve already made the potato and leek soup with some home made crusty Ciabbatta bread from the Nigel Slater one..although I do admit to adding some double cream in for good measure….! Good job we have the wii fit!

So all in all we have had a wonderful Christmas and I hope yours has been good too!  The computer has been off for the duration and its been a lovely restful week. We are both in the studio today, we are cleaning and organising, getting ready for going back to work in the New Year, sort of like an early spring clean! I hope you are enjoying yourselves wherever you are! Cheers!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

We would like to wish all of our clients a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. With Best wishes for 2010 – we hope it will be a sucessfull and prosperous one for you all!

I thought id blog a quick post of this years christmas cake. Lets hope that it tastes nice, its got a fair bit of sherry in it! I know not everyone likes christmas cake but its quite a tradition in our house and Nick loves it. We didnt have one last year as we were away for christmas but this year we have a cake and log which should keep us going for a while!

Here is my last portrait for 2009! The client came to collect it this evening and so we are now officially stopped work for Christmas. We have a few freinds to see and cards to deliver these next two days but Christmas eve onwards we are staying home in the cottage to enjoy the festivities. We have both worked pretty hard this year and so are definitely not working over Christmas. We have done in the past and I know that Melanie has done a lot of web work over Christmas for as many years as I can remember but not this year! A real rest awaits. We have taken some great photos of the lights on the cottage, the tree and the snow so im sure there will be one more blog post before the year is complete.

The lights are now up on the cottage and the tree is twinkling! The last pencil portrait was posted today and the oil portrait of Sophie and Daisy will be sent tomorrow and then that’s it, we are officially closed for Christmas!

Unlike previous years, this Christmas we are closing the studio door for at least a week and a half.  My New Years resolution in January was to make sure we had some ‘us time’ and to not have such a stressful year. I think it has worked, and we made a few critical business decisions back in September that enabled us to not have too much on our plate for the Christmas season. We are both less stressed and less tired and with the week and a half off over Christmas we should really be able to recharge our batteries.

I am also not doing any changes or updates to the website this year. For many years now I have either overhauled the whole thing to improve on it, or changed things around with the navigation to create a better flow. The fundamentals of the website are sound now, and it really just needs updating with new gallery work and testimonials which can be saved until the New Year. I’m so glad as that’s one job I don’t want to have to do over Christmas time, as web design is so time consuming, tiring..perhaps a little stressful too!

I will make another post soon, we are going out and about visiting friends and family delivering cards and gifts for the next few days, however I do have a lovely photo of the snowy cottage to blog in the next few days so there will be at lest one more blog post this year : )

This is the final scan and two stages of the latest pencil portrait, my last pencil before Christmas! One of my students was asking how I completed the pencils and I said I would take some scans or photos as I was working on this portrait to give him an idea of how to build up tone. I did scan the first one but it was slightly too large for my scanner and I didn’t have enough time to scan two sides and stitch, so the second image is a photo which is why perhaps its a little darker than it should be. The final image just below is the finished portrait scanned and stitched. Ill add some explanations below each picture of how I created the portrait – you need to start at the bottom and read up as the final stage is just below : )

This is the final image and you can see that I have darkened up the tones quite a lot, overall you can still see the sunlight across his face, which again helps with the form of the dog. I used pencil ranging from 4b to 8b and just keep building your tones gradually. I hope that helps!

Here I am building up my tones over the entire dog. I prefer to work this way as I personally feel you get a better overall smoothness to it. Some artist work in patches and this is fine, as I say everyone does things differently and you need to find a way that you feel comfortable with. There are no real rules in art and everyone should have their own techniques, styles etc – otherwise your drawing won’t be ‘you’.  So experiment and try different techniques and way of capturing fur. Do try to work in the direction of the fur though as this will help with the overall form of the dog. Also don’t be afraid of spending time on a drawing, or any portrait for that matter, you cant hurry these things and if it takes you 20 hours then it just does – if it takes you 50 hours it does. Every portrait will be different and you cant really make a set time for it, so take your time with your shading as it will be worth it.

This is the first stage, basically sketch out the dog, you can use any method that helps you, there are many ways of doing this and all artists have their own preferred method. Experiment with a few to see what you feel most comfortable using. I will say though spend the most time as you can at this stage before adding tone making sure you have everything correct, otherwise its difficult to change things once you have added your undertones.

These are the final stages of Rox and Rio. I have really enjoyed creating this portrait and I hope the client is pleased too, Melanie will email it to them this morning. I have a pencil portrait to do next for a local client who visited the cottage on Sunday, they would like a 12 x 10 drawing completed for their parents so I will blog that in a few days time.

This is the final scan of the Sophie and Daisy portrait, they are two Tibetan Terriers belonging to the London Art College. They have been in the studio on the go for quite a few months now, I started back before September however with one thing and another they have been delayed – but glad to say they are finally finished to send before Christmas! If you would like to see the progress and read more about them, you can view the earlier post I made back in November – Tibetan Terriers Painting.

Moving onto the pencil drawing of Riska next and will add the stages soon.

Heres the next stage of Rox and Rio, they are coming along well and I will add another stage tomorrow.

Here are the photos of Monaco Prince framed, Melanie took them this morning. This is our last framed portrait of 2009 and hopefully next year we will have some new frames for the website so I will blog them when we have photos of them. This is one of our most popular frames though so this will be staying in our range. Back working on the two cats Rox and Rio today and I will post the next stage later this afternoon.