(New) Cross Stitch

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Well the day finally arrived. The sculpture project Jon Newey and I worked on last year is finally in the ground. Together we now have a piece of public art with our names on it which I hope will be around for years to come. I also hope it will be the first of many.

The piece is called ‘New cross stitch’ and can be found around the corner from  New Cross station in London. Drawing on local history the piece is represented by the line ‘Salus populi suprema lex’ (Latin “The health of the people should be the supreme law”). Within the piece we reference local history of new cross as the heart of Haberdashery in London and the old brick pits which the site is built on. I would like to thank Goldsmiths University. Makers Studio and the One Housing group for making this all possible.

Here are some images of the final installation And  some images of the Needle being made by Makers Studio and installed by the One Housing Group: -: –

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Oil Paint Practice

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Fantastic lesson yesterday. Still sticking with the box layout technique Jon showed me last week. The image really came together in the first hour. This is really great as I seem to be getting quicker at blocking out and getting to the point I would normally get to after 2. This is giving me more time to work on tone and colour. The end likeness isn’t to bad. I spent most of the second hour working on the face. Hopefully this speed up in the layout will continue and ill be able to get deeper into the tone and colour in future paintings.

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Oil Paint Practice

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From last weeks Life drawing lesson. 2 hours with oils on canvas from a life model. Jon started the session by showing me how to lay out the posture using boxes rather can spheres. Up to now I have had allot of trouble getting the initial posture/composition right in these sessions  using the sphere technique. Jon wanted me to try boxes now. And it worked. This is the first session that i can remember where Jon has not had to come in and make changes to scale/composition. Jon said that he does not teach box layout earl as with painting it is important to learn to paint curves initially as in particular with portraiture the body is mostly curves not hard angles. Once painting curves has been practiced the painter can move over to boxes for layout making scale easier to manage and also allowing curves to be added in (over the boxes)  once the painting begins. very happy with this one. No Lesson next week but maybe ill try to practice this technique at home.

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Oil Paint Practice

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Back from a 7 day holiday in Berlin and I am feeling refreshed. With that fresh return I had a great Life Drawing lesson this week. It actually started off badly as i began with a small brush and focused to heavily on sketching out the image. Jon called me out on in pretty quickly though and once I moved to a larger brush and actually started painting and not sketching it really came together. I am very happy with the likeness and the use of light and dark contrast. Not so happy with the actual  brush work. Allot of it feels quite unrefined and but hay its practice so i cant expect to get everything right.

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Doodles

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The Next Image from my sketchbook. This one I have always wanted to colour and turn into a t-shirt design. Maybe it will be come my first Thread-less submission. Who knows. Watch this space.

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Doodles

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I found that we have an A3 scanner at work. this is amazing as I hate scanning big images on A4 and having to stitch them together. Having been quite lax with painting and uplaoding recently I am going to try and plum the depths of my sketch books and find some choice images to scan and upload. So this blog may deviate from painting posts for a while until i get into the mood to put brush to canvas again. This image depicts what Tooth fairies really look like.

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Oil Paint Practice

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Ok catching up with the now this is from a week ago. Life mode with oil paint. Not on canvas this time as Ive run out! I have been re-using a few of them but they are getting pretty thick with paint now which doesn’t make for a great texture to paint on. Back to this image. Instead of using canvas I used piece of colored card. If canvases with paint already on them are a bad texture to paint on the the card is terrible. The paint just absorbs in and goes nowhere. There was a silver lining to this though as it forced me to get allot thicker with the paint. Its not the best image but again lots of focus on colour mixing and getting correct tones.

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Oil Paint Practice

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Disaster!.. Ok not disaster but just a bad session. I toyed with not posting this as I am not happy with it at all and didn’t even enjoy the process of doing it. This is meant to be a history of my paintings though so it doesn’t make scene to leave it out. Its not the first and I am sure it will not be the last session to frustrate me. Oils on canvas from Life. I struggled from the outset. Trying to use more medium earlier on as I did before but no matter what I did I just couldn’t seem to render the image as I was seeing it. For some reason I just didn’t have the same success mixing the colours and tones as I have done previously. Maybe time to try another monochromatic painting again.

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Oil Paint Practice

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The first Painting after the first life drawing class of the year. A familiar model on canvas with Oils. Im pretty happy with how it came out. After a 4 week break from painting. A slow start it all came together nicely at the end of the two hours.

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Project – New Cross Stitch – Jon Newey

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I have been needle_01-1RENDER_COLOUR_05working with a close friend and creator Jon Newey on another installation. Well actually this has worked out to be more of a strait up sculpture. Working with One Housing group and Goldsmiths University. Jon planed and conceived of a sculpture for a competition. commemorating the livery of haberdashers an industry of great importance to the new cross area. Jon brought me in to help visualize the concepts.I was really struggling to illustrate the space effectively as I had on the previous Letters project. It was because of this i decided to do it in 3D. Initially i was going to use the renders to then create the illustrations i had first planned to do. In the end because of time constraints we just went with the renders.. Using some site plans I was able to create a reasonably effective if slightly inaccurate depiction.

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Later we  built a model version of the space to help fabricators. this was made of lots of cardboard odds and ends. some wire and some miliput.

 

 

3d CombinedFinally Jon had me make a scale model of needle again to help the fabricators. As well as renders we where able to provide a CAD model of the final design.

Thanks to Jon’s hard work this project actually looks like it is going to go ahead.

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