Captain Jack Oil Painting

I love seeing behind the scenes of how an artwork is produced so thought I would take a few photographs of the different steps of my new oil painting!

This is Captain Jack Kitty. Its one of my most popular acrylic paintings and I really wanted to do a slightly different bigger version in oils.

Captain Jack Kitty - Acrylic - 20 x 20cm

Of course it had to feature the top pirate cat Morpheus in his most swashbuckling pose!

•  I always do an acrylic underpainting first to get rid of the white canvas and to make sure everything looks right but I forgot to take a photo of this! 

• Below is about half an hour of throwing some oil paint on the canvas just to get some shapes.
  
  
  

 

•  A bit more definition all over and I decided to make his eyes a bit bigger and less squinty.
  

 

• Again more definition especially on the eyes as I always think if the eyes don't look right the whole painting won't work.

 

• The finished painting just waiting to dry!

I love painting my cat Morpheus as he always has a cute little smile which his black chin accentuates!
I wanted him to be a bit of a scruffy looking pirate and I think it works!

Clare xx

More Exhibitions!

Thought I'd better do a quick blog as its been a while!

Been really busy with exhibitions the last few months and at one point you couldn't get in the spare room there were frames everywhere!

Red House Glass Cone Exhibition 24th May - 3rd August 2014

My latest exhibition of 15 of my collagraph prints is now on at the Red House Glass Cone, High Street, Stourbridge, West Midlands until the 3rd August. Heres me in the local paper and my Dudley Castle collagraph print too!

The Private View is on Saturday 28th June 12-2 so I'm busy trying to decide what cakes to make for the day, must be something involving chocolate though!

I've also just had one of my acrylic paintings in the Junction Festival Exhibition at Wolverhampton Art Gallery. This exhibition finished last Saturday but all the artwork will be on show again during the Junction Festival in the Clarendon pub, Chapel Ash, Wolverhampton 11th - 13th July. The theme of the exhibition is Music, Art, Beer. My entry is called Old Tom New Tom
and I decided to feature my new tom cat alongside a bottle of Old Tom beer. I wanted to contrast my New Tom with a bottle of beer that was first created in 1899 and features a sketch of the old brewery cat.

Old Tom New Tom Acrylic Painting

 Finished framing and labelling yesterday for my next exhibition which is the Staffordshire Enjoy Art Summer exhibtion at the Brewhouse Arts Centre, Burton on Trent. This starts next Thursday 3rd July and runs until 9th August. My theme for this exhibition seems to have become cats and bears! My cat Morpheus seems to be sneaking into most of my artwork at the moment!

Collagraph prints and oil paintings ready for the Staffordshire Enjoy Art Summer Exhibition!

Also just been asked to exhibit a few artworks in a new exhibition at Dudley Museum and Art gallery in September, just waiting for a few more details and then even more framing!

Clare xx

Witley Court - Exhibition May 2014

Over the years I must have visited Witley Court in Worcestershire almost 20 times! Witley Court is a spectacular mansion house and gardens which had a disastrous fire in 1937 leaving the site abandoned to become a ruin. 

I visited for the first time on a university day trip probably around 1994. This was well before the new visitor centre and the site had just closed for the day as we got there so of course we climbed the fence and had a wander like students do! We came back properly a few weeks later and had a great day there sketching and exploring. 

 The ruined mansion itself has inspired my artwork ever since and I still love wandering the site with its archways, ornate windows, balconies and grand sweeping staircases!

Over the years I have built up a large body of artwork based on the site and really wanted to bring it all together into an exhibition. I decided to talk to Gill from the Garden Tearooms which is a tradition English Tearoom right next to the site. She offered me the use of the tearooms for May to exhibit my work and I got framing!

I put the exhibition up yesterday and am really pleased with how it looks all my artwork together so close to Witley Court itself!

East Wing Collagraph Print

Ruined Forecourt Collagraph Print

One of my favourite watercolours of the Orangery steps, it wasn't until I framed this one I realised I had painted it in 2002!

The exhibition is on until the end of May so plently of time to have a look and there is a lovely selection of homemade cakes to treat yourself to while there!

Clare xx

Collagraph Prints

I often get asked what a Collagraph Print is, so I thought I'd try and explain!

 Its a collage printmaking technique which involves using a card plate to start off with and then adding various items to make textures and levels which will eventually make the final image.  Paper, fabric, string, leaves, magazine pages, tissue paper etc can be stuck to the plate as long as the surface is fairly even, has no sharp bits and will go through the printing press then the list is endless! Acrylic paint, enamel paint, acrylic texture mediums etc can also be used and these can give a very painterly effect often showing the brushstrokes when printed. Also carborundum can be used to print a very strong black. Carborundum is a fine silica grit that needs to be stuck down very strongly and creates a lot of texture that will hold lots of ink. Some people also seal their plates especially if they have a lot of things stuck to the plate that could come loose while printing, personally I don't seal my plates as I like to use the surface of the card as one of my printed textures.

With a collagraph printing plate the more texture it has on the plate the more ink it will hold and the darker the image will print, the smoother the surface of the plate the less ink it will hold and the lighter it will print. It takes a while to get your head round how to design a printing plate and what to use to get the textures you desire, it also doesn't help that you have to work backwards too!

Some Examples of My Collagraph Printing Plates

Collagraph printing is great because it is a really safe way of printing and I do it on my dining room table! There are no dangerous fumes like with etching and I tend to use the offcuts of mountboard for my printing plates so it is fairly inexpensive. Also I love the fact that I can cut my printing plates into shapes like on some of my animal prints below. See how the printing plate takes on the colour of the inks that I have used to print them with!

These are the printing plates below that I am currently working on. As well as working backwards I also work white on white which takes some getting used to!

This is my elephant collagraph printing plate on the left and the pink print that was produced from it on the right. You just have to be careful when cutting the plates into shapes that you don't leave any thin parts which could bend/snap when printing.

Pink Elephant

Heres my Black Cat collagraph print hot off the press!

Black Cat

I often think the printing plates in themselves make great works of art and one day I will have to put on an exhibition of just the collagraph printing plates!

Clare xx

Competition Time

I've decided to run a little competition from my Facebook page ClaresPrints to win one of my very popular Hippo linocut prints.

Hippo Linocut Print

 For anyone not on Facebook heres how you can enter:

Have a look in either my etsy shop https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/ClareSherwen or my Folksy shop https://beta.folksy.com/shops/ClareSherwen and pick one item to promote in some way. It could be on Twitter, Pinterest, Stumbleupon etc. Then let me know in the comments which item you have promoted and where for an entry into the competition. 

I'm going to draw the winner on Monday 20th January. Well I'm actually hoping I can get my cat to draw the winner as he loves playing with rolled up bits of paper and I'm sure I can persuade him to draw one out of a hat!

Good luck!

Clare xx

Steampunk Penguin

  A little artwork project I have been working on after Christmas is dressing up animals in steampunk inspired clothes! This penguin has been in my head for a long time so it was great to find the time to finally get him out of there! 

Originally he was only going to have a hat but I couldn't resist adding a smart waistcoat and cravat.

Steampunk Penguin Acrylic Painting

 Of course I couldn't resist making him into a collagraph print (printmaking process using a card printing plate with various textures added) and he just had to have a nice coloured waistcoat and cravat. It can get quite complicated doing more than one colour in printmaking and one thing I'm not good at is registering printing plates which you have to do when printing each colour on a seperate printing plate, I just don't think I have the patience. I decided when I was designing this collagraph printing plate to keep in mind I that wanted to print all the colours in one go which if I was not careful could all end up a very muddy mess!

Printing plate

Heres the printing plate ready to print. The blue is just textured acrylic paint, if you look very closely there are some cogs embedded in the paint so these will print very subtly in the background.

 This is the first colour, a kind of blue black metallic colour which was applied all over the printing plate and then wiped off again to just leave the colour in the indentations/roughest part of the plate. (Apologies for the messy background, I always think you have must have had a very good printing session when you find you have to wipe ink off door handles, lightswitches and your face!)

 The next step I added an acetate stencil shape of the penguin to mask this out while I applied the blue background a la poupee (French for the doll), basically applying a different colour to the printing plate with a small pad of fabric rolled up tightly so that the ink stays on the surface of the plate and the black background ink still shows through.

The penguin stencil was then removed and another stencil applied which covers all the background and  only the waistcoat is then showing. I applied red ink a la poupee.

 

 This stencil was removed and another applied with only the cravat showing. Purple ink was applied.

Heres a close up of the finished printing plate all ready to go onto the press to be printed!

Steampunk Penguin Collagraph Print

 And the finished very dapper penguin resplendent in his red waistcoat and purple cravat!

Clare xx

Exhibitions

This year I decided my plan was to get my artwork into as many exhibitions as possible!

I'd had enough of trying to sell my artwork at craft fairs last year. I was so sick of being stuck in the freezing cold, expensive fair fees and dealing with rude people to make not very much money when I could be selling online at home in the warmth! It hit me when I was doing a Christmas craft fair last year that I had over £85 worth of online painting commissions to work on while at the craft fair and yet I barely scraped the craft fair fee in sales that day. From then on I decided to concentrate on the online sales and exhibitions. I do miss the people you meet at the craft fairs but definitely don't miss the frozen hands and toes!

My first exhibition for the year was through Staffordshire Enjoy Art - a company that promotes local artists and organises three local exhibitions in the year. I wasn't sure if I would be able to exhibit with them as I don't quite live in Staffordshire but they were very welcoming and produced some very well organised exhibitions.

The first exhibition was at Shugborough Hall, Stafford where I had two collagraph prints displayed - "Twisting Upwards" and "East Wing". I also had great fun exploring behind the scenes of Shugborough Hall when picking up my work after the exhibition!

Staffordshire Enjoy Art Spring Exhibition - Shugborough Hall - 30th March to 13th April 2013