A big leaf of faith

Soooo I've gone back to my old art school for a few months. The opportunity makes sure I commit at least 3 hours a week to painting, and i can immerse myself in all the wonderful work other students are creating. I really need to work out a new balance between work and painting, but at the moment, I can only commit to these 3 hours! This is a big canvas I'm working on, from a photo I took of the 'tomb raider' tree in Angkor, Cambodia. What an amazing place that is, an ancient civilisation being swallowed up by the forest. My progress has been slow with doing such a detailed under painting!

Art in Music....welcome to the 80s....

Well I'm back, so how fitting, that I devote my latest challenge to Calypso Moon Artist Movement to the song 'Here I am Baby' by UB40 UB40 take there name from the unemployment benefit (UB) form 40 in the UK, so as I am also unemployed, and back in Australia this seemed to fit. That and we were having an 80s music theme in the house. So this is what I produced! I think I known all the words now to all UB40 songs haha.

Traffic light box....my first stencil!

Well I've been busy since I got back to the Gold Coast, my confirmed home! Our local council has started up a project for painting traffic light signal boxes (or TSBs), and I was one of the lucky ones to take on one of the 13 offered. This box located Marine Pde/Gold Coast Highway, next to a boatramp and what use to be a fish shop called Holy Mackeral. I haven't finished it, but I'm pretty happy with the result, not bad for my first stencil effort! I had to paint it rather than use spray cans, not exactly sure how the pro street artists get the accuracy for so little time....this took me the best part of a day to complete. This is my second box I've painted, my first one I painted many moons ago in Brisbane - http://svc169.wic021v.server-web.com/artforce/rating.asp?id=675 gosh I've come a long way since then!

Back to the painting board....

Well I've finally unpacked my paints and brushes! Having travelled for over 3 months, I had a lot of bottled up inspriation! And glass is one of them. I find it really difficult to paint from real still life, usually having to take a photo first and then working from that. So I've set myself up a challenge, to paint bottles and nick-nacky things from my mum's house. And believe me there are lots of interesting things to paint! These bottles are from my mum's old bottle collection actually, obviously they're a bit rough, perhaps I'll go back over with another layer once I work out what is missing.

Once I've mastered them I've got a new challenge, to paint 20 paintings in 20 weeks, and auction them for charity. I'm sure people will want to buy them? I thought perhaps painting everyday scenes from my city would be a good theme, any other ideas?