Joy Edwards shares her finished picture from our allotment session….
The Allotment Sessions
Author: Halifax Art Society
Dragons of Wainhouse Tower
Last Friday Sue Cordingley brought along some copies of the children’s books ‘Dragons of Wainhouse Tower’ for sale. The Wainhouse Tower is a well known folly in Halifax. Sue did the illustrations to the stories by Sarah Stone.
Sue brought also some of her work with found objects or memorabilia, little booklets or stunning objects assembled with wire and string.
Sue had brought her tablet along and gave us valuable hints and tips in addition to last week’s session with Dennis. We could even have a go at some of the virtual ‘brushes’ Dennis had talked about. After our coffee break we then got out our own little boxes we wanted to decorate and created assemblages. Lynda had brought many too, and lots of material we could use.
Some of us practised with tablets or went on with previous work.
Digital art workshop
Last Friday was altogether different, as Dennis explained how he creates stunning artwork online. He had arranged lots of his beautiful work on tables. He had even created some bookmarks for us to take away as a souvenir.
Dennis explained that you can use your finger on the iPad but that this is just too thick for precision work. He operated his iPad with a special £80 ‘pencil’ which pairs with the iPad. This is used like a water brush – tilting and applying pressure create different thickness of line.
Dennis introduced us to 14 digital art programs and showed us how to use some of them: Procreate, Jackson’s Artgrid, Amaziograph, Flowpaper, i-pastels, My Sketch, Sketchbook.
Procreate comes with a handbook but you can learn a lot just by experimenting. There is a brush stroke library included but you can also download more, and even create stamps. Starting in black and white you can overlay shapes and then fill in with the iPencil. It feels like you are ‘painting’ with colour, but actually you are ‘painting’ with light. Dennis showed us how artwork can be built up in layers, giving us the added tip that these can be labelled to keep track of them. We also learned that it’s a good idea to save a copy of an image before you work on it, and you can import pdfs or photos in to many apps.
i-Pastels allows you to create art with smudges, fine work and many hues and shades – just like pastels but without the dirty fingers!
Down at the allotment
This Friday, members were down at the allotment with Ilona again. What a joy to see the applies, pears, figs and plums ripening! However as it was so hot some members preferred to stay inside and create pictures of flowers, fruit and vegetables that Lynda had brought in.
Fast and loose
Last Friday our member Lynne Hickins gave us a session once again, this time in working ‘Fast and Loose’ on large papers. Too often people are working tightly with small movement. Now we learned to stand up, stretch our arms and grab the charcoal or big graphite from above. Then we even changed to the left hand . Many of us found it very liberating and judged that work as better! After the tea/coffee break we had many pictures to choose from and created a final piece of work.
Halifax Art Society 