Birds without feathers

On my way to stratford, I decided to take the bus, a nice and long 45 minute journey. During the journey I made a copy of the drawings by Katrina van Grouw's "The Unfeathered Bird" which is a glorious set of drawings showing birds without their skin and feathers.

Here is one of those drawings and my copy

A Painting for My Teacher

When my chemistry teacher saw my self-portrait piece, he asked me if I could paint something for him and naturally I agreed. He offered to pay me a lot in return, but as its something I enjoy and as a thank you gift, I told him to just buy me the materials. He emailed me the picture he wanted and the colour scheme, and we discussed canvas size and paint mediums. In the end we decided to use oil paints as they were easier for me to paint with and get a realistic effect and they gave a softer finish. The composition is of a Sikh man with characteristic, symbolic objects. This particular composition I found hard to map out, not only was it side-view (which I haven't painted before and try to avoid when drawing), but the man is kneeling and his head is tilted which I found very difficult to achieve. Once I completed the drawing, I started painting  the base coat. This is just a wash with the basic mid tones of the colours I will use. This does three things; 1) Allows you to see if your composition works, because the wash is light, it is easy to work on top of to alter things 2) Allows you to see if the colours work, now that the colours are on the canvas, next to each other, do they work or do some areas need to be made lighter/darker. 3) it provides a base layer which you can carefully work on, preventing bits of white canvas showing up from underneath The drawing and base coat took me around three hours to complete, unfortunately due to technology, I lost the pictures showing the bas coat. Yesterday, I spent two hours painting the face, turbin and the hands and feet, trying to get the shading right and the angles correct. Here is an image, despite it being "complete", it still needs a lot of work which I will put in later.  This morning, I spent an hour and a half painting the top half of the outfit, I found it very enjoyable to paint in all the creases, I just wish I had a clearer, larger image to work from which would have made it easier.  Anyways, That's it so far, I'm just going to go and work on the bottom half of the outfit in a bit, once I blog a bit more ;) Marwa

My Sister's Wall

This is cheating a little because, this blog is meant to be starting from what I did yesterday and onwards. However, my younger sister has been nagging me to put this up.

Last month, it was her birthday, and as I am broke, I used what wall paints I found in my garage to create a fun painting on her wall. The inspiration behind the painting came from a similar idea I found on a website.

I started out by drawing out what I wanted onto the wall in pencil, and then mixed the paint to achieve the right colours, and then simply painted it on. It only required one layer of paint as the walls are magnolia. It's a nice change to have something fun and different, especially for a child's bedroom. Hope you guys like it as much as she did : )

This is the reference photo from liftupthyneighbor.com 

This is the painting I produced on my sisters wall

Welcome to My Art Blog

Welcome to My Art Blog!!

This is the place where I will share with you my creations, my ideas, my inspiration and my projects. 

As an Artist, I wish to explore a range of subject matter, medium, and styles. I will show you everything, things that worked and things that didn't and where I get my inspiration from!

Please feel free to send me a link to your art websites/blogs so I can link to them or send me a picture of a piece you created thanks to inspiration from me. My email is marwa.95r@gmail.com . It will be much appreciated and amazing to see what beautiful creations you all make!! : )

Marwa