Around the web in 10 clicks

 Some interesting articles, exhibitions and thoughts on all things art and design this week:

An exhibition that I would love to be able to see, at the MoMA museum, is simply titled Cézanne Drawing, as in Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), a very neutral title for the show featuring an exploration of his drawings, using paint to build up studies and still life drawings, exploring drawing portraits of loved ones and so on. The drawings have a sense of lightness of touch, of freedom and time spent just exploring the process, shapes and lines. 
This wonderful essay/article from Two Coats of Paint features lovely nuggets of information on Cézanne's life and how his work came to be without being too pretentious and filled with jargon. The essay is writen by  Laurie Fendrich, also a painter who brings some clear insight of his work into the text. Well written, lovely painters, nibbles of information and some lovely images of his drawings, what more could you ask for? 

Well I would love to be able to see the exhibition, but Covid, newborn baby, life...the internet will have to be my lens for looking at art for now. 

Some beautiful paintings/drawings that are full of flurries of colour, pastels and paint strokes, speak of vast windy days in the country or on rivers and lakes, fitting not so neatly into landscapes, but also crossing borders into abstraction and expression. The painter Ashley Garretts really brings out the wild weather in her landscape drawings and paintings. Really love her work too. 

Sculpture, plus colour, fluidity and of course that beautiful and strange substance and material called resin, all feature in the work of Ben Godward. Again I found his work from a Two Coats of Paint article/post. Jonathan Stevenson's comparison of Godward's sculptures to ice pops and giant sweets is just awesome! 
Yet again such an energetic feel to the work, and a sense of whimsy and childish delight and fun with a brand new pack of felt tips of crayons. I love the way he fixes translucent layers of colour with each other, building up layers in a way that makes me think of gesture painters, abstract expressionism, mark making and colour explored, action painting especially seems to have maybe inspired this sculpture artist, his works are very physical, and many full of motion too. Again, another artist whose work really needs to be explored and discovered up close. His work from the exhibition at the Slag Gallery, reminds me of the beautiful crystals you would find in a computer game, crystals that make up a digital landscape, or indeed need to be collected by a spunky and amusing Bandicoot with a fruit bazooka.  

Lastly Antoine’s Organ by Rashid Johnson, highlighted by a post on Two Coats yet again (they always have the good stuff), is one that begs to be seen up close, to be wandered around, to go up close and photograph from angles, to look from a distance, from high above in a birds eye view way too. Reminds me of the botanical gardens in Edinburgh and brilliant greenhouses stuffed full and filled with green plants, light and life. 

Photoshop 02: Borders

Having found and signed up to the Adobe Daily Challenge series, I've had a look at one tutorial to try out, watched the video and given it a go.
The video is wonderfully presented, really straightforward and quite engaging too. 

The tutorial is relatively straight forward but a bit visually fiddly. It useful shows you how to use the rulers briefly, along with above tool/options mentioned.
I ignored the using the Libraries pane to drag and drop images though as I want to primarily use my own photos anyway. So instead the images I wanted to use were opened to copy and paste from.

This will be useful to show students how to add borders or develop edits that are relatively straight forward but can have the composition manipulated to produce some very interesting results. I ignored the using the Libraries pane to drag and drop images though as I want to primarily use my own photos anyway. So instead had the images I wanted to use open as tabbed images to copy and paste from.
This will be useful to show students how to add borders or develop edits that are relatively straight forward but can have the composition manipulated to produce some very interesting results.

 

Gradient added to develop space for text.Could this be used to insert quotes or lines from a poem?

Links:
Adobe/Behance Photoshop Daily Challenge: https://www.behance.net/challenge/photoshop

About Adobe Libraries: https://www.adobe.com/uk/creativecloud/libraries.html 

Photoshop Daily Creative Challenge #01: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taXFBXHqqBg

  

Photoshop 01: Actions Panel

Learning how to batch resize images...and use the batch edit function AND learn how to record actions or processes used on one image to do the resizing.
I found this excellent tutorial here:
https://enviragallery.com/how-to-batch-resize-images-in-photoshop/

Then I went off to develop some smaller images for use on my website (which is still under major construction, its needs plastering, painting and filling in with work).

I have wondered if it's worth while making such a tutorial a resource for my teaching file, but really, if someone else has already done the awesome work of putting together a really straightforward guide, why should I repeat it?

Thinking this could be manipulated to then have colour painted onto images automatically, but using the colour picker tool to pick out colours at random for each image, so in essence you get a unique colour palette each time you use the action.

Unfortunately, this didn't work.

Photoshop goes through the process, and even flickers through colours from the time the action was originally recorded, but nothing comes up on the image. 

I checked to make sure that the other actions were still working, and of course the resize action in the screenshots below worked perfectly. 

But maybe there are other ways of using the Actions tool to create some automated starting points to work with?

Also I've finally updated my mixed media gallery with the Mix and Match series:
https://hennajaved.squarespace.com/

A note going forward...

Blowing off the dust from this blog. I need to consider how to do things differently, and how to manage it all when this is all over. When I'm back at work. Where the grind at times, seems to never stop. Maybe that's me though, I need to stop and say nope, not doing any more of this. 1: Keep painting once a day 2: Keep drawing once a day 3: Keep training once a day (TKD) 4: Keep reading (and don't stop even in term time!) I will come back to this post later I think. And maybe laugh at the concept that this can be done.

Until I'm back at work, I think I'll concentrate on the blog a bit. First thing, I want to create a clear identity for this blog. It's all about colour and pattern, yes, but then there is something else very important to me, art history. Not always looking into the past with cobwebs, but the near past, the present, the possible future and so on. Pen and Paper > Zine > Collaboration (meaning I'm going to have to develop some links so I can collaborate with others). Pattern and Surface > Blog > selflessly solo > updates on my practice as an artist > exploring the web and the world (for now just the web) > exhibition reviews > ideas and more ideas!!

Found brown packaging

Brown as a colour is under appreciated, sometimes it is the point blunt of racial discrimination, a colour used to cause harm and insult, but here it takes on a captivating elegance it has always had with gold.
Looking at a box of coloured pencils or a packet of wet felt tips, it is nearly always the only writing or drawing tool that is sharp or full of colour.