Foray into market stall

My daughter's school ran a fete yesterday in conjunction with the Election. She and her 7 year old friend decided to run a tattoo and face painting stall to raise funds so that they can shop at the fete. Obviously the parents had to get involved so here I was busy painting faces whilst Doreen and the girls applied tattoos. The men helped setting up and packing away.

I put up my little paintings for exposure which was fairly successful considering the type of crowd and the lack of space. Here is a picture of me at the fete.

Quite a few business cards went and I'm hopeful that people will look at my website. All publicity is good publicity, surely!

And for the curious, we made more money painting faces and busking than from art : but the girls learnt some valuable lessons about earning money and work ethics...

Miniature paintings

We are doing a stall at the school fete in a weeks time. My friend Cecile suggested that I paint a series of small canvases and sell them at the fete as a test. Good idea I think and bought 20 x 25 cm canvases. These are small but not minuscule.

Since they are small they shouldn't take long and therefore can be priced low, right? Wrong! Even with small canvases, there needs to be planning and perspective etc. You save on paint I guess and time taken to cover larger areas but really no saving on composition and colour mixing.

The good thing is they serve as a test bed for ideas before launching into a larger canvas. The term 'study' comes to mind. I took about 90mins for each one. How much should I sell them for?

Expressive colour ala Bonnard

After copying the Gaugain painting the next logical step is to use a palette that I admire in one of my own compositions. The painting I chose was 'Regatta'. The main colours were green and yellow/ orange.


Unfortunately the orange looked ghastly so I reverted to ochre. This is incomplete as I still have people to put under the stairs but I post it up to show what the experiment yielded. More on this later.

My first clay sculpture

After a couple of weeks away from the Fri girls art group, we are back and my first sculpture has survived the bisque firing. Here is a photo (drum roll)


Apologies for the background clutter. It looks pretty good for a first piece : modelled using a sketch. I've put a green underglaze and done a second one of a sitting figure this time. Hopefully there will be 3 in this series which I can display somewhere in my crowded display cabinet.