Snow day!

Followers of my Twitter may have read that I was "Planning to be very creative" today - in other words, intending to spend the day doing a lot of painting and maybe even a bit of wirework. Well, the snow had other ideas. Much of today has been spent either watching the snow out of the window or actually being out playing in the snow, leaving little time for much else. But no matter. Days like this tend to bring a lot of inspiration, which makes up for the lack of actual work :)











I have in fact got some 'actual work' done today - I've made a start to a painting that will eventually look a bit like the last of the above photos:



I've also made a sinister snowman - don't have nightmares! ;)

Hanley Park

There was a park I used to walk home through as a student in Stoke-on-Trent. It was a longer walk than just going up the road, but it was a lot more peaceful. I would sketch, collect twigs and take photos there, it was a great source of inspiration. A few weeks ago, I was looking through some of those old photos and did some work in my art journal about them:





I've recently painted an artwork based on the second of those sketchbook pieces. It's called Hanley Park and depicts trees, and the dark ground from which they grow, silhouetted against a pale sky:

An unlikely source of inspiration

A few days ago I took inspiration from an unlikely source - a Wallace & Gromit poster on my wall.



Much as I love them, they've never inspired me to paint before, but looking at the background of that image I had an idea.



I'd been looking for something different to paint, something other than the trees and sunsets. So this simple landscape was a solution to that.



It's not a huge departure from my usual style, but it's something a little different. And it's inspired quite a few works in progress.



As has this sketchbook piece, painted a few days before, which was also an attempt to do something different (this attempt to do something different still ended up in painting trees though, lol).





I'm now newly inspired to paint, after a bit of a dry spell. Which is no bad thing.

New Year, New Art

So what have I been up to since I last blogged? Working very hard for Acme Jewellery, mostly. But all work and no play makes Jen a dull girl, so I've had a few decent nights out too, including seeing Madness on the 12th Dec and Aladdin (a panto starring John Barrowman) on 20th Dec. Yayness! With them, plus Bill Bailey and Alice Cooper, I've had a busy winter :D

I started a new project in the Christmas holidays too. The actual paintings have nothing to do with this, but me starting to paint again was inspired by reading Anthony Keidis's autobiography. He described how he and the rest of the Chilis lived in a house while writing Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and that John would be painting in his room there. Just the word 'painting' made me want to paint stuff, so the next day I started off a new sketchbook of paintings, little ideas for future canvases.

The first page of the sketchbook is a version of this canvas (click the image for a little more about this piece):



Using that canvas as inspiration, I painted a similar scene in watercolours and acrylics:



I traced the outline of the tree onto a piece of acetate with a marker, then added to this using copper-coloured glass outliner. I cut a hole in the top of the plastic, then attached it to the rings of my sketchbook with black ribbon.







The next page. Painted in watercolours:



When I was in college, a few years ago, one of the things the tutors had us doing was drawing the negative space around a figure, rather than the figure itself. I've come back to this idea, painting the sky around the tree rather than the tree itself.

I'll have more of these soon, plus some canvases and Valentines cards based on them.

My first art cards

I've just listed a new ACEO diptych in my DaWanda shop. It looks like this:



and is for sale here.

It's a mini version of a favourite composition of mine, which I've used here and here. It depicts a tree spreading across two cards. The first card shows one side of this tree in daylight, and the other shows the other side of the tree at sunset. The tree on the daylight side has been painted using a mixture of copper poster paint and black acrylic, giving it a metallic sheen that looks different in varying light. The sunset tree is in silhouette, painted in black acrylic, a striking contrast to the bright acrylic colours of the setting sun. As I believe is standard with ACEOs (I did say these were my first!), both of my cards measure 6.5cm (2.5") by 9cm (3.5").

I've also painted a circular art card, on display here:

Art and craft for sale!

Originally, there was only one place to buy Sneddonia's designs, i.e. sneddonia.etsy.com. There are now two places to buy my work, the
Etsy shop and my recently opened shop on DaWanda. On Etsy, I sell my jewellery, suncatchers and other metalwork, and on DaWanda I'm selling my paintings on canvases and t-shirts. Originally, all these items were available in my Etsy shop, but there was too much variety and the shop didn't seem like a coherent whole. So I opened the new store at DaWanda to create a suitable home for my painted things.

Here's what's for sale there so far:



And something that I just listed today:



Please be aware that all prices on Etsy are in US Dollars and all prices on Dawanda are in Euros. If you want these amounts calculated in your currency, just let me know.

More coming soon, so watch this space ...

Thanks for looking :)