Fishy fundraiser: Local mackerel III in Kent Messenger

Macmillan Folkestone Art Show curator Tom Langlands with ‘Local mackerel III’

Local mackerel III appears in today’s Kent Messenger. Hundreds of postcards of Local mackerel III have sold at a pound each, 100% of which goes to the charity.

Winter hedges

Winter hedges  © Peter Gander

Driving down the motorway tonight I saw this dramatic scene of a high row of hedges chopped with a ruler-straight top against a cool blue darkening sky. I tried to retain the image as best I could in my head and set brush to paper soon after getting home. I think there’s much potential in this image - it would make a particularly nice three colour print, for starters. Painted with Winsor & Newton watercolour on 400gsm Three Rivers extra rough, mould-made paper.

Abreast of plans, cover of today’s Herne Bay Times

Today’s Herne Bay Times

‘Abreast of Plans’ saucy postcard-style painting

‘Abreast of Plans’  © Peter Gander

My local Herne Bay Pier pier pavilion, a bit of a loveable but ugly 70s architectural icon, is currently under the demolition man’s hammer. However, plans are (ahem!) abreast to design a more aesthetic replacement for the main pavilion which was once home to a legendary skating rink now at Herne Bay High School.  I had gander at the plans in last week’s local paper and the new design gave me erm, a couple of pointers regarding a painting opportunity. The above is my Donald McGill-inspired watercolour entitled ‘Abreast of Plans’, (dimensions approx 30cm x 30cm). This will be on the front page no less of The Herne Bay Times tomorrow morning, (Thursday 16th Feb 2012) so this is a sneeky peek! Original for sale - please email me with enquiries.

Painting details

A shocked seagull drops his chip

Sweet feet

Skates

Crane and demolition ball

Face

Cuppa and Thermos flask

Swing-top flask

Swing-top flask  © Peter Gander

A quick sketch on a new supply of Jacksons Eco Handmade Watercolour Paper (extra rough) 425gsm. The extremely rocky surface is hard work for a scratch pen and the lines bleeds a lot of course, but makes for a rich base for the watercolours. A touch of wax candle in places gives us some white relief within the glass.

Hand-drawn type Phrenology head

Phrenology Quiz head  © Peter Gander

The original for this design drawn for a school quiz was painted with brush and black Rotring ink on paper and converted to colour in Photoshop. Inspired by antique Phrenology busts used to map out the supposed workings of the brain.

‘Local mackerel III’ for The Folkestone Macmillan Art Show’

http://thefolkestonemacmillanartshow2012.yolasite.com/

Creative Canterbury recently alerted me to Cancer charity Macmillan’s Folkestone Art Show 2012. Last year I exhibited alongside loftier artists such as Tracey Emin with my ‘Local mackerel’ (Margate version) in a Pilgrim’s Hospice exhibition of artists’ postcards at Margate’s Harbour Arm Gallery. Folkestone is a local Kentish seaside town that I thought would adapt well to the mackerel concept. The original idea was a linocut (see previous post) and I have also painted a whole shoal of these as small watercolour originals (Whitstable version, which are sold at Taking the Plunge in Whitstable High Street), but this is the first time I have turned to canvas to convey the concept.

Base layer drying in my studio

I transfered the design to the large (0.5m x 1m wide) box canvas by the time-homoured process of drawing a grid over a linoprint and translating the size upwards to the canvas. I then painted the sea and base colour which I left to dry.

Pre-stripes

Now down to the black linework, painted in a very graphic style close to the original linocut.

 

Painting the mackerel’s unique pattern

Note the bluish-green reflective surface

Once the black linework was dry, I added a mix of acrylic varnish and silver flecks of glitter to achieve a lovely fish-like sheen. As a result, the canvas winks beautifully when it catches the sunlight. The exhibition runs from Friday the 17th of Feb to Tuesday the 28th of Feb 2012 at Georges House Gallery 8 The Old High Street, Folkestone, Kent, CT20 1RL Tel: 01303 244533

St George’s House Gallery window

‘Local mackerel III’  © Peter Gander

 

National Trust sign (Mosaic)

National Trust sign   © Peter Gander

Another painting for one of Fiona’s Photo Mosaics. Scratch (dip) pen and Indian ink with watercolour and wax (texture).

Bateaux Mouches, Paris

Bateaux mouches, Paris  © Peter Gander

Mosaic again. Paris by night. Painting of the famous Parisienne boats company sign with the Eiffel tower in the background. Dip pen and watercolour on rough paper.

Ruby port bottle & glasses

Port bottle & glasses  © Peter Gander

Mosaic painting. A particularly nice chance effect of transparent blends on the bottle. A wax candle was used to provide glasses highlights.

Mosaic painting: Ballantine’s whisky

Ballantine’s Whisky  © Peter Gander

Another mosaic piece, this time it’s for a client with a penchant for whisky. Dip pen and ink with watercolour on rough 300gsm paper.

Fish & chips

Fish 'n' Chips  © Peter Gander

Another ‘Mosaic square’ painting. I used Winsor & Newton ink for this one, which gives a rich finish on this 300gsm rough paper. Salt & vinegar anyone?

Café

Café  © Peter Gander

Using Indian ink and white gouache on Indian Khadi paper, a loose, gestural painted sketch of a waiter through the window of a London café. The heavyweight, cotton rag paper is perfect for those unexpected blooms, spreads and grainy effects that give richness to the piece. Indian ink, gouache on Khadi 310gsm paper.

New Year, New Yew Tree Sign

At last, The Old Yew Tree, Westbere, Kent, has my new sign up. Here I proudly stand below it, with a real yew tree visible right behind it.

President Emmental pack

‘President’ Emmental  © Peter Gander

Another small square painting for one of Fiona’s Family Mosaics. Each small square of the print reflects a particular interest of the person or family involved and a small painting like this looks far better than a ‘pack shot’. Drawn with a dip or ‘scratch’ pen, I allowed the (Rotring) ink to dry before adding watercolour, as it’s resistant to water only when dry. The dip pen gives a lovely, variable line like no other. The coloured shadow was painted wet-into-wet. Ink and Winsor & Newton watercolour on Daler-Rowney 300gsm rough paper.

‘Seven Peas’ Gravy Boat

The ‘Seven Peas’ Gravy Boat  © Peter Gander

Following on from my recent post & visit to Chessell Pottery in the Isle of Wight, I recently painted this gravy boat (well, it’s a half-litre jug really) as my keen cook wife wanted something handmade for Christmas. I found the excellent Espressions pottery painting & ceramics café in The King’s Mile in nearby Canterbury, Kent. The spelling is intentional and reflects their excellent coffee offering. The place is run by a really friendly couple and they bent over backwards to see that they had the right kind of pot in for me too. Design-wise, I took a leaf out of Edward Lear’s Owl & Pussycat verse and painted a scene to match my theme of ‘sailing the seven peas’. Again, using the sgraffito method, I was advised to paint several layers of white onto the entire raw jug, allowing this to dry and then add a few layers of dense black. Scraping back the black to reveal the white layer underneath proved much easier this time as the softer white layer was more yielding than the white ceramic substrate of my Chessell fishy plate, so thanks for the tip, Espressions!

The Beetle

The Beetle  © Peter Gander

Back to acrylics for this new painting, a Christmas present for my eleven year-old son Jack. It’s our bottle-green Mexican import Volkswagen Beetle, in the (much lovelier) old style of body design, though only a decade old as it was one of the last run of Mexican imports made in the retro style in 2003. Jack loves classic cars and is very fond of this motor (as I am) and asked that I paint if for him months ago, so he should be chuffed with this. I had got to the stage where the car was finished on a plain white canvas and something was lacking, so I gave it a bit more of a cooler, urban feel, with spattered and running paint. (Hope he’s too busy to be looking at my website before Christmas Day ;)

Flame koi (digital)

Flame koi  © Peter Gander

From water(colour) to fire today, experimenting with Flame Painter, designed by Peter Blaskovik over at EscapeMotions. If you’ve ever fancied playing with fire without getting burnt, this is the drawing package for you. I bought it thinking it would be a good tool to sketch out (real-life) fire sculpture pieces, another creative pursuit I am keen to look into. If there are any artists out there that know anything about fire sculpture by the way, do let me know. Flame Painter/Wacom Bamboo/Adobe Photoshop

Misty morning, Swalecliffe

Misty morning, Swalecliffe  © Peter Gander

A recent cool, early morning November cycle ride took me through the coastal area of Swalecliffe, in between Herne Bay and Tankerton, Whitstable. Visibility was poor, but atmosphere rich - dog walkers on the dirt track in this marshy area the loomed out of the fog which unfurled from the sea, merging into the grey sky in a horizonless vista. Despite the fog, I managed to spot my first white egret here in Swalecliffe Brook (on the left of the painting). Like a small albino heron, it stood ghostly and motionless in the water, probably on the lookout for eels. The absorbent paper is a weighty mould-made 560lb and made the merging of colours in the fog a dream, as the paper retains the water for ausefully long period. Winsor and Newton watercolour on Jackson’s 560lb Extra Rough Eco Handmade paper.

The Old Yew Tree Inn pub sign designs

The favoured calligraphic design  © Peter Gander

I recently posted about my postcard painting at The Old Yew Tree Inn, near my club’s fly-fishing lake at Westbere, Kent. Well, chatting to Mark and Anna, the proprietors recently, I suddenly became involved in a project to design and paint a new pub sign for them to replace their weatherbeaten version which has seen better days. The tradition of pub signwriting is a dying art nowadays as pubs are dying out, especially in rural areas and pub chains produce digital signs with little regard for the provenance of the pub itself, often renaming them too, thus swathes of inns have little visible heritage but the building itself. From a design point of view, Mark and I were keen to reflect a contemporary attitude (food etc) within this 14th century pub (Kent’s oldest) whilst trying not to ride roughshod over its significant history. I looked at illustrative and calligraphic design icons that respected the pub’s historical roots (forgive the pun) with the Yew Tree on centre stage. I drew up five black and white sketches (or ‘scamps’ as we call them in the trade) for Mark and Anna to choose from.

Scamps A to E  © Peter Gander

Scamp (D) proved to be the favourite and next steps will be to look at the colour palette.

The pedalling painter 1: Reculver and back (12k)

The artist © Peter Gander

In little less than a year I will be doing a cycling tour along a portion of The Compostela di Santiago (The Pilgrim’s Route) -  in the south-west of France, with my brother and old art college friend Ben, a trip of at least 600 kilometers and today it was time to start something resembling a training regime. Admittedly a 12k round trip is no big deal at all, (even the paper boy would scoff) but not having cycled properly for some years I needed to set my sights, well, on Reculver Towers, 6 kilometers away and just visible from Herne Bay’s seafront. It’s an ancient Roman monument which bizarrely was only partly demolished in the 1920s. They left the towers to the front of the building in situ as a navigational aid to passing ships. Anyway, my wife Fiona is far fitter than I and regularly runs 5k or so which she takes, erm, in her stride. And she dutifully ushered me along the way with the odd reassuring word and the habit of disappearing over the horizon like a out-of-reach carrot to a hungry donkey, in a similar way that my brother did when we recently did a ride or two in France. Still, I was enjoying the 20mph cold north-easterly gale in my face, supressing my forward progress like I had the ‘bike handbrake’ on. And I use the title ‘The Pedalling Painter’ in a wishful sense, as it really was howling with wind, plus we had to be back for an appointment, so the chances of sketching en route were very unlikely (I’m hoping for more balmy weather too in France). Thus Fiona took this shot which I opened up on the Mac and sketched from a distance, freehand. Cheating perhaps, but better than nowt. Future Pedalling Painter posts will be from longer rides with a proper sketch stop built in, something I hope to carry on doing on our French trip at the end of the day or during a lunch-stop. Ink and brush with Winsor and Newton watercolour on 210gsm Khadi handmade sketchbook.

Chessell Pottery fish plate

Fly-fishing plate © Peter Gander

Last week during half-term, we took the kids over the water to the Isle of Wight, to Fiona’s bungalow in Ventnor, which is looked after by friends Helen and Frazer of Vintage Vacations. We were only there for a few days and the autumnal weather called for an afternoon’s leisure indoors. We picked out Chessell Pottery Barns near Calbourne on the island. We selected our blanks, a piece of slip-cast pottery, choosing from bowls and egg-cups to mugs and vases. I picked out a large 10 inch plate, the best and biggest ‘blank canvas’ available. I set out with a technique called ‘sgraffito’ in mind, where the paint is applied then scratched away by a metal tool called a fettling knife (just visible in the top photo).

Laying down successive layers of black paint (3 were used in total)

Hand-lettering the words with bottle of paint

Scratching in the scale design with the tailormade fettling tool

The final piece showing pallette, fettling knife and squeezy paint bottles

Lettering was done by squeezing a matching paint through  a fine-tipped plastic paint bottle, icing- bag-style. Cutting through the now-dried layers of rock-hard paint with the knife was hard going, fluid, curved lines must be very tricky but mine was a relatively simple design. I added a decorative couple of blocks of water and the fly and job done. As our plates needed firing to glaze the design and we were due to leave the island the next day before a firing day was due, we will have to wait until next year to collect our pieces! In any event, were soon distracted from that glitch by the Barn’s legendary cream tea to finish a great afternoon off!

Conkers & acorns © Peter Gander

Autumn in England. Conkers and acorns. Whilst out walking the dog I crunched underfoot this unfeasibly long acorn, minus its little cradling, egg-cup-like stalk. It was bigger than a nearby conker which was missed by schoolboys looking for bigger prizes as they clacked their sticks up at the boughs of the horse chestnut, shielding their faces as the sticks came down again, peeking hopefully at a shower of prize conkers, thudding on the wet grass, nestled inside alien spiky green cases. Winsor & Newton watercolour and charcoal on handmade Indian Khadi (210gsm) rough paper.

Still life, petit chien © Peter Gander

On a recent trip to see my brother where he lives in Navarrenx, a Béarnaise area of south-west France, I perused a wealth of bric-a-brac that sits on the mantel piece on top of his giant fireplace. I chose a grouping of this wooden Indian scuttle, porcelain dog and wax cactus candle to sketch. It’s actually painted in the main with white gouache on Raven Black paper, with sanguine and white Conté details plus charcoal pencil.

Nude by bath © Peter Gander

An experiment in combining traditional and digital techniques. The nude is drawn with a charcoal pencil, highlighted in white and sanguine Conté, then scanned. I also scanned the background Kraft paper (or ‘brown’ paper as we poetically call it in the UK), seperately. The patches of aqua, green foliage, sienna border and model’s back highlight in white were then added as tints (in Photoshop/Wacom pen & tablet). Looks Anglo-Chinese perhaps?

Herne Bay Pier Trust’s web page

My recent postcard for The Herne Bay Pier Trust (THBPT) appears on their website today. The demolition of the Sports Pavilion, which the postcard commemorates, begins this week. The original painting will either be auctioned or raffled off soon, so we are hoping to recreate the success of the recent Pilgrims Hospices Charity Postcard Auction with the sale of the painting, 100% of the proceeds of which will go to THBPT.

Mackerel on stone © Peter Gander

Note the canvas-like toothy texture of this mould-made paper

The mackerel, a fishy favourite of mine, both in eating and illustrative terms, with its iteresting body pattern which I have visited before, of course. Another painting on Two Rivers paper, a substrate so well-suited for this study of the fish lying on a stone surface, as it’s rich in texture, most notable in the close-up. Note also the huge brush that I use, which I also keep at arms’ length in order to keep a freer, looser feeling to my work than if I used a tiny brush up close. Winsor & Newton watercolour on 400gsm Two Rivers (Somerset) deckle-edged, handmade paper.

The fish padlock © Peter Gander

I started this painting of my beloved fish padlock a couple of months ago. The padlock is a weighty lump of hand-incised brass and is accompanied by a more golden-coloured key. I bought this beautiful piece of handmade Indian art on Ebay a few years ago from India and though I wish I could say I had an exclusive ‘fishing tackle shed’, it does appropriately guard my fishing gear in my garden shed. Painting-wise, my original, half-baked creative attempt was painted in gouache and not working at all on the strongly-coloured pastel paper, so I abandoned it. The whole thing was wishy-washy, so undeserving of something so chunky and strong and I didn’t know what to do with it. Revisiting it today, I covered the whole coloured image in black Indian ink, creating a black silhouette and started again. This time with soft pastels working in darkest colours first over the black, finishing with the highlight. I then painted the scales, keyhole and fin lines in ink and finally, acheived a good result. Indian ink and soft pastel on Daler Rowney Murano (warm colours) Pastel Paper (160gsm).