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.