Colour on the walls

Hey guys! Hope you're all having a nice week/lovely holidays for anyone who's at school or uni :) I'm home for Easter at the moment too, supposedly using the time wisely to revise for exams at the end of May, so any paintings I'm posting on here the next few weeks means I'm seriously procrastinating, haha!

Here's one I've just finished which I've been working on for the last couple of days. It's had mixed reactions from my family already  (Dad: Well then. Mum: There's splodge-y paint. WHY DID YOU SPLODGE THE PAINT. Sister: Well, I quite like it), so I wanted to gauge what you fine people of the internet thought?

Looking back over it now, the eyes could do with some slight repositioning/resizing, and just generally going back over the facial features. I was really happy with the colour palette though, I bought some new Cerulean Blue and Rose acrylic paints yesterday which are so vibrant and pure for mixing :) To achieve the splatter-y effect I mixed the colour with white wall paint and water (I may have been a little over-enthusiastic with the paint flicking, our guest-room walls will never be quite the same again. The carpet's beginning to look slightly like a Jackson Pollock painting. But it's just such a great stress reliever!).

Acrylics on canvas, 16"x20"

Lauren x

Edit: Just a few days after my little celebratory post about reaching 20 followers, this blog now has 65 followers! I've gained over 50 followers in a week! Thanks so much guys :)

What Emma did

Hey guys,

Here's a quick photo of a piece I did yesterday, based on a photo of ultimate girl-crush Emma Watson from an old copy of Harper's Bazaar. It's pencil, ink pen and watercolour on watercolour paper; the ink's a bit smudged because like the fool I am, I decided to do the watercolours after the ink! I also discovered along the way that drawing faces in profile may be my least favourite thing ever. It's always nice to experiment with different materials though, and I'm pretty happy with how the bottom half of it turned out, haha! :)

Lauren x

The Roaring Twenties

Hi everyone!

So I know it might not sound like much, but I'm SO EXCITED because this blog passed 20 followers on Bloglovin' last night (23 right now, as I hastily refresh the page) and to date has had over 2500 views! I never thought posting occasional quick paintings and sketches online would have such a response, and I always love reading the lovely comments you all leave :)

So basically, this post is to say thanks very much for following, hope you like what you see, and here's to the next 20 followers!

 Lauren x

Step away, stay numb

Another old one that I did last summer, acrylics on paper.
Lauren x

Victory's contagious

Pencil, ink and permanent marker on paper. Based on this Zadig & Voltaire ad.
Lauren x

LDN

Hey everyone, hope you've all had a good week!

So like the last post, this painting is one of my old final GCSE pieces. I know it's a bit cheeky continually posting stuff from a couple years ago instead of new things, but I'm working on it, promise! :)

If I remember right, the theme for the whole project was the word 'structures', so I decided to take that quite literally and do a cityscape. London seemed like the obvious place to get the best photos, so on a day trip there, I spent a few hours wandering around with a camera. In the end, I think I got the final photo for this while crossing a busy road at rush hour because a red bus went past at just the right time, I must have looked like a bit of a nutter!

(Final photo of it sitting in my parents' living room at home for scale, haha!)
So now for the details; it's acrylic painted on wood. I chose wood instead of canvas basically because I couldn't find a canvas that was long and thin enough, and I've tried and failed miserably to make my own in the past! I was really pleased with how it turned out though, I was happy with how the vibrancy of the colours managed to convey the energy of London :) what do you think?

Have a good weekend guys!
Lauren x

Throwback

Hi all,
So I came back home this weekend for a bit of a break from Uni life and came across some of my old paintings which I never put on this blog :) I'm still slowly adding to the painting which I've been working on in the last couple of posts, so the next few posts are going to be a throwback to some of my older paintings. This one was one of my final GCSE project pieces, which now has pride of place in the hall of my parents' house, haha!

The basic brief for the entire project was 'landscapes', and I took the photographs for the painting in a forest near a village called Borth, in Wales. The canvas is the biggest thing I have ever painted on, around 4 x 3 foot.





I also took a lot of inspiration from the artists Kurt Jackson (left) and Peter Doig (right), and I studied the above two paintings quite extensively whilst planning my project. I really liked the subject matter they used and their technique of painting just using a limited colour palette. I wanted to move away from making my paintings so photo-realistic, and in the end I think the final piece ended up looking quite dream-like and ethereal; I was very pleased with it :)

And here it is in my house back home (with umbrellas and door for scale!)
Lauren x

A quick update!

Hey all,
So this week, I've just been carrying on with the project I started in last week's post, here's a quick few photos to show you how it's coming along :)
Lauren x

New Year, New Project!

Hi everyone!
So it's all been a bit hectic since I started Uni and I haven't really had the chance to do any painting or upload any new content to the blog, but that's all about to change!
The corner of my student room is now full of boxes of paint and canvases and I'm already starting on my first big project of 2014! Thought I'd share with you the first few photos of the initial ideas and the start of the canvas :)
Also, yesterday I changed the name and URL of the blog to 'Lauren Does Art', so be sure to change any bookmarks/follows now to laurendoesart.blogspot.co.uk :)
 Anyway, back to the photos!

So first off, these are the photos I printed off which acted as a kind of moodboard. As you can see, the main idea was florals! The photo in the bottom centre is actually the print from an Urban Outfitters dress I have, I figured it was pretty enough to be turned into a painting!

This is the initial sketch for the painting, just quickly in pastels and black and white acrylic.

Next up, I did a larger mock-up, this time focusing more on the detail of the flowers, the composition and working out a more limited colour palette. As you can see, the trees which were in the foreground of the initial sketch have disappeared, I was too scared to just paint over the top of the flowers once I had finished, haha! I'm still undecided whether I'll include the trees or not, or whether to just keep it as it is; what do you think?

Next, after copiously covering my carpet in newspaper to avoid a painty carpet and an angry landlord (!), I sketched out the canvas and started painting. It's difficult to tell the scale from this photo, but the canvas is about 2'x3'.

And that's as far as I've got so far, but I'm working on it whenever I have spare time, so I'll keep you guys posted! As always, let me know what you think in the comments, I always love reading them :)

Lauren x

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