Russian Stacking Dolls a la Owl

I bought two sets of blank wooden russian stacking dolls a few months ago via ebay. I have been dying to paint them, but have been busy. See below...

So this weekend I have finally been able to paint them. I saw these really cool stacking dolls on deviant.art, which gave me the idea to do some of my own. Of course my first thought was owls.

Anyways, here they are.

The end.

So many birds, so little time.

So a couple of weeks ago I submitted a bunch of my paintings for this art festival that went on in Chichester. The organiser was looking for artists, so I asked "what for?" and they said "an art maze!"and I said "okay, count me in!". That's basically how it went down. The theme was Myth/Enchantment/Conspiracy, so I painting a load of owls.............. I was already painting owls, so just continued on with what I was doing and hoped that people would be able to link the theme with my paintings.

Here they all are on show:

There were a few pieces cut out from this shot, but you get the idea.

So that is what I have been up too. Painting owls.

Here are some better pictures of some of the new paintings.

This one I love. I bought this frame of preloved.co.uk for £8.00. Bargain! It is just plastic, but it looks really cool. Mind the glare in the photo, I have to re-take this one. I call this one the "bad owl". I am so uncreative with the naming of my paintings.

I call this one the cardinal. This bird's hands creep me out.. I love it!

Click this one to see it bigger. He's holding a tiny cat.

I love this one too. Also a tiny cat on it's head.

The Bird King?

Owl made from crows. Creepy? A little bit.

tree barn owl

crow mask

There are loads more. Check out the website or the facebook to see them all. Most of them are for sale as well. And I need to sell them as I am seriously getting over-run with art. 

The end.

Long time no see

Soooo I've been a bit busy/lazy.

Well since the last update I've been home to Canada for 3 weeks and done loads of wedding planning. I have managed to fit in an entire new series of paintings though. I've just not had time to update blogs and fb... but when I say 'not had time' I really mean 'couldn't be bothered'.

There is this Art and Music festival in Chichester that I've taken part in (very small). They've built this maze full of art and I added some paintings to it. So in 2.5 weeks I painted 19 new paintings, all bird related. Hoorah!

Heres a taste, more to come later.

This one I did a year or so ago (just the bird). It started out as just a random tea stain which evolved into a bird. I added the doodles recently. Much better.

The end

business cards!!!

Just got my very first business cards in the post today.

They are amazing!

I have 1000 so if you can expect to get some from my when you see me.

The end.

Beaucoup plus d'hiboux!

More owls!

These are both 8x10 sized and I'm going to put them up for sale via le facebook. 

Day and Night owls. I think its best that they are sold together as they are sort of a set, but I'm going to keep painting these so I may come up with another owl that will suit one of these. We'll see

These are 6x4 size. 

I think I will call this set Stumpy owls. A) because they are stumpy type owls and B) because they are on stumps. Good enough! 

I will also put these up for sale on le facebook. 

Hopefully you can click on the pictures to see them bigger as there is a bit more detail than is visible from just these pictures. 

Im on the hunt for old picture frames to recycle and use for my art. Mismatched, ugly, or broken.. I don't care. So if you have any... send them my way.

The end.

Hope you are enjoying the owls as much as me.

OH I almost forgot this little guy...

This is 'Tree hole owl'

He doesn't have a counterpart yet, as I have run out of frames.

The end, for real. 

les hiboux

Okay... so since my last post I have painted 3 new paintings.

The first - tried to replicate the bird hand painting... It turned out utterly poo. I'll try to fix it another time.. but I moved on to other things.

The second - A painting of a crows, hot air ballons, kites and clouds.. I haven't quite finished it yet though. Will post later

And the thirs - OWLS!! I love owls.

I'm too excited about owls to finish the two previous paintings, so they will have to sit on the back burner for a bit while I draw as many owls as I possibly can.

I have so many ideas for owls....... OOoo so exciting. Just wait and see........

the end

new paintings of the old

And when I say old, I don't mean elderly people.

I've just bought some wood today that I'm going to start painting in a few minutes. I think I am done with painting on paper in the style I was doing before... for now anyways. I will probably revisit it later when I have some more ideas. For the wood, I am going to revisit the 'bird hand' painting I did a few years ago.

It seams to be a favorite among my friends and family. I've always really liked it too, but not loved it. There are a few things that I would change given the chance. When I first painted it I had painted the entire hand bright kelly green. I have no idea why and I soon realized it was a huge mistake, so I spent hours scraping the paint all off, because I still wanted to have the wood showing. So it was a bit frustrating and I never did anything more like it. I think straight after this painting I starting painting the very first set of coasters.

The end.

Time to get to work!

llamas, llamas, llamas

I love llamas... who doesn't?

I have been drawing llamas since 2004 I believe. They always seem to pop up in my work every now and then.

I actually hate this. I don't know what I was thinking when putting the spinning wheel in there. It just doesnt work. The only good thing that came out of this painting was the llama. I first painted the llama shape in thick black paint with a tiny brush, making a fur texture. I wasn't really sure how it would come out but I love it. Its too bad I ruined the entire painting with a bad decision. Instead of trying to fix it, I thought, it will be much faster and better to just do a whole new painting....

Much better! I love the hand mountains.. I think I will be using that agains somwhere else. I don't think I actually love this painting either, but it is a much better improvement to the previous.

The end.

Whatcha got there little fella?

Jam jars... New painting.

I did the background and the hands last week but couldn't come up with something to finish it off. I was reluctant to try anything I did come up with because I really liked the hands with the blocks of color on its own, even though it definetly needed something more. Mr tom actaully was the one to suggest jam jars. I was thinking of filling them with weird animals... like yaks, but I could come up with a good enough drawing of a yak so I stuck with what I knew would work, doodlelies. Maybe I will try the yak idea another time.

The end.

electric boogaloo

Another painting!
I was inspired by the album art I did with the tree branch spelling the text for the album tittled, so I wanted to do something more like it.  Voila:

Why electric boogaloo? No idea... Just because I can.

The end.

little girl shy album complete

I have just finished the album cover that I was doing for my friend ilana. Here it is.

click it to see it better

I haven't properly cropped it yet... and i've left the template in there still just so we can see whats going to be where for now. But there it is. I ended up changing he tree to a single color and lighter, as before it was competing with the flowers for main focus. I think it works really well this way, even though I did spend ages coloring each little part of the tree a different shade of purple previously. If only I would have known it was going to look poo. 

Hopefully it is clear that the album is titled "would you follow" and the artist's name is little girl shy. Oui? 

Hopefully in 4 weeks time she will have a bunch printed up and ready to be distributed. Im excited to see how it turns out.

The end.

up and up....

Okay, so I fininally found the energy to finish the painting last night. Same themes and colors.

up and up

I've never been one for tittleling pieces. I hate doing it actually. I always just end up tittleling it something that refers to something in the painting, only to help me to know which is which. At the same time I hate when paintings get tittled 'untitled 1' etc.

I've already primed and begun two more paintings with the same backgrounds, but they are different sized paper and I think I am going to explore something else... but again, I've hit a wall.

The end.

the progress of a whale

Right, so I have hit a wall with the creativity this afternoon. Usually I only get to really painting on the weekends but this morning we went shopping and I've come back thinking I'll get straight on with painting, but its really not happened. So I am doing what I do best and am procrastinating. Here is the progression of the whale painting of the earlier post. I never do this and I think it will be interesting for me to look back on to see how a peice has gone from blank paper to finished piece.

Step one. Tape and Prime Prime Prime.

Step two. Base colour, dark blue.

Step three, colour blocks, definetly turquoise, definetly lime-ish, definetly gross brown/green... then I tried a florescent type pink/orange in the bottom left corner which looked terrible, so changed it to the color it is now.

Step four. Doodle.... I did this while watching project runway, sat on the couch. I think this is probably the best bit to do. No thought process needed.

Oh and did the hands, in calligraphy ink... so much easier to work with than paint.

Step five, bubbles, greys

Step six, waterfall, ink pens... basically more doodling, but a little more purposefully.

Step seven, add red for tree leaves.. almost fini!

Then added the whale in. See the final image below in previous post if you like.

The end.

whales, hot air balloons, lemons

Three new paintings! I am still carrying on with the same series of the previous post. I don't know how long I will keep going with these but I don't seem to be slowing down yet. I haven't had much feedback on any of these yet so I'm not really sure what others think about them, but I love them... For now anyways. Alot of the time I will end up hating it after I look at it long enough. Anyways, here goes three more.

This is is my least favorite so far. I think its the red and the yellow-ish color that doesn't do it for me.

I called this ones lemons.. only because there are lemons hanging from the top. Not quite sure why.

This one I titled ' a whale of a time ' and i think it is one of my favorites so far. Also with this one I took a picture of it at each step so that I can later upload them so you can see how they develop.

With alll these in this series of painting I never started with a plan or a vision of how it was going to look in the end. The very first painting was a total fluke that it actually turned out in the way that it did. For the rest I only worked with the concept that I would have a background made from rectangles, that there would be loads of doodle-ly bits at the bottom, I would have a hand in black somewhere and the rest of the image would be painting in grey tones. The end.

feather rain

After finishing the bald balloons painting I was quite pleased with myself. I really liked the outcome at it and this morning felt the need to do another. So here it is.

This one is a little less random (no bald heads) but I think I may even like it a little more than the previous. I feel really excited about these two so I am going to continue with the same ideas and do many more. I've already begun the third. The end.

bald balloons

Brand new painting finished! Finished it yesterday but had to wait until to today to get a pciture of it when the sun is out.

Don't ask why... Im not even sure myself. Ages ago, when searching for patterns in google image search, I came accross a diagram of male pattern baldness. The diagram had about 15 or so heads all with different balding patterns. I thought it looked hilarious and always wanted to use it for something. Yesterday I painted this picture with no intentions of using the heads until I needed a scrap peice of paper to draw a hand on, and picked up the print out of the heads. And there you have it. Bald balloons. The end.

creating album cover for talented little girl shy

My friend Ilana has asked me to do some art for her album cover that she will be finishing in the near future. I did her Myspace a few months ago, after some frustration; as I don't use myspace let alone have I ever created a myspace layout/background. We did have big ideas at first but turned out the coding was a bit too complicated for msyelf. You can view her space here : Little Girl Shy. Check out her music while you are there.. She's quite good. Anyways, so on to the album cover. We decided it would be best to do whatever she liked most and not try to have it relate to the myspace artwork as we could always change that later on. She liked the Lenka album art work and send me a few other album cover that she liked. I found it very hard to not copy the Lenka style as its very close to my own and what I might have come up with without seeing the artwork before hand. So I did try to steer clear of it.. I'm not sure how successful that was.

Here is what I've come up with so far.

I haven't heard back from her what she thinks yet.. but hopefully it's a step in the right direction.

I think I will change the tree a bit; the shape is a bit weird for me. It also needs a bit of cleaning up but other than that I quite like it.

x

Its here!

The website is finally done! Fini!

I think it needs a few more touching ups but it's pretty much done. But if you are reading this then you have probably come to the blog from the webpage so you already know thats its done. How exciting! Finally my own website. Hopefully eventually we can put an actual store on there where you can order coasters straight from the website rather than just emailing me. But that will take time.

caleigh-ill art

Website is coming.. the website is coming

Right now my husband, mr. tom, is trying to upload my very own website. I have been saying I would get a website for probably 4 years now. But like most people I am a procrastinator and like to take my time doing important things. The main reason why we have finally decided to get on with it is the coaster thing. At the moment I have just uploaded an album of different designs to facebook for people to view and then order, but it is sort of limited. Not everyone uses facebook... but most people can go to a website. So there we go, I will have a website very soon (fingers crossed). We have been having some trouble getting it up and running. But when it is done you will be able to find it at http://www.caleigh-ill.com/.

Helloooo

Hello... Just trying this out. Not sure if this blog will be able to be transferred to my website.. Just testing it out.