Reflections on Lockdown #1

Howdy doody folks,

How’ve you all been doing under lockdown?

I’ve been doing lots of art.

Mainly sketching, painting with acrylics and photography.

Today, I thought I’d focus on portrait sketching. Most of it is in pencil, some chalk pastel and a little bit of charcoal.

You might even spot the odd bit of Amazon packaging for canvas when I ran out of paper.

Reference wise, some of them are life drawings, a lot from photographs and a few from other people’s paintings.

Apart from it being good practice, it’s also very good for your mental health. And, let’s face it, we all need to look after our noodles. Especially when Barack Obama stares at you like that all day.

I’ll post a few of my acrylic portraits at some stage. They’re a bit more experimental. With the emphasis on ‘mental’.

Follow me on Instagram: @milligancroft

Remember folks: Art is Medicine!

Toodle-pip.

Making art out of art

I love marbling with the kids.

If you’ve ever done it before you’ll know that you can get some really cosmic patterns. You’ll also know that you’ve probably got more leftover samples of the stuff than you can shake a big shaky thing at.

So … what to do with all those cosmic castoffs … I know, let’s make a collage.

Start by cutting out shapes from your marbling masterpiece that you want to use in your composition and glue them onto a piece of paper.

Next, sketch in the rest of the composition. Add a bit of a felt tip outline.

I filled in the background with chalk pastel, but you could easily use felt tip, watercolour paint, pencil crayon or coloured paper.

And there you have it – you’ve made art out of art.

There is one other thing…

And, it’s probably the best bit. But I didn’t realise that until it was too late. Instead of cutting the shapes out of your marbling sample willy-nilly like I did, cut them out in the same position that you’re going to stick them on your paper. That way, when you position them next to each other you get a sort of positive/negative effect.

Hindsight? Serendipity? Whatever.

If you haven’t done marbling before you can use off-cuts of old patterned wallpaper, pictures from magazines or gift wrap paper. Or even paint an abstract background and use that.

It’s one more thing to do until the schools reopen in September!

If you want loads more of art activities to do you can sign up to Arc’s free ‘Keeping us together‘ programme. They email you a different art activity every week. (Arc is a brilliant Arts charity based in Stockport.)

And remember, folks – Art is Medicine*!

*Do not swallow art like medicine. It might kill you.

**I am not a trained physician.

***’Art is medicine’ is only my opinion and not a scientific fact.

****Or, is it?