David Hockney and me

Tablecloth design - Brushes

Living Room -Brushes program

Daisy using "Glowdraw" on iphone

I just read an article in the Financial Times about digital painting by David Hockney.  He has recently hung a show at the Royal Academy of Art in the U.K.   Hockney was asked several years ago to create a show entitled Spring. During three springs he became intensely familiar with the day-to-day changes in the landscape near his home, before, in a few frenetic months last year, painting the 52 works that comprise "The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire, in 2011".  These works were drawn on an Ipad!  They were drawn so they could be printed to scale and reproduced in large format.  The largest painting is a 15 meter oil painting, of purple and ochre tree trunks and outsize luscious leaves.  The article doesn't make it clear if this painting was conceived on the ipad and completed in the studio.  The show consists of very large prints from the Ipad drawings.  www.royalacademy.org.uk

The latest program I am using to draw with is call "Brushes". I hope to, someday, be as proficient as Hockney on this wonderful tool.  The difference, besides talent, is that he uses a stylus and so far I have been painting with my finger.  The finger is always available but clunky, and you can't see under your finger!
Once the painting is finished and saved, all the steps used to make the drawing can be replayed-very fast; it shows all the color choices, erasures and then the final product. I hope you enjoy this art, it's not as easy as it looks.  The living room took a couple of hours to produce and seconds to replay.

Creativity

"Several years ago, Teresa Amabile, researcher and professor at the Harvard Business School, completed a study which led to "The Six Myths of Creativity." She studied all of the usual motivators, time pressure, fear, competition, money, born creative and discovered, "folks get creatively engaged when they have a sense of playful progress.  "People are most creative when they care about their work and they're stretching their skills," she says. And it happens over a period of time--one day to the next in a cooperative environment can produce more creativity than the hot expectation of a bonus."  Quoted from Robert Genn-twice weekly newsletter.

Case in point, playing with acrylic ink.  The crows, a few posts back, came from playing with ink and dropper.  Not knowing how the product would work, I let the ink and dropper lead the way.  I used the dropper as a pen or brush,  added water and other colors and found I liked what was happening.  Recently, I was playing again using images of my cat and daughters dog Lola.   Lola, and Yang, my meditating cat, became subjects for small paintings.  I also painted Yang in a more traditional way with tube acrylics, but that will be next time.

Let sleeping cats lie

Lola the Havanese, my pal

Yang meditating

Quiet kitty