Peter Gander's photostream  

Finally, in the New Year I finished the painting of The Old Yew Tree’s pub sign for the oldest pub in Kent. Here I proudly stand below it, with a real yew tree visible right behind it.

Another small square painting for one of Fiona’s Family Mosaics (www.haveagander.biz) 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.

Following on from my recent blog 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!

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 Flickr before Christmas Day ;)

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