Tuesday night art class, one of the great things about teaching is getting inspiration from my students and fellow artists. Martin, pictured here is working on a pen and ink drawing of the great Chuck Berry and is using watered down bleach which when mixed with the ink turns gold. the effect is amazing and i'm off to buy some bleach in the morning!

The creative process always starts with an idea, that can literally just pop into my head or can inspired by something i've seen or from a casual conversation, anything really. The idea can then knock around my head for days, weeks, even months, sometimes never ever ending up more than just an idea.

I always have several ideas floating around that i want to paint at any one time, some never ever end up anything more than an idea, while others make it to the digital design stage but no further, a few even end up as unfinished paintings, started but never completed, either through lack of enthusiasm or overlooked by commission work or a more promising idea, forgotton until the canvas needs to be used for something else. Iwould say 1 in 30 ideas may actually ever become a finished piece of work.

Like I said the beginning is mostly done in digital form, the computer is the 'sketchbook' and 'layout pad', ideas, colours and designs are all worked on and finished on the computer.

This is the image of Jimi Hendrix that i'm going to collage and paint onto the canvas, although the picture is more suited to a square canvas i've decided to work on a small canvas 18 x 24. There are many reasons for this, the main one being i havn't got a small profile square canvas.

The image is taken from an old photo of Jimi Hendrix and converted to a pop art style with photoshop. I then print it to size. This can be anything upto 8ft square using a Micrografix program that is really old. probably older than me!

Jamie comes in to help on a Saturday, currently he's organising the new online shop, answering the phone and listening to a podcast!

Exciting isnt it, a blank canvas!, decided yesterday I wanted to paint a picture of Jimi Hendrix from an image i've had knocking around for ages and thought why not blog it as well from beginning to end. when i'm asked how long a piece of artwork takes to create it can only properly be calculated in terms of the number of hours spent on it. The Elvis 56 painting that is currently on display in the Towngate Theatre was put together over a period of 2 years, but it didnt take 2 years to paint. it was just very much (because it was such a big painting 7ft x 5ft) a stop start project, in real terms it most probably took no more than 30 hours. this latest artwork in camparison is only expected to take me about 6 hours.

it's half way through the month and we( Ben and me) are a lot busier here than this time last year we have commissions to take us well into Feb and the art class numbers are still increasing. with more classes penciled in including kids classes, the small but great team we have here are ( Wendy - bookkeeper and painter, Jamie L- website, advice on all things computers, Jamie E-stock maker, online shop programmer and Amanda- all things office), ok enough back to the art class ..

Ben's Bill Shankly painting a must for any liverpool fans

New Online Shop And Rss Feeds

Have a look at our shiny new online shop you can use the above link. We are trying to up load images of all our stock so it’s worth checking in weekly.
Hope you all like it, please comment if you do. 

I have added RSS feeds for the hard core fans of Dean Smith Art.