Laura Thompson Art

It's been a while!

2012-02-13T12:31:00.001Z

Well I know I said I was going to try to keep on top of this blogging thing and post more regularly, but it turns out, I am just useless!! I would like to use the excuse that I have been very busy, which I really have, but I'm sure I still could have made time to write something if I'd really tried. Anyway, from now on I will try to be better :) Here are some pictures of what I've been up to anyway.

It's a bit late, but here is my Christmas card, I am hoping to make my own from now on, I always mean to, but this Christmas was the first time I actually got around to doing it! Once the cards were printed, I added different coloured sparkly inks to the snow and leaves, but I don't think that shows up particularly well on a screen.


After I learnt how to needle felt last year, I haven't had much time to actually do very much, so before Christmas I used some time I had off from work to make these as presents.

Then I made this little bear for my cousin's one year old, Alec's birthday.

Now, since Christmas, I have been working really hard on my portfolio, this year I WILL start sending off pictures to publishers.

I have realised for a while, that the way I work always takes me forever to get anything finished, which is completely impractical if I ever want to earn a living from my art. So, I have been experienting with using collage as well as painting, so that I can still do lots of tiny details in some areas, but can cover some bits much more quickly. These are my two pieces I have done in the last month.

Now I know two pictures doesn't seem like a huge amount for a whole month, but it is a massive improvement for me :) and I have to say, it did take a while for me to track down and sort through all the paper and things I used!

Now, I must get back to work so that I have something to write about again before next Christmas!

To see more of my art, have a look here.

Hello? Is there anyone still there?

2011-10-16T19:48:00.001+01:00

Hello, to anyone who hasn't given up on my blog!! I am still here, I have just been INCREDIBLEY busy!! I have had a couple of commissions from various family members, and have finally finished them.
The first one was a painting for my Aunt, she wanted a portrait of my cousin with her cat as a graduation present.

The most recent painting I have done is this for my uncle. It is his house and family, magically transported to a snowy mountainous country, but still with all their local Kentish birds. It was quite a fun project to work on, but took a very long time, and drove me slightly mad paiting each flower individually, but I think it was worth it, and everyone seemed very impressed.

I always find it hard to finish a painting like this, there is always just something else that could be added, so I was quite pleased to hear that if new members of the family appear, I will be called on to add them in :)
Hopefully it won't be quite so long til my next post, I have lots of things planned, so keep watching!!

Ink

2011-02-20T19:58:00.003Z

No, I haven't got a tattoo... yet!! But I have discovered the magicalness that is pen and ink drawing!!! I started off having a go at a botanical illustration class, and had a bit of trouble getting it to flow nicely, but after a bit of perseverance and the discovery of bristol board, I LOVE it!!! This was my first attempt, of a really crinkley, scrunchy leaf, and I am really quite pleased with it!! (Apart from all the smudges and blotches that got themselves all over the edges!!!

Then I tried this, as a monthly challenge done on deviantart. The idea was to recreate Little Red Riding Hood, I decided to go for a sequel, in which the wolf decides he is so good at catching children and Grannies, he decides to make some money out of it!! There is a recession going on after all!! (Please click on it to see all the detail.)

I have also reopened my facebook page, so please 'like' me!!! http://www.facebook.com/pages/Laura-Thompson-Art/186050654748981

Finished!!!

2011-01-26T14:09:00.000Z

Does anyone else find it really difficult to finish a piece of art? I have been working on and off on this commission since about October, and when it actually came to the deadline, I found I just wanted to add more and more detail. Luckily I have had to stop to give it time to dry before I hand it over, otherwise it might have driven me mad... more mad anyway!!! I have spent quite a few nights recently dreaming about white fluffy clouds in a rather panicky way!! But now I can get back to drawing tiny little creatures!! Woohoo!!

I have also been doing some botanical illustration classes, which my parents got me for Christmas, so far we've just been doing pencil drawings, using lines and shading, but I'm going to do some experimenting with pen and ink soon.

Starting Again

2010-12-29T11:06:00.001Z

Oh dear, this blog writing thing hasn't quite gone as well as I had hoped, but I promise it's not entirely my fault. My computer died in October and I only managed to get it back a couple of days before Christmas. But I have been very busy while it has been away, and apart from going slightly insane not having my Harry Potter audiobooks to listen to, I think I have been pretty productive. I have been working on a commissioned painting of some mountains, which has been quite interesting. It's not the kind of thing I would normally do so it has been a bit of a challenge, but I think it's going alright, I will post a picture when it's completely finished. I have also been working on finishing some pages for my 'hopefully going to be a book'. I think I've got all the really complicated pages done now, so hopefully the rest will be finished pretty quickly. The pictures I've finished so far are of a village hidden away in the jungle, where the Mahwibs, a tribe of tiny people live, at night and during the day, and then one of them having a party, with lots of music and dancing. I love drawing tiny things, so you may have to get pretty close to your computer screen to see all the details properly, for Christmas I even got a magnifying glass light thing on an arm, so my pictures will be getting smaller!! enjoy!! and please do let me know what you think of them :)

I am also very excited to say that my cousin, who has her own very lovely blog finally had a baby boy yesterday afternoon.

Pink tadpoles!!

2010-10-20T10:51:00.001+01:00

Well my plan to have a really busy arty weekend sort of worked!! I went to Kew to draw the plants and things, but it was such a lovely sunny day, we just ended up wandering around mostly!! But I did take lots of photos and got lots of ideas, and that's what's important really. One of the things I did draw was this strange pink plant, with little buds with what looked like eyes!! It didn't really have pupils, but it really really did look like little pink tadpoles with rows of eyes that went all the way around. Some of the buds had burst open into flowers, so it looked like these cute little tadpoles had great big tonguey mouths for catching things that flew too near. I have to admit, I did have to finish my picture once I got home, but the hot house it was in was about 10000 degrees so I think I did pretty well!!

In the evening we went to a Dr Sketchy life drawing class, which was definitely the most unusual one I've ever been to. They made us do things like draw with the wrong hand, and do a scribble which we then had to turn into a drawing!!

Last week I also managed to finish this!!

Busy busy busy!!!!

2010-10-15T23:00:00.000+01:00

Well, I feel like I've failed at this blogging thing a bit!! only 6 posts in + I've already started to neglect it!! I went to a lecture by David McKee yesterday at the lightbox, which was really interesting, he was very inspiring and just the right amount of mad! I spent about an hour and a half in the exhibition before hand and had a sneak preview of David Mckee wandering around, I was listening to one of the recordings at the time and was concentrating so hard on trying to work out if it was him, I managed to get the headphones completely tangled up in my necklace and threw everything I was holding onto the floor, so felt like a bit of an idiot!! ah well, he still signed my book and drew me my very own snow elephant :D
Apart from that I've been practising drawing lots of people, cos I'm a little bit scared of doing that at the moment!! They're not quite ready to be put up here yet, but some might be soon!! I've also, on the advice of Lauren Child, been working on doing some illustrations for old stories, to build up a portfolio, so hopefully one day I might be able to illustrate for other people!! I'm also trying to decide what to do for the Wildlife artist of the year competition, cos that looks quite fun, oh yeah, and I've got a commissioned painting to get started on too!! busy busy busy!! With Nick away though, I'm planning an action packed arting wkend, including a plant drawing trip to kew and a Dr. Sketchy life drawing class. Should be fun, and hopefully I'll have something nice to stick up here by the end of the weekend!! Woohoo!!

Neat and Tidy

2010-10-11T09:34:00.000+01:00

I spent the last few days of last week (yes it took that long!!) tidying up my house. I now have a lovely clear space to get back to work in, I really need more room, but at least now I can actually see my desk and fit my work on there without any danger of it getting squished by clutter. Let's see how long this'll last... Now, enough distractions, back to work.

Potatoes!!!

2010-10-10T16:27:00.000+01:00

This is so exciting, we planted some potatoes aaaaaaaaaages ago and had pretty much given up anything ever happening to them. So as it turned out to be a nice sunny day I thought I'd sort out the dead remains of the plants, when out popped hundreds of potatoes!!! well 23 anyway, but thats pretty good!! woohoo!!! Potato feast tonight I think!! And we've got a whole other bag for next week!!

In our potato harvest we had a little family of snowman potatoes...

And some teeny tiny dwarf ones!! yum yum yum yum yum!!

How exciting!!!

2010-10-08T08:57:00.000+01:00

Yay!! A nice bit of publicity for the Guildford calendar in the Guildford magazine. An online version of this is here. On page 43 for some reason, when in real life it's page 41!! My painting's the third down on the left :D

The post I was meant to do yesterday!!

2010-10-07T10:13:00.001+01:00

Well, my plan to get all my online stuff up to date, was slightly ruined yesterday by my internet connection going completely MAD!! For no reason I can see it kept disconnecting me mid upload, it seems fine today though, so it must have just been having one of those days!! Anyway, I have finally got everything sorted and updated so can get back to some real arting!! If you want to have a look at all my work, my website is here, I also have a deviantart account here which has a bit more stuff on it. But here's a quick sneaky preview of everything I've been up to:

Squirrels

2010-10-05T12:09:00.000+01:00

I went to hobbycraft yesterday, which is always an exciting adventure, but yesterday was especially good. I walked there, through the woods, which were all drippy and rustley with rain that had happened before I'd woken up. Everything smelled nice and Autumny too and there were little fairy toadstools all along the path. On the way home I saw a little squirrel desperately trying to pull up an acorn from where it had been hidden a bit too well!! This gave me an idea for a whole new story and I just did a quick (lightning speed really, compared to my normal working behaviour!!) little sketch, also testing out my new inktense pencils, which are really quite magical!!! I was quite pleased with my speedy work, and although it's not perfect, I'm quite encouraged by how much I seem to be speeding up. Unfortunately, When my Aunt saw the picture, instead of being the nice inoccent person I thought she was, she thought the squirrel was doing something rude. I will have to be more careful next time with squirrel hand and acorn placement. I hope you like it anyway and hopefully there will be more of him soon.

First Blog Post!!!

2010-10-03T21:30:00.000+01:00

Hello! Well, this is quite scary doing my very first blog post ever!! I've been meaning to do this for ages, but I've been so busy doing art I've had no time to write about doing it!! I'm going to try to keep this up to date with what I've been up to, both arty and not... not that much of that goes on!!
Anyway, I finished my degree in technical arts and special effects in 2008 and since then i have worked as a carer, then in an outdoorsy shop, which sadly killed all my creativity and turned me into some kind of zombie; now i have gone back to after school care work for a disabled boy, which I really enjoy and it encourages me to have a break from drawing teenie tiny things and going cross eyed!!
I mostly enjoyed uni, but think it taught me more about what I didn't want to do than what I did, but for my final degree piece I wrote a little story about the creatures I had made, and since leaving I have (very very slowly) been tweaking and prodding it to try to turn it into some kind of childrens picture book. I have only really been making progress with this since I started my last job in May, but I think it's going well. Once I get home tomorrow (spent the day in Canterbury celebrating my sister's birthday and am crashing at my parents after too much food!!) I will photograph my progress and stick it up here for all the world to see!! Feedback would be really appreciated :D Now, here's the real test, I think that's the end of my first little ramble, let's see how long I can keep it up!!