More on colour and landscapes

I have discovered two artists recently, I am usually a late arrival at the queue for jumping on the bandwaggon so excuse me if I am telling you old news.

I am particularly excited about these two as they are landscape artists and they use colour in a very exciting way.

The first is Peter McDermott.  I visited my friends Kate and Phil and they had a mug and a few framed prints of his on their walls.  Peter paints his landscapes in watercolour, here are a collection of beautiful moody paintings of Scotland.  But it is collection of graphic prints that are getting me quite giddy in the spending department.  He has a series of posters inspired by the old fashioned railway posters as I have been. He has done a series of prints of my beloved Scotland and another place very special to Rob and I, the Lake District.

You can buy his work online at a number of outlets, I am currently going silly on bayattic.com. Check out the aviation pieces and his mugs too!

Peter McDermott's Lake District c/o bayattic.com

Peter McDermott's Vulcan c/o bayattic.com

The next artist is a chap I met at the Manchester Christmas markets.  It was a striking limited edition print with a block of bright red that stoppped me in my tracks.  It was a pen line drawing that has been coloured with acrylic.  The drawing is of Old trafford and is part of his series of football grounds.

Jamie B Edwards' Old Trafford

Now, although I did work for MUTV, as did my sister and a couple of friends and my brother in law Andy still does.... I am not really a fan of football.  Having said this, I was very tempted to buy this as it was so striking. I also perhaps should have bought it for Andy or my other brother in law Phil who is a mega fan, as his beautiful son Callum.  I didn't.  I had already bought Phil a shirt, Andy a load of chocolate and Callum well lets just say it has a rotor and a remote control (shhh it's a Christmas surprise).

Anyway, the only people I hadn't yet bought for were Rob's brother Brad and his partner Anna.  Oh what's that you say Jamie? You do City? Brad is a die hard blue, he also appreciates art.  Not entirely sure Anna would be thrilled with football memorabilia adorning her walls, so I chose a framed print of Maine Road a) it's a nostalgia trip for Brad and b) with it already being framed it stands more chance of being hung somewhere :)

I got home and had a nosey at Jamie's website and there is a collection of landscapes too, including my old home village of Marple Bridge.  My favourite is Hurst Spit.

Jamie B Edwards' Hurst Spit 

Get yourself down to the markets, Jamie is there for the run, until the 22nd December.  The range of Football Ground prints are available mounted or framed at a discounted price so snap them up!

Colour and Landscapes - a workshop in development

I love the tourism posters of the 30s.  I have been taking inspiration from well known artsists, Brian Cook, Norman Wilkinson and Tom Gillfinian and trying to decide what to do with them. Local landscapes seemed an obvious choice.

This idea came to me whilst doing my second year group project with Becky, I was producing some simple landscapes for the game that we were designing.  I want to take my own photographs and use graphics packages Photoshop and Illustrator to create digital 'screen prints'.

Here was my first trial. Very basic. This was created in Photoshop, traced a photography by hand using my wacom bamboo pen and tablet and coloured using the fill command, paint bucket and fill gradient tools.

First attempt at digital version of 30s style landscape, used in my 2nd year group project

As you can see the colours are rather basic and in very deliberate blocks, giving the impression of the landscape, rather than the detail.

Here is an example using another method, this time a local sight of Holmcombe Hill and it's tower, looming over my adopted town of Ramsbottom.

This method is again a combination of simple tools in Photoshop. I used the cutout tool in the filter gallery to simplify the image. This dilutes the detail into colour blocks, whilst retaining identifiable elements.

At the top end of the cutout options you can produce some very abstract images, which I love and am exploring in another avenue, but for this stage of the project I am keeping the landscapes recognisable.

I then adjusted the brightness, contrast and tweaked the curves and levels to exaggerate the difference in the colour blocks.

Finally I used the replace colour adjustment to give a wintery feel with some pretty pinks to the whole picture.

Alternative method using cut out filter and replace colour

I am developing a tutorial for my Media Club kids (they won't thank me for referring to them as kids) demonstrating these two different, very simple methods.  I am hoping to practice and perfect my own process of recreating those great Railway Posters.