Friday 31 December 2010

Eve Muirhead portrait

Last week I was asked to do a painting of top Scottish curler, Eve Muirhead, for a fundraising campaign.
The painting, as seen below, is watercolour-on-card and measures roughly 205mm x 190mm (unframed).


Exciting news about the fundraising campaign and the painting itself will be coming soon, but I won't reveal these until full details have been confirmed: So stay tuned!

Thanks go to the commissioner (to be revealed at a later date), and to Bob Cowan at the excellent Skip Cottage Curling blog [http://skipcottagecurling.blogspot.com] for providing the reference imagery.

Tuesday 28 December 2010

'Alternative' outdoor curling photos

Visitors to Loch Leven this past week may well have witnessed a rare sight - Scottish curlers playing on the frozen waters of the Loch: But there have been some more peculiarities on the ice recently, as you'll see from some of my images below.









Friday 24 December 2010

Curling-inspired artworks

I started working as an ice-technician at Kinross Curling Rink at the end of September, and have since created a few unusual curling-inspired artworks, as I'll showcase below...

It all started with this year's early snowfall and my first snow sculpture - a rather crude little curling stone that I built with my bare hands at the end of my evening shift on Saturday 27 November.


But a couple of weeks and much more snowfall later, I had a second, and much more successful, attempt at sculpting out of snow. This time I had much more snow at my disposal; as well as a snow shovel, teaspoon, and gloves - all of which made the sculpting much easier than before. After spending about two hours spread throughout my evening shift of Thursday 9 December, my second attempt at snow sculpting was completed to a much better standard. As you'll see below, I had now created a much larger snow-sculpted curling stone, which raised a few eyebrows over the following days!




Onto my more conventional artworks, and earlier this week I created an amusing photoshopped-image of the curling rink manager involved in an unusual ice accident...
...Since I published this image on the Kinross Curling Rink facebook page, it has received a terrific response and attracted several new 'facebook fans': It has even been spread across other social networks by the management at the Green Hotel (which owns the rink).

Tuesday 21 December 2010

Some landscape practice

Here are some quick landscape sketch/painting tests that I made late last month, but forgot to upload.

Majorca

Hamilton Mausoleum

Edinburgh North Bridge