The Crow, a winter time art project …..
The crows
A winters art project 2020/2021
Nigel Borrington
The Crows
A winter time art project, Digital painting created using a Wacom art tablet and taken from a photographic study of our local landscape and the Crows that have made it their winter home.
I feel today’s painting is a big step closer to the final paintings I am hoping to create, I like this composition much more than my last painting and I feel that I am now starting to represent the crows and the movement they create in our winter fields much better….
Winter Art Project 2020/21, Crows in a winter Landscape …..
Winter Art Project 2020
Crows in a Winter sky
Digital art
Nigel Borrington
Charcoal drawing – A tribute to the work of Trevor Grimshaw …….
Digital Charcoal drawing
In the style of Trevor Grimshaw
Following my post yesterday, I have started working with my PC based art application ( Krita ) in order to use its charcoal drawings tools to recreate as best as I can the landscapes style of Trevor Grimshaw.
Tomorrow I will give myself time to work at my desk with actual physical charcoal and chalk, I do feel very much however that a digital method of producing a work of art is just as valid in 2020, as working with physical materials, every mark made on my drawing above is made manually using a Wacom art tablet with an art pen. I often use this method of working to work out just how best to construct drawings and painting, when later it comes to sitting down with a sheet of physical paper or canvas.
February evening at Beach : Duncannon Beach, Co.Wexford, Ireland
Duncannon Beach, County Wexord, Digital painting,
Nigel Borrington 2020
February evening at Duncannon Beach
The light by the last wave lingers on fronds
of seaweed fingering wave-wet rocks where
brim-filled pools overflow before they
empty when the water surges then sucks,
surges, then sucks.
glistening, sun warmed, lit by the last
light of day while slow footsteps meander
with the gentle waves rhythms, rising, falling,
so calming in my ears, that crest falling
with an almost silent swish, hearbeat’s grace.
All troubles tumbled away calmed first,
washed by light where the last wave lingers.
Digital Drawing – Winter in the Hedgerow, December 2018.
Digital Drawing
Tone Brushes, MyPaint with Wacom Pro M Tablet
Winter Hedgerow
Nigel Borrington December 2018
Digital Art work – A December Sunset – Callan, county Kilkenny
Kilkenny Sunset
December 2016
Nigel Borrington
A December Sunset – Callan, county Kilkenny
Often when out for an evening walk at this time of year the sunsets across our local fields can be just amazing to view, the sun is low in the sky all day long in December when compared to a mid summers day. With out getting to detailed this changes the angle of the sun and it seems to make the last few moments of day light last longer. This along with the mist and early frosts that can sit of the fields, haging above the hedgerows is just great to see 🙂
This painting is created using a PC application called mypaint, I have spent the last few weeks doing my best to get up to speed with how to make the best use of it, at first just using some of the drawing tools and ink pens but as you can see – I hope that I am now getting more use to the painting and colour tools..
The paint is posted the moment I feel its finished , I very much like the idea of this as it helps me to close the processes involved and to stop me coming back and over working anything. Its a little hard to describe but its a great feeling to start and finish a painting in one session and then be able to learn when you feel that you have finished !!!
Painted Skys – MyPaint
Painting Skys – MyPaint
Earlier this week I posted about MyPaint a Windows and Linux application used to produce ( Art work , digital Paintings and Graphic Designs)
Since then I have been able to spend a little time using this application to paint some sky’s using some photographs as source material. I feel that its always a good idea to practice areas of a painting and sky’s are great fun to work on by themselves.
MyPaint has a full selection of artists brushes available that are capable of reproducing such painting styles as (oil, Acrilic and watercolour), I have found the watercolour brushes and tools such as the sponge very flexible, especially when you want to blend areas of a painting together and produce some soft area.
Another area I have worked with is the colour palettes, there are many great palettes available as standard in MyPaint, I am however more use to working with artist colours from a tube and wanted to recreate some of these colours digitally.
So by downloading the Winsor & Newton Artists colours palette as a tiff file and then creating my own palette by using the colour eye proper selection tool and the tiff file I have now produced a palette that matches the one I am a little more use to working with. This palette is only a starting point and I can ether edit or added to it as needed.
As for mixing colours using this palette as a starting point, I am experimenting with the available scratch pad window along with the palette knife and smudge tools to see just how well colours can be mixed.
Digital painting and artwork with mydraw
During the weekend, I started to use an application called (my-paint), to help with some of the art work that I am starting to work on again.
I first used this application last year and along with a Wacom tablet , I have its great fun to work with.
I love the drawing control the tablet can give, almost as good as using a real pencil or brush and this combined with the pens and brushes available in my-paint, you can make a great start learning line control and layering of both tone and colour.
New paintings , Digital art work
Painting from the Irish Bogs.
Digital art work : Nigel Borrington
First paintings for over a year :
Its over a year since I did any painting, I have been working with my photography so much, but as its the start of a new year , I felt a real need to paint again.
This painting is the start of a project I will work on , based on the upland bogs of Kilkenny and Tipperary.
It based on a series of photographic images from these great places.
Photoshop : Producing a painting from a photograph
Nikon D7000, 18-200mm lens, iso 100
Grange Crag walk, Co Tipperary
Landscape photography: Nigel Borrington
A very different post today, For many weeks I have just posted photographs and it remains my main interest here but I just wanted for a little time to talk about Abode photo-shop and an application called My-paint.
Art has always been of a big interest to myself and I view all my images as a form of artistic production, some people don’t see photographs as art they are to much of a completed process or they don’t see any artistic process involved in the taking of images using a camera. To a point I do get this view, however I think the speed and directness of a camera can offer results that a painter or an artist with a pencil will not capture.
Here I post some result from working with a photograph in adobe camera raw and then photo-shop, in order to produce more developed results. In the first of the images below I have converted the photograph into black and white then using photo-shops levels and curves tools I have increased the brightness and contract until only the outlines of the trees exists.
In the third image down I have taken one of these black and white images and over painted it with photo-shops brush tool adding layers of different colour.
The last image and painting is taken from the second black and white image loading it into an application called My-paint, this is a free painting tool and is packed with great brush and pen tools. Using it I have created lots of layers of different colours and opacities in order to produce the final result.
Nigel Borrington 
The places I remember, all my life ……
Altrincham, Greater Manchester, UK
Digital art work
I spent the early years of my life growing up in Altrincham in the greater Manchester area of northwest England. It was in these years, between the 1970’s and the late 1980’s that marked the end of the industrial age for the town.
This period left much of our local area with factories that became redundant and closed, some locations included empty land where factories once stood, a lot of these locations existed beside the Bridgewater canal.
I am currently working on a visual art project that is calling on my memories of these locations, working both digitally and with charcoal on paper, creating some compositions that reflect on this period of my life, places from my childhood. I am in my 50’s so this is not easy at times but I feel its a great exercise in visual storytelling…
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April 28, 2021 | Categories: art work, charcoal, Comment, Digital art work, Digital art work, drawings, Forgotten places, History, manchester, Solo images, Story telling gallery | Tags: Altrincham, charcoal, digital art, drawing, History, Industrial landsacpes, Industry, manchester, mypaint, Nigel Borrington, wacom | 1 Comment