Kat Johnston

Tag: studio

  • Sketch: I know something you don’t know.

    Kat Johnston Sketch: I'm not quite sure what she's thinking... but it might be something along the lines of 'I know something you don't know.'

    This is my sketch for today. Since I am going to be spending most of the day cleaning, I thought that I had best get it out of the way nice and early! I’m not quite sure what this lovely lass is trying to say, but from her expression I am assuming it is something along the lines of, “I know something you don’t know.” It is as if she has a wonderfully decadent, juicy secret she is keeping just for the pleasure of calling it her own.

    So anyhow, my project of today is to get my studio clean, in addition to the rest of the house.It wasn’t as if the studio was in a particularly huge mess before, by the way. I just like to do a big sort every now and again to get things neat, tidy and findable.

    Supplies upon supplies have already been sorted and stored, tucked into individual boxes for different types of things. Sewing supplies in one, yarn and knitting in another… a drawer here for paints, and another for brushes, palette knives, and other assorted things with which to apply paint. So really, the major parts are done! Now it is just all those last finicky touches to put the finishing polish on the room, and I can finally relax.

  • Photo/Painting: Symbolism, anyone? Oh, and a few bunnies too!

    Kat Johnston Photo: artistic suicide clean-up… I’m not sure whether it’s symbolic, or just a desire for something different.

    So today I got up and popped straight down to the studio… well… not straight down, but pretty close to it in any case. It was time for a clean-up, a clean-out, and a rearrange. I haven’t gotten to most of it, but I will… I’ve started. It counts.

    One of the things I have resolved to do is pull up the outline. It’s been there for over a year now – it’s rather stubborn… but it will be moved. I think that now is about the time where I go ‘oh lord… note to self, don’t do this again. It looks cool, but it seems that masking tape gets ground further and further into the ground and the adhesive becomes more stubborn the longer it is there and the more it is walked over.’ Ah well… I’ll get there! The cards are already off of the wall (I had playing cards splashed across my wall) and at least the most obvious of artistic debri has been disposed of. Yay!

    So now that you’ve seen that, time to post something a bit more ‘artistic’. I’ve started a little painting – this is the progress of yesterday and today (done in two little bouts). Now I will state this: this is still in progress… not done, nor really all that close to it… we’ll just have to see where this little gentleman leads.

    Kat Johnston painting: bunny is progress… this is the first incarnation of it.

    The first incarnation… I’m loving starting on a black base, and working from there. Building up a base of white to define the figure, you have no idea how much I want to stick with the black and white. I love it. It’s so vivid and raw. I could fix up a few bits from there and quite happily go ‘that’s it!’ But nope… I’ve decreed that this picture will be colour. So the first layers go down.

    Kat Johnston painting: incarnation two… it still has a way to go, methinks, but the first layers are down, at least!

    The first real layer of colour… so far, so good. I feel almost weird showing in-progress shots here – I know that the in-between stages are hardly the best indication of how it’s going to go… but hey, that’s what this blog is for: for showing the good beside the bad, the well polished beside the rough cut.

    Phew! Ok, I think that is about it for now. I have a studio to get back to tidying, and more painting to do a little later. In the meantime, I think I may feast on some seedless green grapes. Wish me luck!

  • In the Studio.

    Kat Johnston - A work in progress is always fun, isn't it?

    I decided that I would throw up a work in progress for you, since I have been throwing up sketches left and right recently. Unfortunately, due to study commitments, the ability to find enough time to go and paint at all has been difficult. Nevertheless, before the work-load got too over the top, I was able to get started on this piece of work.

    A while back, I did a series of artworks which involved a lot of experimentation… some of it worked, some of it didn’t. What I did find during that series, however, was a technique I think I will be coming back to again and again since the results were so ideally perfect that I was literally bouncing up and down clapping my hands after I put the final coat of glaze over the piece. Long story short, the technique is just a particular method of building up colour and producing a fine texture across the work.

    When I discovered this pre-stretched canvas along with all the rest, I knew it was a perfect opportunity to play with something along those lines again. The canvas has a rather pronounced imperfection which makes it unsuitable for ‘regular’ artworks. There is a huge gouge in the smooth surface of the canvas which just makes it unworkable for me (which can’t even be seen by this far-away shot of the canvas… its there, trust me). When I see something like this, however, I can’t help but feel that it is an opportunity to play with it, to turn this imperfection into something beautiful rather than shunning it for marring a perfectly otherwise-useable canvas. Its a canvas that is going to make me work around it, rather than the other way around. Quirky, but fun, because I think we’re going to be challenging each other a bit along the way.