Category: Looser Work - Cavanagh Art

Okay, so I totally missed July

12/8/2021

For 2 reasons: 1) I've been preoccupied editing our June Holiday videos and; 2) I totally forgot about the website. Apologies.

Okay so let's start with the artwork then; which requires us going back to May:

St Pope Paul VI.

First off is this watercolour of Saint Pope Paul the Sixth that I did as a Memorial Card for a friend's Priestly Ordination at the end of May this year (2021).

Pentecost 2021.

Then we skip back a week, or so, to Pentecost 2021 for this quick, unplanned sketchbook drawing. I'd been pulling my hair out earlier struggling to do something for Pentecost digitally and it wasn't working out, and then just before, say, 10 or 11 o'clock that night I made this with a black, blue and red ballpoint pens with text highlighters as well. You don't always need fancy stuff to make art.

St Charbel Makhlouf.

And now come to the missing blog month of July with this watercolour of St Charbel Makhlouf, Maronite monk and priest, and a patron of Lebanon.

At the moment I don't know if, or how long, this "pure watercolour" (ie, no ink outlines or such) style is going to stay. I think, on reflection, that it came about for 2 reasons: 1) during a conversation with a family friend whose eyesight is not what it once was, I realised that some of my more ink-heavy pictures (such as St Joseph and the infant Jesus) had no real clarity.

St Joseph and the infant Jesus (2020).

I knew what I was looking at, but someone with bad eyesight couldn't untangle the mess of black ink from the sometimes equally dark watercolours; and 2) I'd been watching some watercolour demonstrations on Youtube (link here) and there was one where the instructor painted an picture of Santa Claus, for a Christmas Card, in with just Red, Yellow Ochre and, I think, Payne's Grey or Black. So that was an added impetus to change my style: I wanted to also try painting a face with just watercolour. And that is the condensed set of reasons why I painted Paul VI in watercolour (see above).

Now as I mentioned earlier in this post, I've been, and I am still working, on editing and uploading our June Holiday to South Australia videos to Youtube. If you want to see where we went, I've put the first (in no way chronological) video at the bottom of this blog post. As of 12 July 2021, 12:49pm, there are 3 South Australia videos up on my Youtube channel (link here), with much more to come.

So until next time (barring me forgetting again!) God bless and stay safe.

A Quick Digital Picture

4/5/2021

Blossom – Tram Scene

Just something I put together tonight. It took me about an hour, an hour-and-a-half, maybe? I didn't really bother to time how long I spent on it.

Recently I had a chance to ride on the Sydney Light Rail network to Randwick for the funeral of a family friend, so perhaps that is what inspired this picture. The telephone box is based on a preserved example at the Sydney Tramway Museum at Loftus. Other than those two things I've also had a few stray thoughts about Japanese paintings rattling around in my head. That about it really.

I have ideas of maybe making this into a 3D animation, but I don't know if it isn't anything more than just a pipedream at the moment.

Stay safe and God bless.

— — — — —
Digital Painting in a limited palette.

Late Night Sketching

20/4/2021

Lately I've been participating in an online tuition course for Blender 3D, which has been a good if somewhat challenging experience. The challenging part being trying to work in a group with many other students in multiple different time zones (and the associated late nights that come with it), but I'll talk about that more in a later post. Sometime in May. Hopefully.

Below is the sketch that I made last night to release some of my creative frustrations:

Christ Pantocrator (2021).

I just needed to do something religious to make up for my recent lack of any such artworks.
The original Christ Pantocrator (roughly translated as "All-Mighty" in Greek), that is the inspiration of this image, is one of the first icons depicting Jesus in early history of the Church, and remains to this day a very important image in the Eastern Orthodox Church.
It depicts the two natures of Christ, being both fully God and fully human, through the different sides of His face.

Below are the mirrored composites of the left and right sides of my rough sketch:

Pantocrator Blessing, Mirrored.

Pantocrator Gospels, Mirrored.

Honestly, I had no real plan about how to mirror this image, I just had the vaguest of recollections of what a Pantocrator Icon should look like and I went from there. So I sketched in out with blue ballpoint pen and went over it with a water-based black marker, and added colour with text highlighters. In hindsight I really should've either scanned or at least taken a photo of the under drawing, but I decide to let it go and just keep on drawing with the black marker.

The one real difference between this sketch and the Icon it's based on, is that the real Pantocrator doesn't have the wounds of Christ in it, as far as I know.

So, until the muse next takes me or I need another outlet to create, God bless and stay safe.

Year of St Joseph – Part 1

8/4/2021

Back in December 2020 Pope Francis proclaimed a Year of St Joseph (8 Dec 2020 – 8 Dec 2021) for the whole Catholic Church.
More information about it can be found here, and about prayer to St Joseph here.

Below are the first 3 images of St Joseph that I painted in the Year of St Joseph proper:

"St Joseph and the infant Jesus." The starting point for this image was the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 1, Verse 20; which was one of the prompts from the #Adventus202One art challenge during Advent 2020.
This image in not exactly of the moment described in Matthew's Gospel, but rather of a moment after Jesus' birth when St Joseph fell in love/accepted Jesus as his son for the 2nd or 3rd time.
Also the main inspiration for this image was the idea: if St Joseph had a beard before Jesus was born, how much of it would have been left after Jesus' toddler year (ie. pulling part of Joseph's beard out)?

"The Holy Innocents/The Flight into Egypt." This image was also another inspiration from #Adventus202One, this time being close to the scripture reference: Matthew, Chapter 2, Verse 13–15.
The inspiration for this was thinking about how the recently departed Holy Innocents may have processed with the Holy Family in their flight into Egypt from Herod's persecution, all under the protection St Michael the Archangel.

I just sketched this one rather quickly on some coloured paper and inked it with a calligraphy marker and text highlighters, because I just wanted to get it done and I didn't care how I got it done.
I'd been getting sick of doing so many watercolour pictures in a row and I wanted a break from that medium.

"St Joseph, Protector of the Holy Family." The title for this one basically explains all there is to this picture. Showing St Joseph as the Protector and Shield surround the Jesus and Mary.
Although I must not forget to acknowledge and appreciate @awememento's influence upon this particular painting of St Joseph and the Holy Family.
And her Etsy page can be found here.

Until next time, Happy Easter!

What happened after inktober

3/2/2021

First off I must warn you that this is hardly going to be either a concise or chronologically correct catch-up of all my artwork from the end of October, 2020.

Well, with that brief explainer out of the way here is (below) the final painting from my #CATHOLinktober (2020).

"Title of the Blessed Virgin Mary" was the 31st and last prompt of the CATHOLinktober challenge. As it turned out I wasn't the only artist participating who chose to paint "Our Lady, Star of the Sea".
Before asking God's intercession and throwing a Miraculous Medal, I had no idea which Title of the Blessed Virgin to paint. As such was rather stressed out trying to figure out what the final picture was going to be, but God did proved us an answer.

After I had finished CATHOLinktober, I was commissioned to do a painting of "Our Lady of Guadalupe" for the iWitness 2020 Conference,, in a style similar to what I done previously with "Our Lady, Star of the Sea".

"Our Lady of Guadalupe" is the patron for the iWitness Conference which happens starts on the Thursday before the Third Sunday of Advent, and finishes on that same sunday. I had attended previously attended the 2019 Conference, which had been my first iWitness. During the whole of 2020, the thought of meeting up with previous friends and known face at iWitness had been one of the few lights of hope during the year, and I along with everyone who went to iWitness, as well as the organising team were relieved when it was able to happen under NSW restrictions. Thank you God!

In the above gallery are my photos of the 2020 iWitness Booklet I took when I got home on Guadete (Rose Candle) Sunday.

The iWitness Conference began as a grass-roots way for Catholic youth of Sydney and beyond to keep alive and renew their faith in God and grow deeper in the traditions of the Catholic Church in the afterglow of World Youth Day 2008, Sydney, Australia. It is run by an amazing team of dedicated Catholic youth for the youth, it has been held (as far as I am aware) every year since 2008, and have staked out the 4 days before and including the 3rd Sunday of Advent as their usual set dates. Together they bring in a variety of Catholic speakers to talk on a variety of themes centered around the main theme of that particular year. Such notable speakers have included: Archbishop of Hobart, Julien Porteous; Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney, Richard Umbers; Robert Haddad; Monica Doumit; and many other known and lesser known speakers, priests, missionaries, religious orders and many more.

To God be all the glory!

more from the 52 week illustration challenge

28/2/2017

Here are my efforts for week 4 through to week 8 of the 2017 challenge. #illo52weeks

Week 4 : Ode to a favourite children's book
For this one I went with The Magic Pudding.

Week 5: Peacock
For this one I did things backwards for me, and did the watercolour first and the ink last.

Week 6: Garden
This one had a Japanese influence on it.

Week 7: Botanical
This is the life cycle of a plant given to someone with brown thumbs...
Healthy plant....sick plant...dead plant.

Week 8: Pastel
I'm not fond of getting pastel dust everywhere, so I went for pastel colours instead.
Again, to shake things up a little, this one had the watercolour first and the ink second. The sign says 'No Picnics' and along the river bank we have a boat and a bear doing a spot of fishing.

Once I get the idea for what to draw to suit the Week's word or phrase, the challenge is fun. Getting the idea is normally the tricky part.

My plan is to post each Week's challenge to Twitter, via @VJCavanagh and then to put groups of them into a blog-post at regular intervals.

fiery fred

30/8/2016

I am closer to submitting the third set of artworks for assessment to the London Art College's correspondence course D6 Illustrating Children's Books.

Of the set, the second part is a bigger project, is a vignette of a young dragon who has yet to control his fiery breath.

The brief went something like this: Capture Fred's look of baffled horror as he sets fire to a thatched cottage roof. Audience is for fairly young children, but will also appeal to older children if enough humour is present. Use very bright colours, loose paint work, and thick black line work. Use portrait orientation and despite the chaos make it easy for a child to decode what is happening in the illustration.

So the first step was a few practice sketches to work out what Fred should look like:

And a practice go at the composition of the image, especially the relationship between the dragon and the cottage:

Here is the pencil outline for the vignette:

And some of the initial washes, starting with our friend Fred:

Some more washes along, and the vignette shape can be seen, and the background is taking shape:

Now to add in some more layers of colour and to intensify the fires poor Fred has lit:

The next thing is to add the thick soft pencil, while somehow keeping it both loose and bold:

The last step is doing some clean-up with Photoshop:

And Fiery Fred is done. Just like the first part of this unit, using this method of building up a picture is well outside my comfort zone. I'm far more comfortable using pen ink for the backbone of the image instead of watercolour.

silly animals

26/8/2016

I am getting close to submitting the third set of artworks for assessment to the London Art College's correspondence course D6 Illustrating Children's Books.

Of the set, the first part is a smaller project, outline drawings of animals doing silly things.

The brief went something like this: Make 3 or 4 loose bold outline drawings of animals doing silly things. Use bold and simple shapes. Draw with thick, soft pencil or crayon, and use a different primary colour for each animal. Add a contrasting colour for interest. When dry add more line detail. Keep your audience of young children in mind.

This exercise was well outside my comfort zone, because I love using close ink detail and loose work does not come naturally.

Here are the initial ideas I had, in my usual style:

I had to go much larger, and with thicker pencil. You can see here my pencil tests and the development of the horse, kangaroo and kookaburra ideas.

The next sketches explore the dancing bird and the kookaburra further:

And some more ideas, with the emu, kangaroo, horse, echidna and kookaburra.

The next step was to give it a go on good cartridge paper. Here's a progress scan.
We have the horse with the top hat, (blue with orange contrast); the dancing bird/emu, (yellow with purple contrast) and the kookaburra listening to music (red with green contrast).

Now to add the extra pencil detail.

I didn't want to go further and ruin them, so I decided not to redo them on heavier paper. But I did try to clean them up with Photoshop.

I think I am happy with the final result. The more I look at them, the happier I get.

So I decided to explore the thick pencil style a bit further and used it for my Father's Day picture. Firstly, here's the pencil sketch:

And trying 'to keep it loose', here's the first wash.

Another set of washes, and the image will get clearer:

And adding in some more line work, and a bit more colour detail:

With the final touches in Photoshop, it is now ready to go on this year's batch of Father's Day cards.

So all in all, a very interesting exercise/project, despite all my initial misgivings.