New Artwork on the Map

After putting out a call for artwork in last week’s blog post, I’ve spent some time revisiting my sketchbooks and digging through older posts to see if there was anything I hadn’t yet shared on the map. I found a surprising number of sketches to add (note to self to be more organised in future!) and was delighted when the very talented Paulina Kurzydlowska generously sent in photos of several of her works to be added to the map too. With these new additions, the IOMNJ map is beginning to feel richer and more complete, so let’s take a closer look at what’s been added.

I was so excited when Paulina Kurzydlowska emailed to say she’d like to join the IOMNJ map project. Paulina is studying towards her MA at Manchester Metropolitan University and, as a multidisiplinary artist, uses a variety of media to express herself. Paulina often explores pixelated textures in her work, such as in ‘Stone Pile’ (below), in which acrylic paint is allowed to drip from areas of colour, down the canvas.

‘Stone Pile’ shows a beautiful view of the sea and sky seen from the stony shore of Douglas Beach.

Paulina also sent in a photo of her artwork depicting the lighthouse at the Point of Ayre. In ‘Point of Ayre’ you can see that the drips of paint are formed from paint running both up and down the canvas. I’m not sure which technique is my favourite but they both give a stunning effect.

In both ‘Flower Bed’ and ‘Floral Abstraction’, Paulina has created pixelated renditions of flowers using cross stitch. On her website at https://www.paulinakurzydlowska.com you can see the artwork ‘Flower Bed’ photographed next to the flowers it’s based on, as Paulina connects the abstraction with the real.

There are so many other artworks on Paulina’s website that I highly recommend a look and to follow her on Instagram (@p_kurzydlowskart).

Now on to the bits and bobs that I’ve added from my own stash of sketches and drawings.

First we have a bit of an experiment that I did to see how coloured pencil would behave on acrylic painted onto a MDF panel. I chose a photo that I recently took of a rather incongruous pine cone that was lying on the sand at Blue Point. I really liked how the brushstrokes formed in the acrylic paint were accentuated by the pencil, but it was a little difficult to get some of the colours to work well on top of the acrylic. Rubbing out the pencil was also a challenge at times and the eraser left oily marks on the acrylic. I guess that’s why people don’t tend to draw on acrylic paint often, but I liked some of the effects and learned a lot in the process.

If you’ve followed the blog for a while then you’ll have seen many of the remaining images before. I realised I’d missed uploading quite a few to the map over the last few months and I’ve now added all the images below. Several are quick sketches as these are just as valuable to the map as more refined artworks – so if you have any sketches sitting around at home, we’d be glad to have a photo of them!

The Point of Ayre images were taken from the ‘Michael Harding Christmas Set‘ blog post.

The image above featured in the ‘Choosing from the New Derwent Drawing Range’ post, in which I used the colours from the original set of 24 Derwent Drawing Pencils to sketch scenes from Port e Vullen. This helped me to work out which colours I needed to prioritise buying from the newly released colours in the range.

I also found two photos of sketches from Port e Vullen (above) that I’ve previously posted as part of a reel on my @emmabutlerart Instagram account.

The tree sketches below come from the blog post ‘Trying a New Technique’, in which I, rather reluctantly, tried out stippling as a shading technique and compared it to my usual ink shading style. I did like the effect though, even if stippling drives me mad!

The final image to be added was my small sketch of Peel Castle, taken from the blog post ‘Desert Horizons Triad’ and featuring the three watercolours from this Daniel Smith set.

I’m glad to have finally caught up with adding my blog post drawings to the map and feel inspired to create more, especially of the west coast of the Island, north of Peel, as we currently don’t have many artworks of that area. Many, many thanks to Paulina and all the IOMNJ map contributors for your generosity – we really couldn’t take this project anywhere without you! I’ll be busy drawing, painting and creating lesson plans to build IOMNJ for Education. To find out more about this exciting stage of the project see last week’s blog post and keep following the blog for updates.

Happy sketching!

Emma