A very imaginative and colourful piece today by student Lise Couture who submitted this for an exercise on the Drawing and Painting Diploma course. We love all of the bold colours and strong shapes of the buildings and windows, particularly the warm light inside the windows too. The deep dark background colours to set everything off beautifully. The shape and composition of the piece is truly inspired!

Michael Ilsley completed and passed the coloured pencil drawing with flying colours . We have added some of his work below for students to view. We are particularly in awe of the squash and pumpkin drawing below, so many wonderful shapes, colours and contours that it really draws the eye in. The amount of detail is incredible. All of Michael’s work is stunning and we are thrilled that he enjoyed his time on the course and has produced such amazing artwork whilst doing so.

If you would like to receive a roundup of all of our blog posts once a week to keep you inspired in your inbox, why not sign up to our newsletter. You can access our sign up at the top of our page. If you are a London Art College student and you would like your artwork featured here, drop us a line at any time.

We all have some onions and garlic lurking in our kitchen somewhere. Whether it be onions in the bottom of our salad draw in the fridge or garlic in a very beautiful garlic pot adorning your kitchen. What ever you can find, we would love to see it!

Draw it, paint it, sketch it! Both together, separately or just the one. You choose! You can cut the onion open, peel off some of the layers, even arrange it on a wooden chopping board with a kitchen knife. The choice is yours and the options are endless!

Use your creativity and artistic interpretation to produce a unique piece of art – and tell us all about it too! Have fun!!

Post your work on our Facebook Group or email it to us for inclusion on our blog later this week.

Inspiration
Eliot Hodgkin (1905 – 1987) created some incredible paintings of onions and garlic which we hope will give you some inspiration.

All of the photos we post on our London Art College Weekend Challenges are copyright free. Feel free to use the artwork you produce however you wish. If you would like your artwork posted here on our blog, email it to Melanie at techsupport@londonartcollege.co.uk. If you have any Weekend Challenge requests let us know too! Best of luck and happy drawing and painting!

Welcome to this week blog post all about the wonderful artwork from the art challenge all about reflections in a mirror. We have been sent a wide range of very creative pieces of art which i hope you all enjoy viewing below.

Mila’s pear reflection pastel drawing is very impressive. Very cleverly called ‘Pearing into the Mirror’, Mila has added intense colours and tones in the pears themselves and diffused their reflection in the mirror slightly to allow it to recede. Absolutely superb!

Magdalena’s chicken posing in front of it’s reflection is so bright and colourful, we love it! The chicken looks quite shocked to see itself doesn’t it!

Huzete has taken much care and attention with his self portrait with reflection along with his mug, rendered in charcoal. A wonderful piece of artwork, well done Huzete!

Pauline has cleverly portrayed her cat Abby looking at her reflection in a mirror. As Pauline as said below, we agree, Abby does look a little like Tom Kitten! To go along with the animal theme Vera has similarly portrayed her rabbit in front of a mirror too. So very sweet!

Isabel has created a very ingenious illustration of a cat in front of a mirror ..but if you look closer, the mirror image cat is wearing a crown!

Finally we have Audrey’s cartoons which make us smile every week – keep up the great work Audrey!!

We hope you enjoy viewing the artwork this week and stay tuned for next weeks challenge!

If you would like to receive a roundup of all of our blog posts once a week to keep you inspired in your inbox, why not sign up to our newsletter. You can access our sign up at the top of our page. If you are a London Art College student and you would like your artwork featured here, drop us a line at any time.

We have three amazing cartoons today by student Veviene Wallace who is studying with John Byrne on the Cartooning Diploma Course. Anyone who is familiar with the London Art College and its tutors will immediately recognise the cartoon of John Byrne below. Veviene has captured him perfectly and we are sure that John was very impressed!

We also throughly enjoyed viewing Veviene’s second cartoon showing a chap enrolling onto one of our courses. We are thrilled to view Veviene’s cartoons and hope that they make you smile too!

If you would like to receive a roundup of all of our blog posts once a week to keep you inspired in your inbox, why not sign up to our newsletter. You can access our sign up at the top of our page. If you are a London Art College student and you would like your artwork featured here, drop us a line at any time.

Yesterday was a red letter day when I received my Certificate from the London Art College.  After months of working with Polly O’Leary I was thrilled to see I had gained a distinction.   This was only made possible with her amazing input:  her thorough, detailed and helpful comments to each assessment and unending encouragement made the whole journey such a joy.

I learned many new things while on the course, not least not to trust my own eye sight and to measure things!  And having been forced, a million years ago, to take O’level art a year early “to get it out of the way” and just scraping a pass, it has made me realise you are never too old to have a go at trying new things!

I do hope if anyone is considering the course, this will inspire them to have a go. They will be so glad to have done so!

With very best wishes to all at the London Art College,

Angela.

If you would like to receive a roundup of all of our blog posts once a week to keep you inspired in your inbox, why not sign up to our newsletter. You can access our sign up at the top of our page. If you are a London Art College student and you would like your artwork featured here, drop us a line at any time.

I’ve always wanted to draw and paint seriously, however, other life’s priorities always seemed to get in the way. That’s why I’m so pleased that I took the plunge and enrolled on the Painting and Drawing Course.

I’m finding this course is really helping me to focus and it’s stretching my imagination and abilities, hopefully, to its full potential.

The tutor, Alan Dedman, has really encouraged me with his comments on my assignments. The first drawing of Jug and Brushes was an assignment. The theme was abundance.  I seemed to have an abundance of brushes, not that I use them all! So I set up a still life of them.  As I was sketching it out, I realised that I could take it further and make it a bit more interesting by including my drawing board and my hand drawing the drawing.  

My second drawing is of a local junk shop. This assignment really stretched my capabilities, but I enjoyed every minute of it.

The third drawing is my favourite assignment so far. The flower theme. I chose poppies as they’re my favourite flower, and gave it a WW1 theme.

If you would like to receive a roundup of all of our blog posts once a week to keep you inspired in your inbox, why not sign up to our newsletter. You can access our sign up at the top of our page. If you are a London Art College student and you would like your artwork featured here, drop us a line at any time.

This weekends challenge is all about objects or things reflecting in a mirror. You can choose anything to set in front of your mirror, try to portray some of the background and surrounding area too.

There will be a lot of things at play here from distortion to variations in colour. Also try to note is it is the same tone in the mirror or is it darker or perhaps lighter in the reflection? It is slightly more blurred or out of focus? Perhaps you want the objects in front to be in focus and the mirrored version behind to be slightly little less defined and secondly in the artwork – or vice versa! This one will definitely get you thinking.

You can be as creative as you would like, there are so many options. We have added a few photos below for inspiration. If you have any questions about this challenge, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!

Post your work on our Facebook Group or email it to us for inclusion on our blog later this week.

All of the photos we post on our London Art College Weekend Challenges are copyright free. Feel free to use the artwork you produce however you wish. If you would like your artwork posted here on our blog, email it to Melanie at techsupport@londonartcollege.co.uk. If you have any Weekend Challenge requests let us know too! Best of luck and happy drawing and painting!

If you would like to receive a roundup of all of our blog posts once a week to keep you inspired in your inbox, why not sign up to our newsletter. You can access our sign up at the top of our page. If you are a London Art College student and you would like your artwork featured here, drop us a line at any time.

Welcome to this weeks Halloween Challenge. I hope that you aren’t too scared looking at the amazing artwork on offer this week. Particuarly Magdalena’s ink artwork – incredible!! Our students must have had a lot of fun completing this challenge. A great theme revealed on Halloween too!

Readers must scroll to the bottom to view all of the artwork as a special mention to Julie Smalley who created three images for this challenge which all work together beautifully! Very clever, well done Julie!

Happy Halloween to everyone!!!

Huzete
We Chinese also like Halloween especially for the children, because of candy and funny makeup. When I think about this topic, I would like add some humour and horror elements in my drawing.  There are some classic horrible zombies in Qing dynasty clothes in the old Hong kong movie, these Zombies are as horrible and funny as ghosts and witches. I like Hong kong movie, so I choose this kind of scene. A Qing dynasty TV show named is popular months ago. The costume are fantastic and glory. So I download a poster and adjust it to to be Halloween theme.

Here are some Halloween illustrations. Fountain pen line art with digital colour. The prancing pumpkin was done earlier in Oct, but the owl was done this weekend. Marc Davis

Julie Smalley
Innocent members of the pumpkin public slashed with cold, hard bladework… Jack O’Lantern smiles! Not so scary after all!

If you would like to receive a roundup of all of our blog posts once a week to keep you inspired in your inbox, why not sign up to our newsletter. You can access our sign up at the top of our page. If you are a London Art College student and you would like your artwork featured here, drop us a line at any time.

We are absolutely thrilled and delighted to announce this years winner and runner up of our London Art College 2019 art competition. The winner is Claire D’Arcy and the runner up is Olga Polianska. We have added both pieces of artwork below along with some text written by each student. We are so pleased for both students and we hope that our viewers enjoy reading about their artwork in more detail. You can find all of the entries and runner up on our website too – Competition Page.

Winner – Claire D’Arcy

I am both shocked, and very honoured to have won the student art competition 2019! Particularly in a year when I had browsed the entries and thought they were of such a high standard that the possibility that I could win, had never been further from my mind. The level of talent and skill amongst the entrants is, whilst a little intimidating, also very motivating and has made me want to study more of the courses on offer.

The winning piece was my second submission on the Illustrating Children’s Books Diploma, called ‘Sebastian’s Sink City’, about a boy who finds another world beneath his kitchen sink. The piece is mostly digital, drawn in Photoshop with a brush on a dissolve setting with a slight blur to give textured lines somewhat similar to pencil. It was drawn freehand using a Wacom tablet on a Mac. Most of my work combines more traditional techniques (ink, watercolour and pencil) with digital. In this piece there is extra textural depth added using a paper texture on a base layer with colours overlaid with layer effects, and also use of softer air brushed elements for lighting glows and clouds. I used a 50’s inspired colour palette (which I keep to the edge of my piece as I’m drawing so that I can sample it, and not stray too far from it) and decided to carry this 50’s theme through into the logo designs on the products.

The course is definitely pushing my comfort zone and encouraging me to try varying techniques but this particular piece did play to my passions by asking for high detail with a cartoony edge. It also allowed me to work from a fairly pushed perspective which is another quality that I find myself returning to a lot. 

Its difficult to say how long the piece took as I was probably working on it for a month, but had it been 8 hour days I’d guess about a week or so. Most people will empathise when I say, I’m not usually very satisfied with my pieces! But with this one I actually was pretty happy with the finished image and there are definitely elements of this that I would like to revisit and explore further. It wont surprise anyone to hear that I am from a digital background, working as a creative retoucher in advertising (largely doing comp work, combining different photographic elements such as packs or cars in a single scene) although I do regularly practice life drawing and try and keep pen/pencil on paper practice in.

The course has been extremely good for streamlining focus and providing goal motivation, giving both constructive and speedy feedback whilst not feeling too overwhelming, not to mention total indulgence in creating for children, where you are challenged to push your imagination to meet theirs. I am juggling the course with working freelance and parenting 2 young children so this win has come at a good time to encourage some refocussing on the current brief that I’m wrestling with, ‘The Cow Who Went Looking For a Friend’.

Runner up – Olga Polianska

«Metropolis Touch» 

I believe that every person is belong to some place – the place¸ where it can feel the harmony of it’s soul, the inspiration and ability to share it with others. The piece «Metropolis Touch» inspired by this feeling. This girl  belongs to the metropolis, its bright lights, the fleetingness of time, which reflects her inner world.

I tried to convey this by the light blurry features that symbolise the rapid rhythm of the city and the human ability to flow into it. I use oil on canvas, the pallet knife and a brush for this painting. I am incredibly happy to be a part of the creative team of our college students and to take part in it’s artistic life. I wish inspiration to everyone!

Olga Polianska

If you would like to receive a roundup of all of our blog posts once a week to keep you inspired in your inbox, why not sign up to our newsletter. You can access our sign up at the top of our page. If you are a London Art College student and you would like your artwork featured here, drop us a line at any time.