My name is Natasha Griffiths and I am studying Digital Illustration with tutor Monique. I’m normally a traditional pet portrait artist, pen and paper but I’ve always been really interested in digital art. This Dachshund was my first attempt at any kind of digital art and was drawn for my first assignment. It is so much harder than you expect it to be. Although I absolutely loved it. I was just aiming for it to be slightly realistic. 
Natasha
Digital Illustration

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Nemu Abe has just reached the finishing line of the Drawing and Painting Diploma Course with a Distinction! Nemu is very talented and produced some excellent work throughout the course. Take a look at some of her work below. We wish Nemu the best of luck with her future artwork!

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 our latest weekend challenge artwork! This weeks challenge was to paint or draw a bottle or jug and fill it half or three quarters with a liquid along with a glass with liquid in sitting next to it. We have received some amazing paintings and drawings this week.

First of all we have to congratulate Sheila Brown on not only creating a wonderful painting of her red wine bottle and two glasses called ‘Wine is meant for Sharing’ but we also received a moving version called ‘Whoops, maybe one too many’ and this is a piece of art in itself! We absolutely loved receiving it and found it hilarious. Well done Shiela!!! Top of the class!!

Both Shamina Chowdhury and Tatiana Sukhareva added fruit next to their bottles and jug in their still life set up. The colours in both paintings are absolutely super. We would like to draw our students attention to the way Tatiana has painted her pear. The depth of tone and shadows and beautiful bright highlights are simply out of this world. Congratulations to both students on wonderful paintings.

Audrey always keeps us smiling with her fantastic cartoons and Pauline’s old fashioned lemonade drawing in coloured pencil is beautifully delicate and extremely well draw. Loving the cocktail umbrella too!

Louise Dexter has created a beautiful watercolour called – Gin O’Clock!! We love the attention to detail in the tablecloth too. Very decorative and cleverly painted through the glass tumbler.

Last but not least Gayathri has created a stunning digital painting with atmosphere! Scroll down to see. Gayathri said ‘Sending digital work on the theme glasses/bottles. It’s a painting of a glass tea light with soft light. On the background, you could see two containers which have been defined with the soft light from the tea light’.

Congratulations to all students – stay tuned for our next challenge coming Friday!!

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.

My name is Julia Meekin and I have just completed the Pastel Painting course with tutor Monika Cilmi. From time to time over the years, I have found time every so often to practice art, mostly in watercolors.   I bought a box of 30 pastels on sale about 30 years ago and they sat in the drawer until I took them out two years ago and started ‘playing’, trying out landscapes.   I like pastels, because they really give me contact with the medium itself  and the paper, with the different styles of marks and blending.

I learned a whole lot from the LAC Pastel certificate course and highly recommend it for any level. I came closer to conquering my fear of a portrait not being recognized as a portrait!  I would like to become more proficient with animal and human portraits, and look forward to taking more LAC courses!

Julia Meekin
Pastel Painting Course

Today we have a lovely selection of artwork from Elena Peres, a student who completed our Pastels Course. Elena was able to experiment with a variety of subjects, colours and genres on the pastel course. You can too! Why not drop along to our website and view our Pastels Course. You can enrol today and work on the course in your own time. If you have any questions just let us know!

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Student Emma Jane Rosenberg completed the Pet Portraits Course and has created some absolutely superb pieces as you can see below. A lot of work has gone into each and every painting.

We particularly like the cat pastel below, with it’s depth of tone and rich colours, the whole piece really gives a very realistic feel.

Equally the double dog portrait second down is absolutely superb. Both dogs look and feel as though they are sitting together outside in a natural landscape. We know that Emma’s task for this piece was to create a painting using three separate photos and everything has come together for her perfectly.

We hope that you enjoy viewing Emma’s artwork and if you would like to join our pet portraits course, why not contact us today for more details!

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.

Tutor Vanessa weaver asked if we would share student Julie Noonan’s logo design from one of her assignments. It is an idea for a charity, although it’s not an actual brief, the company does exist and the student decided to redesign the current logo.

Julie wrote to her tutor Vanessa Weaver…….

For this task I chose a local charity – the Salford Foundation – who work with young people and adults to increase opportunities. Their tagline is “Opening doors to opportunity” and their existing logo incorporates a key, and is quite busy and not very eye catching.

The Salford Foundation have quite strong branding in terms of using their colour scheme, so I was fairly sure I was stick with their red as my colour.

Picking up on the opening doors idea from the strapline, I began with what is very clearly a door, and rapidly became a much cleaner more conceptual version of a door. I played about with the shapes long enough to know that this was my preferred option. Once I had worked out the angles for the two shapes, I then worked out which line needed to be on top of which to make the perspective work and give the impression of a door (rather than just two shapes).

I started to work on how the charity name might be incorporated. The first typeface was quite fun, but I thought a little hard to read and didn’t have the clean, modern feel I was aiming for. I also worked up version using just the initials: it is quite a long charity name, and I thought an alternative version that would be more compact might be helpful to the charity.

The final full version of the logo is found below.

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.

Todays blog post has been written by our lovely Botanical Painting Tutor, Polly O’Leary.

Satoko Handa has drawn a Tulip leaf for one of her Botanical Coloured Pencil assignments.  It’s a lovely sensitive drawing and I was delighted to receive it for assessment.

Equally, Naomi Dickens has also created some beautiful drawings of Blackcurrant Leaves.  They are a delightful set of leaves and show how line drawings can look really effective.

Polly O’Leary
Botanical 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 weekends challenge. It’s quite a tricky one. We would like you to draw or paint a bottle and glass with liquid in half or three quarters full. It doesn’t have to be a wine bottle and wine glass which is the obvious choice. It could be a beer bottle and pint glass, a tumbler and a bottle of water, a glass of orange juice and a jug or if you are feeling extravagant, a Champagne flute glass and Champagne bottle!

The challenge here is to draw the bottle with equal sides and the correct shaped ellipses. The second challenge here of course is to be able to create a glass the correct shape with the illusion that there is a liquid inside. This challenge isn’t for the feint hearted!

You can draw or paint the artwork in any medium at any size with or without a background. If you are portraying a wine bottle and glass with wine in, we take no responsibility if you start to drink your still life setup…!

We have added a few photos below for inspiration, you can draw from some of these if you would like, don’t forget you can click each photo to view and download a larger version. Have fun and let us know how you get on, we look forward to seeing your results on our Facebook page next week!

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!