I cried in the café – the women working there gave me some chocolate.

I wanted to write ‘easy peasy’ but couldn’t fit it all in. This is a drawing I did on a recent flight to London – by myself. I felt luxurious.

I read ‘ What Mothers Do Especially When It Looks Like Nothing’ by Naomi Stadlen – it was within these pages that I found the words about many of my experiences and thoughts about motherhood – but also about depression.

Loosing a sense of future is something that I think all people who have suffered with depression would understand.

Driving myself a little bit crazy in cafés.

 The Prinzessinnengarten, where we spent the summer of 2011.

I have done a crazy amount of drawings for my project – Berlin Domestic – a project that keeps changing shape. I felt like deleting it all last week but I can be pretty extreme in that way. I just have to learn to just take a break from the world wide web every so often.

This is the last oil painting I made in Berlin – thank you Julia for posing for me.

‘That awkward moment before the eyebrows go on’- I believe is what I tweeted about this image of the painting.

I really enjoyed how intense her expression is.

I didn’t want to do a grey background like I have on many of my other paintings. So I thought I’d try out green as it is meant to compliment brown. I don’t know what I was thinking! This green made me think of hospitals, veterinary clinics and disinfectant – totally not what I was trying to inspire in the viewer.

Fixing it up! The good think about oil paintings is they are more forgiving when you make a blooper like I did. Just takes a lot of time – waiting for the green to dry before I could paint over it.

There she is – I think she’s pretty fantastic.

Thanks to Camille for posing for me!

Dear all, I’m back online!

My last post here was in June, there’s a lot to catch up on. But I will update this over the next few weeks. Even though this has been offline I’ve still been documenting the process of my recent works which I look forward to sharing with you.

But for now, these are my views:

A drawing of feet in progress.

I got Gene to take some screen shots to show the development of taking a canvas image from photograph to a high quality digital image.
After I complete a painting, the first stage is to take several photographs. He then opens them up in the compositing program Nuke (used for motion pictures), here are some visuals so you can get an idea of the process:

width=”450″ height=”281″ class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-1414″ />

This part takes Gene about an hour for each
piece, he came up with this process himself and is often tweaking it as software develops.

Here is the final result:

‘Phia’

Amazing.
LMM

It’s been taking a long time to get this one finished because I needed parts of it to be dry before I could work on it again. The above photo shows progress of the fourth and final layer of stripes on the top. It is now complete and is drying on my easel. Then my wonderful
man, Gene, will take a photo of it and translate it into a digital image for me.

I think this time I will take some shots to demonstrate what he does to make them look as close to the real thing, as it is quite a process. It’s taken years for Gene to develop this technique ( I didn’t ask him- he’s a perfectionist, I’m not complaining though!!) and it’s quite complex- I will probably never really understand what he does. But he does it and he does it well.

Lily Mae
x

Last night I went to the Salon Session that Dr Sketchy‘s run here in Berlin. The model was a performer from Australia, La Viola Vixen.

When I arrived last night I quickly remembered how much I miss life drawing, I used to do it all the time when I was pregnant: PROOF.

I enjoyed the atmosphere at this session and I really hope to do it again! The Dr Sketchy’s sessions usually have a
performance and lots of photography, but to my joy there were no cameras and no one was permitted to take any photos, all that left were our drawings.

( As much as I love photography the immediacy and accessibility sometimes seem to overwhelm the human experience. Sometimes I’m pretty sure the photograph matters more than the actual experience- now I am deviating from the point of this blog post! )

The next session is in June: INFO

Lily Mae
x

I thought I’d share some recent drawings from Berlin Domestic – they make me gush with pride.

Above is a drawing of a miniature tea set which I wrote about here: PORK CHOP

This is a drawing of my first house in Wales. Which is probably one of the nicest houses I have ever lived in.

L
x