My Edinburgh Festival Highlights
4 jam packed days of joyous creative immersion! Watch a little overview of my visit to the Edinburgh Festival a couple of weeks ago.
A mini overview of my 4 day #edinburghfestivalfringe adventure.
Impossible to cram-pack everything into 1 minute but this hopefully gives a flavour of the atmosphere!
Thank you to all the amazing performers who poured their extraordinary energy into such fantastic shows! The joy, humour, innovations and - at times - sheer physical daring, endlessly inspire and energise me.
Featured performers, in order of appearance :
@lutrek_art - 'Juliette' / 'Old Blue Eyes' / 'Marie Curie'
@ameliacadwallader - Amelia Cadwallader
@bhoundp - 'Seeds of Memories'
@agoodcatchcircus - 'Casting Off'
@flabbergast_theatre - 'The Tragedy of Macbeth'
@interactearnest - 'The Importance of Being Earnest'
@benzeiulia - #ladywhistledown
@oldtroutpuppetworkshop - 'Famous Puppet Death Scenes'
@circo.goyo - Grego Richter
@melonthehuman - Thomas Stewart
@puppetstate_theatre - 'The Man who Planted Trees'
Paddy McCullagh - 'Paddy the Potato’
@thebananamanofficial - Matt Eberhart
@thejugglinggent - Matthew Kerr
@walkabout_eddie - Edwin Eddie Bond
@yannelvis - Yann Elvis
@lacliquetheshow - ‘La Clique’
@blackbluesbrothers - ‘The Black Blues Brothers’
I urge you to click and discover the pure magic of what they do!!
INTERESTING FACTS
🎉 The Edinburgh Festival is a 3 week performing arts festival that happens every August.
🎉 It started in 1947 and is now in its 75th year!
🎉 It includes a formal ‘International’ festival and a less formal - anything goes - ‘Fringe’ festival.
🎉 The roots of the Fringe were planted in 1947 when 8 uninvited theatre groups turned up in Edinburgh and performed outside the 'official program'.
🎉 The fringe society was officially formed in 1958 and still prides itself on not vetting shows.
🎉 This year the Fringe included 3,334 shows performed by artists from 63 countries!
🎉 My first festival encounter was in 2003 when I started my 5 year MA Fine Art journey in Edinburgh and it's been inspiring me and my artwork ever since!
Watch out for some sketching spotlights coming soon!
A New Ride
My love of bicycles is finally finding expression in a new toy inspired painting! Watch the progress so far!
Those of you who know me, also probably know my second hand beast of a bicycle, which I am constantly getting from A to B on.
A big fan of cycles, I have been meaning to pay tribute to one in a painting for a while.
This charismatic diecast acrobat, riding a cycle, again manufactured by Charbens is my first go at the subject! Will report back when I am further along with it!
New Muscles
Building my strength back up and what better way than with this new painting of a Toy Circus Strongman! Watch the progress so far!
Building up new muscles!
In the wake of last week's tech shock - I thought I'd reinforce the visual muscles with a strength inspiring subject!
This diecast toy circus strongman, with his barbells, manufactured by Charbens, seemed like the perfect candidate. A figure I've painted before, but one I have wanted to revisit for sometime.
It's only a beginning but has definitely got my digital paint brush singing again! More updates to follow soon!
Lessons Learned
Big lessons learned this week in a horrible shock when I discovered 3 weeks of recent projects were accidently erased in a routine back up! Today I share an inspiring story which has helped me pick myself back up again!
Today is a bit of a confessional!
I managed to erase a bunch of recent projects in a routine backup that went very wrong!
Having explored recovery options, but alas to no avail, I have had to stand back and take this one on the chin and learn a massive lesson from it!
It could definitely have been worse and I am very grateful I had a certain amount I could retrieve from other places.
Needless to say, I am giving my whole set up a massive review and overhaul and I guess better now than later down the line!
I feel very much a pupil of the universe right now and realise that no matter how organised you think you are, life can always throw a curveball your way, forcing you to change, adapt and start again!
I hope this little story helps anyone else going through something similar!❤
Kicking off a new painting!
A new artwork is on the digital easel! Check out a mini timelapse of how I got going on this painting, inspired by a toy die-cast goal keeper.
I'm getting stuck into a series of toy inspired digital oil paintings.
Kicking things off😉with this goal keeper.
I'm using the wonderful Rebelle 5 from @escapemotions which offers an amazing range of traditional mediums and brushes in digital form.
Going for a 'wet on wet' approach with this series, which means working with a more loaded brush vs building up in thinner strokes.
I'll see how things progress and post another update soon!