Painting with coffee is a great experience, it not only smells good but it works in a similar way that watercolour does, water is the key and because you are using coffee, it is only one colour so monochrome is achieved.  This might be a good starting point to learning how to control water and watercolours without going out to buy some paints.  But if you are young and new to coffee painting please ask your parents first, as some coffee can be expensive! haha.

The 2 Bassett Hounds are my latest paintings fresh off the easel but here are a few others too.
On a more serious note, coffee farming is damaging the habitats of animals like the tiger and rhinoceros and I feel my next set of coffee paintings will be a little more political.  Watch this space!

It has been far too long since my last post.  Covid has been and gone, I really need to get in to making this a regular event of keeping you all up to date.  Though saying that if any of you know me well enough you will know I teach and this last few months has been so busy with marking I would have little to post about due to not being able to do any art for myself.

The summer is nigh and I am doing the traditional Andy Currie-Scarr ritual of trying to create create create like crazy with all this time off.  I have many things planned but we will see how much of that gets done.

I have old paintings planned to finish, commissions to catch up on (Patterdale Terrier) and finish never mind the endless ideas for new projects at the back fo my mind.  I hope this wets your appetite as much as it does my brain.

I have been to many car shows and owners club meet ups since Easter building a vast collection of vehicle imagery combined with years of Flookburgh Steam Gathering visits to start a mass art collection.  It is 75 years of Porsche this year and I have 300 photos to choose from.  See the green and blue boards for 911 teasers.  I have a few bikes on the go too pencil and pen/ink I hope to finish.

As we get towards the end of the summer I hope to have started to create a series of owl paintings on science pin boards (reclaimed from the science dept where I work that were throwing them away)  I have 8 in total.

As ever I am highly ambitious and any other side projects might make it to the table/easel but we will see what happens.

I have decided to get my airbrush and compressor again,  I have new spray bottles, IPA rubbing alcohol and acrylic paint  to make up and experiment with.  I am going to experiment with spraying in different ways to create marks, dribbling, splatting.  Then with the use of layering create fairly realistic paintings, with my own style added to it.

I will post photos when I have done some tests,  I feel it is an untapped area which I have not full explored yet.  It would be great to bring this technique in to my painting more.  Wish me luck! Roll on the summer!

Ok, so last time I posted, I said that 2019 was the year of print... well not everything goes to plan.  I have been inundated with commissions, yay!  I am so pleased!  So the print work will be put on the back burner, maybe revisited in the Summer holidays of July and August.  As I wade through the commissions which I am unable to show right now, I have been giving myself little breaks by creating some smaller, faster, looser work (Yes even looser than my normal work).

I am using the contacts I have built up on Instagram and their photos to start testing the waters of new ideas and compositions.  This has good benefits too, because if they turn out to be successful, I have some new work to add to my ever expanding work.

These smaller paintings are 7x5 inches on mountboard,  I restrict myself to 45 minutes, with the intention of leaving the paintings alone after the 45 minutes is up no matter if they are finished or not (unfinished, they actually look beautiful).  I am using acrylic, "sketching" out the darks and lights of the painting as I usually do but making sure that important details like the eyes, nose and mouth are refined (especially the eyes). 

These little pieces serve a several purposes, which include:

1: to loosen my painting style up so I am not painting "too tightly," 
2: speed up my ability to paint, so I get more done which aids the first point, 
3: helps me work on a smaller scale to my usual work, 
4: provides art for sale, to all, at an affordable price, 
5: helps me to not sweat the small stuff, "a perfectly painted piece," to allow for a little rough around the edges, to me feel happy and more confident with an "artists impression" finish to my work instead of a photo realistic painting that might as well stay as a photo,
6: create character and energy from the previous points,
7: achieving something in a short amount of time, whether its a beautiful painting or a failure I can learn from,
8: and most important of all, the enjoyment of painting and achieving the other points because thats why I paint,

I hope you enjoy these pieces as much as I enjoyed painting them.  There are many more on the way in the coming weeks... maybe making a frequent one a day challenge perhaps.  What are your thoughts?  Get in touch by email, comments on this post or via Instagram where I post regularly. ACSPaintings

I Thought I would start the year off with some new year's resolutions.  My resolutions are never really fitness or health orientated.  I have a number of non art related resolutions which I won't go in to too much detail about but includes things such as learning to speak Spanish, completing my course in BASI snowboard instructing and having a few hours paid teaching of this and finally revisit previously learnt programming languages and hopefully learning some new ones.  All of the above are for future job related reasons that may come about or not, but I like to learn anyway. 

But you guys want to know about my art based resolutions, thats why you are here on my website, so I plan to keep it simple,  I teach art and design at a Sixth Form college and paintings take up most of my spare time, ever increasing my portfolio and trying to push my skills, which I can then teach to the students.  This year I have decided to take a step back from painting and concentrate on Print making.

I bought a mangle in the Summer which I began renovating but then Winter happened, funny how that happens... I intended to renovate and convert it in to a printing press.  So over the next few months I will try and get it repainted and working so to concentrate on doing some printmaking at home. 

I do teach printmaking on a Foundation Art and Design course at work, though I will not be teaching this again until October, this gives me time to play and experiment.  I teach a variety of print making techniques including Collagraph (textures and mount board methods), Intaglio (dry point and mirror card), Lino cut (single layer, reduction and key block), Screen printing,  Monotype/print and Gum Arabic Transfer.

I would like to experiment with most of these but in particular Collagraph, as this can have so many varied results (mostly poor, due to lack of experimenting, practice and knowledge of which textures work best).

Of all the print making techniques, Monoprint is definitely my arch nemesis.  I have had little success when transferring line drawings with the ink to the paper without adding unwanted noise.  I need to practice this, which can be done without a press.  I would also like to try Monotype, a print maker I admire for her style and technique is Rebecca Vincent.  Her textures and layering techniques are fabulous and use of colours are stunning and I will to experiment in a similar style

I would also like to experiment more with Lino cut and/or woodcut.  The latter I have not tried yet but I have a few ideas of things to try so watch this space!  I endeavour to be more active in posting on this blog this year as I am pretty bad at doing so in general. 

So I had raided the beach near me a few years ago for various pieces of driftwood.  I have finally got round to using the pieces over the last year creating a series of paintings.  I have completed two so far, one has already sold (Lioness) and the other a Wildebeest (weird spelling) is currently in an exhibition down in Shifnal, Staffordshire.  I am currently working on a Giraffe and Chimpanzee. 

I am hoping that all 4 will be available and finished to be exhibited in my solo exhibition in Ulverston, next month 7th October 2018.  I will be posting information about this exhibition shortly

,ome of you may be aware I have a solo exhibition coming up in the Autumn and I am lacking a body of work that is diverse in subject matter and media so I have set myself a target of completing various sets of paintings in thus media and subject matter.

I have been painting a series of oils for commissions since Christmas and have gotten in to the flow and decided to carry it on.  It started with a piece for my Dad who turned 50 in December.  I had only a few days to produce the painting which is of a Mustang "Red Tails" WW2 fighter plane.  One of my Dads favourite planes.  I started on Christmas Eve evening and worked for the next few evening until the 28th to have it done in time.  I am pleased with the results if not a little rushed.  I painted a baby for my next commission in oils black and white,  the cute smile on the baby's face was great to capture.

I then moved on to finishing a commission of 2 horses, mare and foal in oils I originally started in September, followed by a commission of a Dachshund dressed in a woolly hat and jumper.  Once finishing my commissions I carried on with oil paintings of my own interests, a Jaguar E-Type car and currently I am painting a VW Beetle.  See below for examples

As a teacher at Barrow Sixth Form College, I find that sometimes the best way to learn is to work alongside students and inspire each others work.  I did a number of print workshops with the foundation art students in October/November time and there were a number of printing methods that went well and others not so.  So i have decided to work on the not so great workshops to see how to improve.

Collagraph printing is a great textural technique of printing.  It involves collecting and selecting different textured materials to produce a collage like image to print from.  I have started one using a photo of my lovely dog as a subject and collaging different textured materials in various directions to create his fur.

I have not posted in a while but I have been playing around with this idea in my head for some time now. I was thinking of different ways of using mark making, in particular in a much more controlled manner.  I know this will take some spontaneity away from the original concept but I want to put these techniques to better use.  Thus I decided to use it to create 3 textured surfaces added by painting some on to the smooth side of hard board and some on to the rough side.  I have used red, yellow and brown acrylic mixed with saw dust, sand and a hint of silver spray paint

The textures would resemble rusted metal surfaces.  I have only got that far though with commissions coming out of my ears since August.  The plan will be to do a photoshoot of some lovely ladies from the neck up with some dynamic lighting to create soft and hard tones to work from.  Using a similar kind of stencil style to my previous work but with some areas less defined and painted with a brush, I am intending to create a peeled paint type look over the top of the rust background as if it was weathered.

This would complement the rusty surface as paint naturally peels from rusted surfaces, it then looks almost like a face is naturally being revealed from the excess paint left over.

I have been busy tinkering in my garage this evening making a mess, literally! I have been making mark making backgrounds for my signature work, Stencils on mark making.  The quality isn't amazing of the following photos but hey! I don't want to spoil the final images.  I love the textures and how different they are. This is why each painting is so unique!