This is a painting of one of my children’s toys – a small plastic figure of Andy Day that came with a CBeebies magazine sometime around 2017. Andy is dressed in his Andy’s Dinosaur/Prehistoric/etc. Adventures gear. My eldest son and I used to love watching the programmes, and used to take toy Andy on adventures…
Author: simonbirtall
I am an artist and art tutor based in Merseyside, UK. I paint in an Impressionist-influenced technique in oils or acrylics on canvas and make drawings in pencil, pen, pastels and more.
Beatles Forever
Here’s a paining I began as a demo piece for one of my online art classes, which I ran during the 2020-21 lockdowns. The theme I wanted my students to tackle on this occasion was ‘music’, challenging them to come up with a piece of artwork that reflected their relationship to music. My demo painting…
Bluey
I’ve been making a few paintings in the last year or so depicting some of my boys’ most treasured toys. This is the latest one, which I completed this week. It depicts a six and a bit centimetre Bluey toy, from the Australian animated childrens (and adults really) programme of the same name. I don’t…
Leaves Under a Swing
I was pushing my youngest son on a ‘birds nest’ swing in the local playground one sunny autumn morning in 2022 when I distractedly noticed the fallen leaves lying beneath the swing. The strength of the colour I saw, and in particular the contrast between the autumnal colours in the leaves and the rich, sunlit…
Happy Meal Paddington
This painting was made as a live demonstration piece for my art class in Hoylake earlier today. It was painted in water-mixable oils on A4 Winsor & Newton canvas-textured oil paper. It took me something like an hour to paint.I don’t like the colour of the shadow in the background, but there isn’t always time…
Drawing Upon Life 