Lone Kayaker

Unlike last Monday, I remembered today to take my template drawing for the next set of Offgridlife Claymation paintings.

Last week I forgot, so started the Add Maddarings series promoting Shelley’s shop at Camden Market. Today’s Offgridlife Hive account@offgridlife inspired image is called Lone Kayaker, the hand stamped red letter titles for which have already been printed. Oil paint on A4 size sketchbook paper I bought from The Works, a budget store in the UK that sells a lot of art materials. The oil paint isn’t applied with a brush, but is transferred to the paper by drawing on to the sheet after laying it on top of an oil paint covered board. I posted some videos showing the process on my YouTube channel, in the Offgridlife Claymation playlist. It’s called oil transfer drawing. A method I learned from the film Paul Klee The Silence of the Angel.

A single colour painting. How to double your output in two easy steps. Discovered today at Billy’s painting studio in Chatham Dockyards, where I paint every Monday: Transfer the oil transfer drawings onto another sheet of paper by sandwiching four at a time and scribbling on the top and bottom sheets. Not the best explanation, so I’ll probably make another video showing this next Monday. From spending most of today making a set of 15, it took less than an hour to make another 15 transfers of transfers. Most needed at least an outline of black ink to finish them off, a couple needed more work. Thirty paintings in a day makes life a lot easier, as it means more interviews at Camden, more paintings in my online stores, and more in my personal collection. If only I had figured this out sooner I would have so many more days doing The Camden Market Free Art Man fully stocked in advance.

Despite being done in oil paint, these transfer drawings will be dry in a couple of days. But this year has already been written off as a learning curve as I keep finding out things I did wrong preparing for it last year. 2026 is trouble shooting, 2027 should be the year I can put all the necessary lessons learned this year into practice. Doing so should allow The Camden Market Free Art Man to run at least three days a week, and for my online shops to have much more work in them.

Lone Kayaker oil paintings. The main lesson learned from 2026 is that I need an assistant. My girlfriend Aon is ready to help with things like packing orders and taking them to the post office, helping cut cardboard and paint the sheets in primer and black acrylic. Her English should have improved enough by then to do The Camden Market Free Art Man alone occasionally. It would make such a difference.

Red and green oil boards for transfering the image from.

I PVA glued over the Add Maddarings oil paintings despite Google’s AI Overview strongly suggesting I don’t. These are long term ephemeral paintings. They’ll age and disintegrate, turn yellow, crack and become brittle. This isn’t damage or deterioration, it’s intentional ageing, willfully injected into every artwork. It’ll hopefully make them much less investible should any dealers or galleries start sniffing around. FREE ART FREES ART wants ambassadors, not investors. Stakeholders, not shareholders. Consumers, not customers. We want you! These statements would go well on a YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU Kitchener World War 1 poster, with me pointing. Kitchener and Billy have similar moustaches, so maybe I could do one for Heckel’s Horse Jr too. FREE ART FREES ART NEEDS YOU!