Summer 2019 Poll

The nights are fair drawin' in and I don't think I'll be out in the garden painting much more this year, so I think it's time for another painting poll.

If anybody has a couple of minutes free (honestly, that's all it takes) I'd be so grateful if they could click on the link below and select up to 10 favourites from the 23 paintings that I've produced since the last poll.  The results will eventually be published on this website.

Thanks in advance.  Here's the link:

https://poll.app.do/summer-2019-painting-poll

Something Different For Christmas?

It's just over ten weeks to Christmas.  If you wanted to buy something different, have you thought about a painting?  If you press "For Sale"on the list of labels on the third line of the page, you get to see the blog posts for all of the paintings that I have up for sale.

All of the paintings are priced at just £30 each, or £50 for two.  Postage on top of that if we can't arrange a handover.  For a single 12*9 framed painting, that's an extra £6.50 - I don't know how much it is for multiple or smaller paintings.

The vast majority of the paintings are 12 inches by 9 and framed.  There are just a handful of exceptions.  First, there are these ones, which are smaller.  I suspect the 8.5 * 11s will end up 10* 8 once they've been framed.  And I've not found a frame yet for the 9 * 9, and the price is based on the assumption that I can find one.

And then there are these ones.  They've all been painted on crackle pasted boards and are being sold unframed.  They're not suited to being framed behind glass, so will probably need a professional framer to glue them into some sort of frame.  Price is still £30 as the raw materials are more expensive for these.

And, just because I feel like it, here's a selection of the plain, simple, framed 11 * 9 watercolours that are up for sale at time of writing.

Tempted?  There's no "add to basket" to click on here.  Just contact me using the "contact me" box in the right hand margin of the website if you see something that you think would make a banging Christmas gift.

Zoltan Szabo's 70 Favourite Watercolor Techniques - Book Review

Another book review.  Today it's Zoltan Szabo's 70 Favourite Watercolor (sic) Techniques.  I bought this a couple of days ago after spotting that it was out of stock at Amazon and that it was written back in 1995.  This could have been my last chance to buy it, so I went for it.  It's 144 pages long and is a paperback but (like that Jane Betteridge book) a resilient paperback with a thick, glossy, folded over cover that shouldn't get dog-eared.

As you can imagine, the book is one big collection of interesting watercolour techniques.  And I was quite pleasantly surprised to find that there were plenty of new, interesting techniques there.  Off the top of my head, there were ways to use a palette knife, the crazy idea of curtain glazes and "charging a wash" which is like wet into wet but more watery into wet.  Lots of interesting stuff.  Just like with the Jeanne Dobie Book, I felt like I should have been taking notes, although I didn't find this book to be quite as dense with new ideas as Jeanne's.

There's a chapter on the ten rules of reflections that is almost worth the price of admission on its own.  The stuff about what gets reflected on the near side of a wave and what gets reflected on the far side was nothing short of excellent.  The sort of thing I'm expecting to see in that James Gurney Colour And Light Book when it eventually ends up in my collection.

There's inspiration to be found in Zoltan's artwork too.  His landscapes have lots of neutral colours in them but they're the sort of vibrant greys that Jeanne Dobie talks about rather than the lifeless earth colours that I've seen in Ron Ranson and Richard Taylor books.  And he even has an abstract side to some of his work.

The worst thing about this book is probably the writing style.  Maybe it was translated from a foreign language by someone without any writing skills.  Or maybe Szabo was a poor writer.  In any case, I probably learned more from looking at paintings and at photos of techniques being used than I did from the text.  He also referred quite often to glazing without explaining what it was (thanks Jeanne Dobie for telling us in your book!) and I did get a bit tired of being told every single colour that was used at every single step.

There were some step-by-step demonstrations at the end of the book that suffered from having too few steps.  Quite often, there were so many things happening in the first step that it wasn’t clear which bit of the painting the text was talking about.

Anyway, despite the bad writing, I learned enough from this book for it to be worth a fourth palette.

🎨🎨🎨🎨