Colour And Light: A Guide For The Realistic Painter, James Gurney - Book Review

This might be the last book review for a while as it's the last of the books from my birthday stash.  It's the James Gurney book that I've heard so much about, a very glossy 224-page paperback that always seems to be priced very reasonably.

As you can guess this is all about colour and light.  There's all the usual stuff in there about colour wheels, colour schemes, shadows on snooker balls with the reflected light , etc. But it goes much, much further than this.

The stuff on light was most interesting to me.  There's lots, for example, about the colour of light.  Just sitting in a room and looking around, there's the colour of the light from the electric bulb, the colour coming through the window and lighting up my desk, the light hitting the lawn outside, bouncing through the window and onto the ceiling.  And the light that makes the lines between my fingers look red when I hold the back of my hand up to the sun.  These lights are all different colours and can all be incorporated into a painting.  That's just a flavour.  One of the reasons I was disappointed in that Hazel Soan book on light and shadow was that I was hoping it would go into this level of detail.

And there's stuff about colour too.  Some of this was oil-related rather than watercolour but anybody with any experience will know what also applies directly to watercolour and what needs subtly tweaking.  The biggest jaw dropper here for me was James' colour circle.  Rather than the circle with red, yellow and blue evenly spaced, the red/orange/yellow corner is squashed up a bit and the blue area stretched out, leaving red, green and blue evenly spaced around the circle.  Red, green and blue are the primary colours in physics, so this immediately appealed to me.  One of the things I struggled with in physics was that, while it was easy to see that blue and green should make cyan and blue and red should make magenta, the idea that green and red light should mix together to make yellow was always the devil's business to me.  But when I look at James' colour wheel, I can see that yellow lies exactly halfway between red and green. I'm wishing I'd seen this colour wheel 40 years ago.

In fact, a common theme in the book is that James likes to give scientific explanations of so many things.  Why the sky's blue, how rainbows work, why distant hills look blue, why we see in black and white when it's dark, ...  I could go on forever.

The book's divided into twelve chapters, although one of these is a historical one, talking about old masters, and another is an appendix with a glossary, reference, lists of pigments, etc. Each chapter, though, is divided into lots of two page spreads, making it an easy book to dip into for just a couple of minutes - the opposite experience to that Kagan McLeod experience where once you start reading there's no convenient place to stop for the next 100+ pages.

James' writing style doesn't ooze passion the way some other writers (like Jean Haines and Ann Blockley) do but it's definitely not one of those dry dirges at the opposite end of the spectrum.  The shiny paper and illustrations and the punchiness of the two page subchapters are enough to keep the reader engaged.

But did I learn anything from this book?  Yes.  Absolute shedloads.  This is a very nuggety book.  Rather than churn out the same points that I've seen in other books (the approach taken by The Urban Sketching Companion a couple of reviews ago), this is absolutely bursting with hints and tips that I've never seen before.  Two thirds of the way through the book and I was counting how many pages there were left to go because I'd taken in so much information that I was desperate to open the tap and spill it all out into notes.  Making Colour Sing by Jeanne Dobie is the only other book that's made me feel like this.

Thank you for writing this book, Mr Gurney. I now understand why it's been praised to the heavens so much.  It's definitely an all time classic.  I would only recommend it to quite experienced artists though - those that have already read and understood the bread and butter in other books.

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Inktober All Year Long, Jake Parker: Book Review

This book has been accused of plagiarising Pen & Ink Drawing by Alphonso Dunn.  Just watch this video https://youtu.be/bG3ENcAdWBM and make your own decision.  I've watched the video.  Parker should hang his head in shame.  Just don't buy this book.  If you're another blogging artist, please think about spreading the word further by sharing the video on your website.

It gets an unprecedented zero palettes from me.  #justiceforalphonsodunn

Rob Key

It's been a good summer of test cricket.  I was watching it yesterday and suddenly realised that Sky cricket pundit Rob key would make a great portrait subject with his bulbous nose, high forehead, chubby cheeks and rosy complexion, so I thought I'd have a go at the great Keyesie, the last Kent cricketer to score a double century for England.  Oh no, sorry, he lost that record a couple of days ago.

Anyway, here's what I came up with.  The cartoony effect on those Rush portraits that came along unexpectedly has disappeared just as quickly.  There's something of Keyesie in there but it's not quite on point.  I think it made  I've made the forehead a bit too conventional.  A bit too Dec rather than Ant.  And the hair is ugly and the background and composition are a bit boring.  And head was so big I couldn’t fit it into the page, although that makes things more interesting.   On the other hand, I like how the shape of the marks and the use of pink among the normal skin tones has added a certain something.  And how there's a steely set to the jaw under those chins.

Rob's up for sale as a standalone.  For now, I don't imagine myself doing a cricket collection.

The Artistic Actuary has a Facebook page

So I now have a Facebook page.  If you'd like to see my artwork popping up on your newsfeed, please head to Facebook, search me out and like me.  Cheers.

The Rush Collection

And here's the complete set together.  It may even surpass the chess player set that I thought was my opus magnus.

It's up for sale.

Alex Lifeson

And here's Alex Lifeson, the third and final member of Rush.

It's not the greatest likeness and the left hand and guitar aren't great but it fits with the rest of the set and they work really well in combination.

I've been careful to make the backgrounds three different colours and with three different types of line within them.

Neil Peart

Next up in either the Rush collection or supergroup collection is the late Neil Peart, one of the greatest drummers of all time and an amazing writer of lyrics.

It's another instantly recognisable portrait to the small minority of people out there who knew who Rush were.  So I'm happy with that.  The variegated background is also good, as are the white highlights on the hat and T-shirt.  But the best bit about this one is the clean lines on the face.  A combination of thin lines from a rollerball and thick lines from a marker worked out well on this one, resulting in something that looks like it belongs in a comic.  In fact, the last two works have both looked cartoony, something that wasn't deliberate and had taken me by surprise.  It looks pretty good.

Obviously more to come In the collection before this goes up for sale.

Geddy Lee

Time for another set of marker portraits.  I've done chess, physics and westerns, so it's time to start on another passion: music.

This is Geddy Lee, vocalist/bassist/keyboarder in Rush and one of the greatest bassists of all time, right up there alongside John Paul Jones and John Entwhistle.  I'd put him at the top of the pile to be honest.

After a bit of a break from the markers, I'm really pleased with the result today.  It's instantly recognisable as Geddy for a start.  And it's quite an exciting picture, maybe a result of this accidentally ending up as a worm's eye view - the sort of view you might get from the front row of a concert.  The strings came out well in white pen with a ruler, too, even if they're too high and too closely packed - there should really be four evenly spaced strings there.

This isn't going up for sale yet.  It will end up as part of a set, although I'm not committing yet to whether this will be a a Rush set or a Supergroup set.  Let's see how I get in with the other two members of Rush first.

The Complete Urban Sketching Companion, Gabriel Campanario, Stephanie Bower & Shari Blaukopf - Book Review

Another book review, only two days after the book was published.  This is a 256-page, A5-sized paperback.  It's a mashup of four books from the Urban Sketching Handbook series:
- Architecture And Cityscapes by Gabriel Campanario
- Understanding Perspective by Stephanie Bower
- People And Motion by Gabriel Campanario
- Working With Colour by Shari Blaukopf
The temptation must have been there to just put all four books back to back and end up with a 448-page monster that had lots of repeated material within it (like Terry Harrison's Complete Guide To Watercolour Landscapes) but that's not what's happened here.  The four books have been mashed together into a single book that hangs together reasonably well.

So, what have they done?  Well, each of the four original books is 112 pages long, has an introductory chapter, 5 or 6 chapters on different "keys" and then a gallery of artwork taking up about 15-20% of the book.  In mashing the books together, the publishers have:
- discarded the galleries
- only put in a single introduction chapter on materials, etc.  It looks to me like that chapter may have come from Shari's book on colour
- kept almost all of the chapters on keys.  Of 22 chapters in the original books, only three didn't make it into this book (the Line and Creativity chapters from Architecture And Cityscapes and the Likeness chapter from People And Motion)
- (judging from the page counts on the contents pages) possibly shaved out the odd page here and there, with Understanding Perspective suffering the most.

In terms of writing style, I found myself warming to Shari in the introduction and In the section on colour.  Her passion came through: it was as if she wanted to transfer over that passion as well as transferring over facts and tips.  I found Gabriel's and Stephanie's style to be a bit more abrupt and rough, but this may be down to editing.  They reminded me a bit of Garth Crooks on BBC Sport who likes to make an obvious point ("Things closer to you look bigger; things far from you look smaller and closer together") and then make a serious looking pout as if he's come up with the most profound point of all time.

And that brings me on to content.  Were there any tasty nuggets of information in this book that made me think wow, what a great insight?  In short, no.  Or not many anyway.  The Gabriel Campanario sections were particularly lacking in nuggets.  There was absolutely nothing in the People And Motion section that I didn't already know from reading the Lynne Chapman book.  I didn't learn much from the Stephanie Bower section on perspective, but this may be down to my grade A at O level technical drawing.  I suspect a beginner would learn a lot more from that section.  The section that was most interesting to me was the one on colour.  Most of the stuff in that section was stuff I already knew but it was refreshing to hear someone else's take on it and to see it reflected in their artwork.

And finally inspiration.  The more books I read and the less that's left for me to learn, the more important it is that the artwork in the book sends me thinking in new directions.  Now, if this book were A4-sized like most art books, I'd be able to open it up and stare longingly at all the artwork within it.  But this was an A5-sized paperback.  This didn't only mean that the pictures were smaller (only a quarter of the size they'd  have been in an A4 book) but also that there were bits of pictures that I couldn't see without cracking the spine of the book.  Somehow, the pictures in Shari's section (it's always Shari) were more inspiring - maybe because they were more colourful, maybe because the text on the rest of the page was more passionate and exciting.

And then we get to the best bit of the book.  Each of the four subbooks has a ticklist of challenges for the reader to attempt.  This book brings them together into a list of 91 challenges to work through.  And it's an interesting set of challenges that's definitely worth working through.

Overall it's a slightly weird book.  The first weird thing about it is that I'm not sure what target audience is.  Most of the tips in the book are too basic for anyone with any experience and yet the tip-tip-tip-tip machine gun approach of three of the four sections is surely too cold and impersonal for a beginner?  I'd probably be making exactly the same points about the individual subbooks.  And I can see a much better book for these three authors to write just sitting there.  It's in those 91 challenges.  Just imagine a book "91 Challenges For The Experienced Urban Sketcher", or maybe 70 or 80 after pruning out crap like drawing cereal boxes.  If there was a book with a double page devoted to each challenge with three or four examples in each case of how different artists had approached the challenge, that would make for a great book!

The other weird thing about this book is that it's like a bad beat in poker.  You have a great hand and the opponent puts you all in.  You call.  The only way you can lose is if the next card to be turned over is the king of spades.  And there he is, king of spades, and you've lost a huge pot.  But it was still a great decision to call.  And in the same way, although there wasn't much to learn from the book, I don't regret putting it on my wishlist.  If it wasn't in my collection I'd still be pining for it, even after reading this review.  So somehow it's comforting to have it there.

Overall, this is a very easy rating.  Two palettes.  The archetypal two palette book.

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Oh, and Gabriel Campanario's book on The Art Of Urban Sketching still remains high on my wishlist, despite me being less than satisfied with his sections in this book.  TAOUS is big enough to open up, is hugely thick and markets itself more as inspiration than as a learning source, so should be a very different experience, and may even have a similar feel to my hypothetical 91 Challenges book.

Exposure

Headed over the road to the Rose &  Crown at Hartlip To order a lunchtime takeaway for tomorrow (GCSE results day).  I couldn’t resist taking a sneaky photo while I was there or my painting which is now up on the wall for all to see.  Having a painting on the wall of my local probably beats being seen on Landscape Artist Of The Year but I'll know for sure in January.

Rhus

And here's another naked female figure.  This is Rhus, another model from artmodeltips.com.

I took a different approach with this one.  This time, I got all the lines and masses down before adding any water - I wanted a bit more control.  Then, still thinking about control (which I really shouldn’t be), I had another idea.  The only issue with JenB was the darks being too similar on opposite sides of the body where I'd not been careful enough with my brush.  This time, to avoid that problem and, also, to not mix the colours too much, I didn't bother with the brushes and instead just dabbed and lightly massaged the pencil marks with a wet bit of kitchen paper, being careful to start with a clean area of the paper each time.  Then I used the paper to sweep contour lines along the paper, again being careful to use clean areas of paper each time.  This wiping with the paper does seem to have added a bit of mass to the breasts, stomach and left thigh, which is good.  Also good is the outline of the right breast against the hair (deliberate on my part).  But the hair itself is just a background shape and lacks texture.

Still, it's up for sale.

JenB

I found a great website today.  It's artmodel tips.com and is a great source of material for figure drawing.  In particular there are lots of naked poses, which is what's really needed for figure drawing, let's face it.  And it feels a bit more respectable looking for material on that site than going through the submissions of exhibitionists on DeviantArt.  And there's no way I'm going onto porn sites looking for material.

Anyway, today's starting point was a photo of a model called JenB.  I used the inktense pencils on this but followed an idea from the Bill Buchman book and bulked out the form first with the pencils on their sides.  After that, I wet all the pencil marks with water brushes and blended them together.  Then, while the paint was still wet, I drew in a few outlines, not worrying too much if the outlines didn't match the masses.  I let the paint escape out in places and added just a v-shape to suggest that head.

The final result is pretty good and feels energetic, which definitely ticks a box.  The worst thing about it is that the blue shades on both sides of the body look too similar - the idea was that the indigo shade on the right should have been darker than the blue on the left.  Maybe I let the indigo stay on the brush and contaminate the opposite side.  Oh well.

This one's up for sale.

Expressive Figure Drawing, Bill Buchman - Book Review

And it's time for another book review, and again it's a book on figure drawing.  After this I really need to do more artwork before reading the two remaining books on my pile.  This is a 176-page paperback.

As the title suggests, this book is about figure drawing but, unlike Legaspi and Huston, this is about expressive figure drawing.  Expressive figure drawing is different to realistic figure drawing.  We can emphasise proportions rather than measuring them, we can leave out arms and heads and let the viewer add them in in themselves (although we might hint at them with a mark of some sort) and we can abstractify the colours and shapes.  All as long as the finished result has some mood or energy to it.  This is my sort of painting!

As I expect from a book like this, the most interesting stuff was in the middle, bookended by chapters that were full of encouragement and passion, trying to rack up the excitement.  The middle 90 pages were where the action was though, with separate chapters on gesture, mass, line, structure, shape, volume and colour.  These six chapters can all be read in any order because they don't build on each other: they only concentrate on their own subject.  I get the feeling that if I put together a piece using all the information in all six chapters, it would look really good, maybe more realistic than expressive.

Anyway, within each of those chapters, there are some tips but most of the learning comes through Bill's demonstrations and the examples of Bill's completed artwork.  Some of those artworks are examples of what might come out if we attempt some of the exercises that Bill set throughout the book.  I normally hate exercises in books as they tend to not aim towards artworks (so I tend to see them as a waste of paper and paint) but almost all of Bill's do result in artworks, as evidenced by the examples he shows of completed exercises.

Materials-wise, there's lots to learn here whatever materials you use.  There are lots of examples where Bill uses pastels, chalks or crayons because he likes to use them on their side and twist them around to get outlines with varying thickness.  But anybody that thinks there are no lessons in this that can be applied to other media is lacking in imagination.  It does tempt me into trying out these other media though, mind you.

All in all, good book.  I'd recommend buying and reading the Chris Legaspi book before reading this one, just because you need to understand the rules before you break them.  The best bit about this book is the artwork inside it: this is one of those books that inspires the reader and where you need to keep looking back at it every now and then to refresh that inspiration.  It's not a book where the learning can all easily be converted to notes.  I originally gave this one three palettes but am upgrading it to four. I just find t( artwork in it so inspiring.  This book feels like a license to go out there and break the rules.  But you do need to learn the basics first via Legaspi or Huston.

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Figure Drawing For Artists: Making Every Mark Count, Steve Huston - Book Review

Time for another book review.  This is 192 pages long, and is flexibound, meaning it’s a paperback but with a cover that's bent inwards along the edge.  It feels big and substantial.

I knew I was talking a risk putting both this and the Chris Legaspi book on my wishlist.  If both of them were bought for me, would there be a significant overlap between the two?  The problem was they both sounded and looked good, so I couldn’t decide which to leave off the list.  So I left them both on the list.  Probably hoping to only be gifted one of them to be honest.

And, as it turned out, both of them popped up as presents on my birthday.  I read and reviewed the Legaspi book a week or two ago (and gave if four stars) and have now read the Huston book.  So how do they compare?

Well, the big news is that these are two very different books.  They both emphasise the importance of gesture and structure but after that there are not many similarities.  The main focus of Chris' book is on a process for doing drawings and on how much can be done depending in how long the model is posing for.  Steve's book is different.

Steve starts off with about 90 pages of what I'd call introduction.  What gesture drawing is, how to draw spheres, cylinders and cuboids, how light works.  I found this all to be quite slow going and wasn't learning much from it, although I did feel Steve's passion coming through.  The most interesting thing from this bit of the book was how Steve's style differs to Chris'.  Chris likes to put down all the gesture lines, then add structure, whereas Steve alternates between laying down quite short gestures, and adding structure.  So head gesture, head structure, back gesture, back structure, chest gesture, chests structure,... - you get the picture.  Interesting, and as Steve keeps emphasising everybody's different and we're welcome to vary from his recommendations.  I also liked Steve's concept of a wave of gestures going down the body.

After that we've got about 90 pages on the human body and about 10 pages on shading.  The bit on shading was a bit hurried and difficult to follow but the Chris Legaspi book is pretty good in this area, so that's not a problem to me.  In fact, Steve probably underdoes the importance of shading in his book, preferring to concentrate in gesture and structure.

But those 90 pages on the human body.  Wow!  While I didn't learn much from the first 90 or last 10 pages, this 90 page section was packed to the roof with useful advice.  Steve went all over the human body and described how it could be drawn as simple or more complicated shapes.  I did like his imagery, likening certain parts of the body to twisted ropes, notches in whistles, Donald Duck bills and the way that a baggy shirt hangs over a big belt buckle.  Imagery that rams the point home and makes sure it won't be forgotten.  The drawings in this bit of the book are also nice and simple, only showing what's needed to illustrate Steve's points.  This 192-page long book had more than 192 pages worth of content; it's just that it was all concentrated into this 90-page middle section.

In terms of comparison to Legaspi, I found that these two books dovetail together really well, like Tetris pieces, and am very happy to have both in my collection.  I think I was right to read Legaspi first as its content was wider and shallower than the narrrow but deep content in Steve's 90 page golden period.

But are those 90 pages enough to match Chris' four palettes?  Hell yes.  Good job, Steve.

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Headless Amy

So I had another go at Amy, this time without a head.  I started from one of the one-minute sketches I did earlier as it looked so energetic and as it had head up and arms down.

Once again, the multicoloured flesh tones look good and the thigh looks shapely.  The round kneecap helps give it some form too.  The right arm is in shadow and looking better than the shadowy bits in the last painting but I'm not there yet.

The thing that lets this one down is the foreshortened left arm.  It doesn’t look right.  I need to take more care with the drawing and not start with the inktense pencils until that first stage is perfect.

Amy

After the warmup, I was ready to do a proper picture of Amy using the inktense pencils.

I started with a decent gesture drawing.  There's a nice undulating line down her back and right thigh.  After that, the idea was to shade the shadows in lightly with blacks and greys and the flesh tones lightly using whatever reds, yellows, blues and greens I fancied, while trying to get some sort of 3D effect.  And to somehow do that Charles Reid thing of merging shadows on Amy into the background shadows.

So this is one big experiment really, and I expect some things to go wrong and hope for some things to go right.  The first thing that went wrong is that the Charles Reid shadows trick isn't easy to pull off with these inktense pencils.  I need to keep trying on that score.  The other thing is the face and head.  I think I need to start looking for poses where I can just cut the head out.  Especially as the big success in the painting is the bum and left thigh.  I've got a great 3D effect going on there.  I think the little pinch at the top of the thigh helps.  That's something I got from the Chris Legaspi book - one side stretched, the other side with pinch points.  And the colours in the skin work really well and are something I need to keep doing and that will become my style.

Interesting.  Let's do another without a head...

Warming Up With One-Minute Sketches

After a pencil drawing and a painting yesterday, today it's time to give those inktense pencils a runout.  And to have a proper go at some figure drawing.

So I've started off the way the experts start with some one-minute figure drawing.  The model's name is Amy and I found her doing these poses on the Draw This YouTube channel.

I actually found this to be quite a good way to loosen up and shake off the cobwebs.  The gesture drawing seems to be working well for me, with quite a bit of energy in those quick scribbles.

The Frankenstein-Dracula Variation

After reading Painting By Design by Charles Reid, I felt ready to attempt my first watercolour portrait.  It started off as the world chess champion Magnus Carlsen but ended up looking like Dracula.  So I've called it the Frankenstein-Dracula variation, named after the line 1. e4 e5 2. Nc3 Nf6 3. Bc4 Nxe4 in the Vienna Game.

I'm still checking out the experimental palette and didn't hold back on the colours today.  There's transparent yellow, yellow ochre, Winsor orange, Winsor red (fast becoming a favourite), cerulean blue, French ultramarine, Winsor violet, Ivory black, Chinese white and titanium white (after the Chinese didn't show up well in the spatters).  With Winsor orange being the main yellow and Winsor red the main red, this is in the key of either orange warm or orange cool as the cerulean and French ultramarine blues both have significant parts to play.

I took on board lots of Charles Reid's ideas.  There are shadows on the face that blend into shadows on the hand and then into the jacket.  The sharpest edges are around the right of the face (from our point of view) where I want the viewer's  attention to be.  There were attempts at fuzzy edges - I like where colour has leaked out of the back of the jacket into the background.  I deliberately darkened the background next to the hand to get a value contrast.  In the jacket, I tried to bring some bits forward by adding red and pushing bits  back by adding cerulean blue.  And in the face, I used more red in the nose, cheeks and ear and more blue in the forehead, lower face and side planes.  And the spattering at the end was a very Charles Reid thing to do.

And I quite like it.  The best bit about it is the jacket, being one big, interesting shape, while still being recognisable as a jacket.  It's a pity I didn't make the hair the same colour as the jacket and join them together into a single shape - that would have been good.  And, still on the hair, there are no passages connecting the hair to the face, which isn’t great.  I did manage to link the hair into the blue in the background though.  And that sharp edge between the hand and the background does attract the eye.

It's up for sale.

The Trio

This one has been brewing for a month or so and I've now got it out of my system after buying some decent paper for pencil drawing (and possibly for inktense pencil too).

It's a tribute to the late Ennio Morricone who wrote (among many other things) the soundtrack to The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.  Together with director Sergio Leone, he created the greatest ever shootout in a Western film.  Only the one shot but the music and the way the camera darts between th three protagonists is just genius.  And that's why this drawing is called The Trio.  It's named after the music that set the whole tone for the gunfight.

I quite like this one.  The character from The Man With No Name (top) and Angel Eyes (middle) come through.  Tuco at the bottom is the worst of the three, even if those wide open eyes do make him instantly recognisable.  So, yes, this is up for sale.

This didn't take long.  I have the gazebo up in the garden, so I'm going to have a go at some sort of painting next.

Painting By Design, Charles Reid - Book Review

This 144-page paperback is one of those books that's difficult to categorise.  The title and subtitle on the front page make it sound like it's all about composition, which it definitely isn’t.  It's actually about other things but it's difficult to pinpoint what exactly.  I should point out, by the way, that I knew all this before adding the book to my wishlist.

The book starts off talking about contour drawing.  In fact all four of the recently republished Charles Reid books do this, which makes me wonder how much duplication there is between books.  Within this, there are hints about what's to come, when Charles talks about merging shadowy sides and cast shadows together into single shapes, even when they're different objects.  And not drawing edges between objects if they're hidden by shadow.  But then he tells us contour drawing can look a bit stiff and talks about gestural, rhythmic sketching as an alternative.  Obviously the best strategy is a combination.

And then we get on to painting.  There seem to be two main focuses, sorry foci, here.  One is portrait painting, with the chapters on figures and faces taking up about 30% of the book.  And the other is painting like Charles, with a big emphasis on lost edges.  Where two shapes have similar values, Charles likes to blend them together, even if they have different colours.  And even if two shapes have different values, Charles likes to blend them together, but this means graduating values within shapes: the dark shape has to get lighter and the light shape darker as they approach the join.  But not all edges are blurred like this.  In particular, the edges in and around the focal point of the painting need to be sharp and accurate.

So it's not really clear whether this is about portrait painting or about painting like Charles. Or how the drawing chapter fits in.  But somehow it all fits together.  And I think it's because Charles has done the same trick as Frank Webb and applied his painting style to the writing of the book.  The chapters don't have hard edges but instead blend into each other.  Not in a haphazard, disorganised way, but in a beautiful floaty Irish cream way.  It actually made for a great read.

What about the content though?  Well, there aren’t that many big ideas in the book.  It's all about getting values right and using soft edges where you don't want the eye to dwell too long.  And these ideas are illustrated by using lots of examples.  On the other hand, there are a lot of little nuggety tips within this book.  Little tricks of the trade that I've never seen mentioned in other books, especially in the chapter on faces.  So many other books talk about how to draw eyes, ears, noses, etc but Charles doesn't do that.  He talks about how to draw faces and includes some amazing tips.

This is a really good book.  Full of interesting tips, introducing a style of painting that I want to try and acting as a gentle introduction to painting (rather than drawing or sketching) people.  It's expensive but worth every penny.  I don't have any of Charles' other books so can't comment on its attributes relative to them but looking at this in isolation, it's a five paletter.

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Strengthen Your Paintings With Dynamic Composition, Frank Webb - Book Review

Now this is interesting.  I just assumed that all books on composition were going to be similar, covering the same sort of stuff.  The only book I'd read on composition before this was the one by Ian Roberts.  It was a book that looked at composition at quite a high level, focusing on armatures and on the viewer's journey through a painting.  This book is so different to Ian's and has so little in common with it that I think the two would work well as complements.

Frank digs down to a lower level than Ian.  Frank's starting point is seven types of mark (line, shape, value, colour, texture, size, direction) and seven ideas (unity, contrast, dominance, repetition, harmony, balance, gradation).  And the book just explores these.  There's a chapter on each of those seven types of mark (and, yes, I know that's bad terminology on Frank's part - size isn't a type of mark).  There's nothing at the higher, Ian Roberts level, about armatures and where to put the centre of interest.

Although the cover of the book talks about 24 artists showing us how to design paintings, it’s only Frank showing us but using the art of 24 artists.  Most of the artwork is Frank's, though, and this is because he's written this book using the same principles as he's telling us to use in his paintings.  There's variety in the artists but one artist dominates.  Similarly, the style throughout the book varies from the normal style that I expect in a book like this to brief demos to whole pages full of quick fire bullet pointy tips (and some of these are really useful, not just throwaway slogans).  All these changes in pace keep the book interesting, just as a bit of variety in shapes, lines, etc will keep my paintings interesting once I've absorbed everything in this book.

This book is well packed with useful tips.  I make notes on all the art instruction books I read and the ratio of length of my notes to length of the book is very high.  Which reminds me, the book is 136 pages long.  I have it in paperback but I think it's still available in hardback too.  Given how good it is, I'd recommend buying the hardback version.

Perhaps, more than anything, this book has opened my eyes to a whole new way of thinking about painting.  What more can you ask of a book?  This is a five paletter.

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The Happiest Days Of Our Lives

Today's painting is dedicated to the recently departed Sir Alan Parker, who directed (as well as many other films) The Wall, a film featuring all the music from the Pink Floyd album of the same name.  The painting itself is inspired by a single note in the music.  It's at the start of The Happiest Days Of Our Lives.  You hear the teacher shout out "You, yes you!  Stand still laddie!" And there's then a single loud note that always makes me jump.  That's the note.  In the film, there's a teacher standing against a foggy coloured background who disappears on that note, leaving the foggy background there.  This painting is all about that note.

It's not really in any particular key today - I wanted to test out some of the colours in the set of halfpans I got for my birthday.  In the fog there's French ultramarine, cerulean blue (a rare appearance, chosen for its granulation), Winsor orange (new), permanent rose (new, deliberately chosen because it looks pink) and burnt sienna.  The teacher at the top is made of French ultramarine, Winsor red (new) and Winsor yellow (new).  The blackboard in the middle started as Permanant rose, French ultramarine and Winsor yellow but was looking too colourful and not black enough, so I put a thin glaze of Payne's grey over the top.

In terms of special effects, the three panels were divided up using masking tape.  Then masking fluid was spattered over, used to cover the teacher in the top panel and used to write on the blackboard using a masking pen.  I deliberately tried to use Gerald Scarfe-like handwriting on the board and I think it's worked.  Using the mapping pen actually made it easy to mimic that handwriting.  And finally, I added salt to the bottom painting and to the figure in the top painting.  I only thought of doing this at the last minute when I thought the paint was already dry and the salt produced the best patterns I've ever seen from it, so I obviously need to add it as an afterthought more often.

In painting the teacher, I was careful to leave some white highlights along the top and left to make him look a bit three dimensional.  I also extended the line of the cane back into the body, with both a hard and a soft edge.  And there's a blob of yellow where his hand should be.  He worked out well.

Early impressions of the new colours are that Winsor red and permanent rose are both intesting.  I need to think about whether a semi-transparent Winsor red could replace rose dore - it certainly has more oomph but I need to watch the transparency level carefully.  Permanent rose is a cool red like quinacridone magenta but pinky rather than purpley.  Is there room for them both?  Winsor yellow is an able substitute for Indian yellow but is unlikely to replace it.  And Winsor orange was a very yellowy orange, a bit like Indian yellow (actually it turns out to be a single pigment colour, and one of the two pigments in Indian yellow).  Being a semi-opaque colour, it's unlikely to win a place win my palette.

Overall I think this one's a success.  It came out looking very much like the painting I had in my head at the start.  I guess there's not much proper fiddly painting in there but who cares if it looks good?  And I needed a break from fiddling, from landscapes and from restricting myself to three colours.  This one was sold at the 2023 Upchurch art exhibition to my biggest fan as a Christmas present for her Pink Floyd loving husband.  I'm glad this one has found the home it deserves.