Stepping Into Second Court

So, after reading that Peter Cronin book. I was keen to put his ideas into practice.  I picked this view from Christ's College, Cambridge because of the interesting shapes and the chance to paint some interesting light on the path.  The main colours today were French ultramarine, rose dore, transparent yellow and raw sienna.  Both yellows are cool, so this is in the key of triadic right.  Why this key?  Well I wanted transparent yellow for the grass and raw sienna for the Fellows' Building at the back.  I didn’t want the green to be overpowering, so picked French ultramarine, a warm blue.  And I didn’t want the top floor of the Fellows' Building to be too purple, so picked rose dore, a warm red.  Cadmium red, cambium yellow and, in particular, titanium white also made cameo appearances.

The first stage of the painting was to draw a pencil outline, reserve some white highlights and put down a watery underpainting.  Here's what I ended up with:

I guess this looks quite like some of the stuff I've seen Peter start with in his first stage paintings but it's far from perfect:

- the little bit of sky showing between the Fellows'' Building and the arch is too dirty: not blue enough

- the Fellows' Building has been coloured too literally, with mainly raw sienna: some blue and red in there would have made for a far more interesting painting

- to be honest, using raw sienna as well as transparent yellow wasn’t really necessary: the transparent yellow could have replaced the raw sienna everywhere

- the shadow on the right of the lawn was added too late and it's cauliflowered

- some reds on the path haven't diffused into the yellow as much as I'd have liked

But let's see how we go.

Stage two is where I needed to start adding some hard edged shapes.  Ideally just for the bigger shapes and not for little bits of detail.  Here's how things looked after I thought I'd finished stage two.

Things were starting to come together but stage two isn't finished:

- the tree shadow isn't there yet

- more glazes are needed on the archway to darken it

There's also a minor problem in that the stones in concrete between the path and the lawn are a bit too dark for my liking.

The last photo I took is the final one, after completion of stages two and three.  For stage two, I just added the shadows and glazed over the whole archway twice with the blue and the the darker bits in the archway with the red.  I also added the blue shadow, which I tried unsuccessfully to combine with the shadowy colours in the archway.

Stage three was about adding detail.  Here I added

- window details

- white highlights (the reserved whites didn't really work)

- opaque reds, yellows and blues in the flower bed (dabbed in rather than spattered)

- some dry blue brushstrokes in the lawn, which I wet and spread out a little bit in places

- some white spattering in the archway to add some magic - a spattering of masking fluid would have been better

I also added a little bit of the red to the Fellows' Building.  This was more of a stage one correction than  part of stage two or three.

So let's talk about the final painting.  The three things that bug me most about this one are:

- how the shadow on the lawn hasn't merged properly with the dark archway shape

- the bit to the right of the path being too dark

- the windows in the Fellows' Building looking too loose and shaky

What I do like, though, is:

- the composition, looking through the archway

- the contrast between dark and light values

- the variety of shapes

- the colours in the archway, including the spattering

- the light that I've caught on the path

Although not perfect in my self-critical eyes, this painting does feel like a return to form.  It's up for sale.

Pure Watercolour Painting: Peter Cronin - Book Review

I first discovered Peter Cronin a few weeks ago when I was watching the first series of the new version of Watercolour Challenge.  It was a frustrating program to watch as every week there was a guest judge and mentor and I found all but one of these judges to not just be a poor teacher but also not a great artist.  Peter was the exception.  His work looked great and his advice to all the artists on the program and those of us at home was always valuable and well thought out.

I was delighted to find he'd written a couple of books: one on sketching and this book on watercolour.  This book is a 144 page paperback with one of those covers that's bent inwards so that it will never go dog eared.  At the time of writing, it's the second best selling art instruction book on Amazon (no doubt because of Watercolour Challenge) and is often unavailable because of the high demand.

I've now bought and read a copy.  Looking at the contents page, it's not until page 16 that we get past all the introductions (I've made it through Olympic opening ceremonies more quickly) before moving on to materials, how to use watercolour and a load of demonstrations.  It's sounding like a run of the mill beginners' book so far.  Is this going to just be another two or three palette book?

In a word, no.  This is one for more advanced artists.  It's been a long time since I learned anything from the materials and how to paint chapters but I was picking up new ideas right from the start.  Whenever I've mixed up watery paint, I've dabbed a bit of paint on the palette, then added loads of water, dirtying my water jar in the process.  Peter talks about starting with a puddle of clean water and adding the paint.  Why have I never thought of this?

And throughout the whole book, there are lots more really interesting ideas, sometimes hidden in the demonstrations, but still great ideas.  I like Peter's writing style.  It's human.  He drops in lots of little anecdotes about life as an artist (and husband) which just kept me reading.  The artwork in the book is inspiring too, and backs up everything Peter has to say in the text.  The demonstrations are prescriptive (do this, do that,…) which I don't normally like but I can forgive Peter this as he does tell us at the beginning that we don’t have to follow his instructions exactly.

Anyway, enough of this box ticking (number of ideas, writing style, level of inspiration, etc).  Is there anything to make this book special?  Well, yes there two things.

First, there's Peter's three stage approach to painting.  I won't go over all the details - you need to buy the book for that.  But his simple approach is one that creates light and atmosphere, something everyone should be aiming for.  A by-product of Peter's approach is that it also takes care of values.  I've read so many books talking about how values are so important and that I should be coming up with a value plan before painting and, to be fair, whenever I have done this my paintings have been great.  But after reading this book, I'll instead be planning the three stages of my painting and the values will just take care of themselves.

Second, this has to be the go to book for atmospheric watercolour painting.  Peter talks about bright sunlight, evening sun, looking into the sun, rain, mist/fog and snow paintings and, in each case talks about what the artist should do with shapes, edges, colours and tones to achieve the required atmosphere.  And in four of those six cases, there's a complete demonstration to illustrate his recommendations.

I have a feeling that this book will be a game changer for me.  I went into it hoping to learn something but worried that I might have picked up a beginners' book.  What I didn't expect was to be handing out five palettes.  Wow.

🎨🎨🎨🎨🎨

The Old Man Of Stoor In Oil Pastel

I'm paying a second visit today to the Old Man Of Stoor on the Isle of Skye but this time with the oil pastels.  This time, though, I'm using oil pastels and am not going to be afraid to go wild with the colours.

I followed my usual techniques in most places, dotting in lots of colours and mixing them with my fingers.  The exception was the big rocks where I made dashed marks instead of dots.  I blended them all together with a finger but didn't get as much texture I wanted, so scraped off lots of jagged vertical lines with a credit card.  This not only imparted some texture but also allowed individual colours to shine through where, before the scraping, there had just been neutrals with little hints of other colours in places.  Maybe I need to re-examine my colour mixing and be much more localised, not allowing everything to turn into a neutral.

The green foreground initially clashed too much with the rocks at the back.  So I introduced some reds and blues to the mix (for a bit of harmony) but also added lots more little rocks than I'd had originally.  The rocks not only temper the green but also help shape the hillside.  The rocks are quite simple: a random raw umber shape on the left and a bit of grey green, light English red or violet ochre on the right , with a tiny white highlight.

I'm not putting this one on the shop window.  The thing I like least about it is the clouds.  They're fine on the right, but on the left they're tipped at a different angle, an angle that would be too steep if applied to all the clouds.

The Trinity Hall Wall

I've been rereading Webb On Watercolour and was reminded of the push-pull technique which I never got around to trying out, so I thought I'd give it a go today.  The idea is to put down the important bits with hard edges but then soften the marks leaving most of the shape white (but still with that hard edge).  If I could do this with lots of bright colours and leave most of the painting white, I'd end up with something pretty special.

I picked out a view of the wall at Trinity Hall, Cambridge.  It's a wall that overlooks the River Cam and is a great place to sit and watch the world go by.  My youngest has been offered a place at Trinity Hall (conditional on A level results) and I'm hoping he'll be able to spend a lot of time on this wall.  Painting-wise, the reason for picking this view is that there are so many interesting overlapping shapes.

The three primaries today were Prussian blue, rose dore and Indian yellow, so this is in the key of orange cool.  Viridian and burnt sienna are in there too and being almost a cool blue and warm red, they very much fit in with that key.

After sketching everything out in pencil, the only remaining task was to mark edges and fade them out.  Maybe also fill in some shapes with variegated washes.  So this is what I did.

I've ended up with something which, if you catch it out of the corner of your eye, looks a bit like a Frank Webb painting,  And there are good variegations and shadows in places.  But I'm not happy.  Here are the problems, most of which are down to poor execution of Frank's ideas:

- some cauliflowering in the sky - I'm not sure how this happened

- not enough white space left in the painting

- not enough white edges against the sky

- not enough coloured edges against a white sky

- too many pinky/orange colours.  The painting would have looked better with some yellow, blue and red edges.  For starters.  But I was distracted away by a voice in my head telling me to use realistic colours.

- poor greenage.  Maybe I could have made this more abstract, with straight edges or different colours.

So, yeah, feels like a bit of a flop, this one, but it's going up for sale because it was really popular in a later survey.

The Call

It's been a bad day today and that means I must have been painting with watercolour.  This bad run needs to come to an end soon.

I thought I'd  have a go at a random landscape or two.  The first one was so bad I’m not going to show it here.  By the time I got to the end I was experimenting with acrylic inks, granulation fluid and blowing through tubes.  I'd given up on the painting and just produced a mess.

Anyway, here's my second of the day.  It's in the key of triadic right.  I squeezed out some French ultramarine, transparent yellow, Winsor red and green apatite genuine, picked them up with a palette knife, spread them on the paper, sprayed them with water and just played around.  Eventually I worked out this would end up as a series of hills, so painted in some top edges using those same four colours.

I forgot two things when I was doing this painting.  First, Winsor red is really strong and a little goes a long way.  Second, the same applies to green apatite genuine.  With the green, I just ended up with a lot more green in the foreground than I'd have liked.  The red was more of a problem.  I tried to wet and dab out as much of it as possible but this was difficult as it's a stainer, so In the end I glazed yellow over the top to turn it into orange rather than red.

I did a lot of fiddling too, including changing a white shape in the sky into a moon.

The end result has some interesting colours in it but there are too many bad points about this one for it to go in the shop window:

- not enough variety in values

- the reds still being too strong

- the horizontal green cloud on the left being at odds with all the diagonal slashes in the sky

- some strange marks showing through on the right in the lightest bit of the sky

The name for this one comes from an Algernon Blackwood short story.

Oil Pastels: A Pause For Reflection

I've just reached the end of my first 12*8 inch oil pastel pad and thought I'd use this as an excuse to review my progress with the oil pastels.  I started with a 6*4 pad just to get used to the pastels.  The eleven paintings I did in that pad are shown above (the other page was used for swatches).  I started off not knowing what I was doing, with the landscape, portrait and figure drawing in the top left.  But then I watched some YouTube videos and learned some techniques.  The next eight paintings were of a much higher standard, especially those two eyes, which I need to incorporate into another work at some point.  So I did learn techniques quite quickly.  But I felt frustrated at working on such small pages.

So I bought a 12*8 oil pastel pad and here are the twelve paintings in it.  I can't believe how competent I've become so quickly.  Some of these look like proper oil paintings.  I'm even starting to wonder whether I should be entering for Portrait a Artist Of The Year because with oil pastels I can do anything.

I will keep painting with oil pastels but I also need to keep painting watercolours.  The one thing watercolour has that oil pastels don’t is the randomness.  That part of the painting where I can't claim responsibility and just have to credit the paints with doing half the work themselves with no help from me.

Interesting times.

James Anderson

I was in the mood to do another oil pastel portrait today and I picked a source photo of James Anderson, the third highest wicket taking test bowler of all time.  Aged 39, he's still one of the best bowlers in the world but was left out of the England squad for the current test series in the West Indies,  I’m looking forward to seeing him back in the side in the summer.

After sketching something out in pencil with the help of grid lines, I got to work with the pastels.  First shape on the list was the cricket ball.  I picked this not just because it was easy but also because there were some fiddly gold markings on it that would be easier for me to to draw before there were wet pastel marks all over the rest of the paper for me to not lean on.

Next up was the head because it's important to get it right.  I went as usual for a James Gurney three colour band face with gold at the top, red in the middle and green and blue at the bottom.  Plus, obviously, lots of white and the pinky light English red.  Once I had something approximating a likeness, I stopped and moved on.

Then I moved on to the hand and arms.  I could see a lot of interesting colours in my source photo, and included them all.  I ended up with arms that were more colourful than the more realistic looking face, so added more colour to the face to get a bit more consistency.

Then on to the cricket whites.  I strayed with the motifs and buttons and then added creases in blue.  Then white everywhere else and along the creases to try to blend them in.  Then there was a long phase of tinkering with white and three shades of blue, using the blues to make the whites look whiter than white.  I added some extra motifs in red but didn't like them, so blended them out with white.  I decided I quite liked the hint of red, so added it in a few more places.  Like I say, this was a long tinkering phase.

That left the sky background, which is made up of white and three blues.  Near Jimmy's right shoulder, the sky was too similarly valued to his whites, so I darkened it.  It's weird to have a sky that's darker at the bottom but it looked ok after I added some clouds.

And then the final tinkering.  This is when I stand back from the painting, identify problems with it and correct them.  The most important thing I did at this stage was to add a dark edge along the top of Jimmy's right forearm.  In the source photo it's highlighted but I'm doing a painting that hangs together, not trying to replicate a photo.

I'm really pleased with the final painting.  There's a decent enough likeness, a good look in the eye and a great grip on the ball.  But I also like how the hair and the general looseness imply pace and how the undulating top edge of the forearm mimics the swing that Jimmy can impart to the ball.  Jimmy's been sold now and I believe he might be waiting until Christmas Day to meet his new owner.

Candace

I'm on the watercolours again today.  In an attempt t find some form, I'm going for a colourful bit of figure drawing as that normally works out ok for me in other media.  Today's model is Candace, making her debut.

I wanted to make this colourful with some decent greens, oranges and purples showing, so went for a triadic left key with Prussian blue, Indian yellow and quinacridone magenta as my three main colours.  There were also appearances for green apatite genuine, titanium white, cadmium red, cadmium yellow and sepia but this is a three colour painting at heart.

I started with the hair going for the Hazel Soan elephant technique.  Yellow down first, then red wet into wet, then blue wet into wet.  I did the ponytail first, to keep it separate, then the rest of the hair.  It took a couple of efforts to get all the hair shapes to similar colours, but I eventually got there and the individual primaries showing up in the hair were a nice byproduct.

Then it was on to the body.  The plan was to put down some simple yellow shapes, then glaze over some simple red shapes, then glaze over some simple blue shapes.  I did this but then also fiddled a bit afterwards where things weren't quite right.  I guess I could have had more green and yellow showing but with lots of magenta vs orange clashes going on, there's some vibrancy in there.

And then I had to think about the background.  The white background looked OK but left me feeling like I'd produced a sketch rather than a painting, so I decided to fill in some background.  I started with quite a watery green apatite genuine with some of the blue and yellow dropped in, some salt sprinkled on and some water spattered over to produce cauliflowers.  But somehow I'd made the background too dark and too similar a value to the figure.  I tried wetting the background and dabbing it out with kitchen roll but the Prussian blue and, to a lesser extent, the green apatite genuine are strainers. I thought about giving up at this point but decided to do some more fiddling and this was the correct decision for once.  What I did was to start by painting over the whole background in titanium white.  Some of the colour underneath mixed with the white but not enough for my liking, so I dabbed all my three primaries into the white in random places and pushed them around a bit.  Mixing with white isn't something I'm ever going to make a habit of, but I needed to do that today to rescue this painting from the scrap heap.  In one place, there was a magenta mark that looked like a bit of tree and horizon, so I added some more marks to bring this out.

Finally, I spattered on some opaques: cadmium yellow, cadmium red and, because everything was looking a little too bright and colourful, some sepia.  I made sure to include more spatters near the bottom than the top.

And then I stopped as there was I'd reached a decent painting and there was nothing more I could do without making things worse.   It’s not bad but the left side of her neck is too wide.  It bugs me enough to not put this one up for sale.

Bridge Near Oswaldkirk

Oil pastels are just too much fun.  Every other painting at the moment is in oil pastel and it's an oil pastel day today.  I thought I'd be ambitious today and paint a scene that a friend photographed and put on Facebook (credit to Cathy).  The bridge was the star of the photo, with lots of individual bricks showing and lots of weird colours showing up in the bricks.

I started with a pencil drawing today.  The perspective was just too important for me to go freehand.  I picked a vanishing point that the bottom wall on the right of the tunnel was pointing to and made sure that all the bricks on the inside of the tunnel converged to the same point.  I'm looking at the painting now and wondering how Cathy managed to take a photo that showed the inside walls on both the left and the right. The painting would have made more sense if I hadn't shown the inside of the left wall.

I coloured the shapes in from top to bottom.  Everything went amazingly well until I got to the walls inside the tunnel.  At this point, I coloured in some shadows on the right before starting on anything else.  This was a mistake - I should have just coloured in the whole wall without shadows but with some bright colour on the right where the sun was shining.

The greenage behind the bridge may be a bit too green.  I should have dulled the colours by mixing in some reds.  The trees in the far distance look good though, with yellow highlights in the left and some branches scraped out.

Somewhere around this point, my iPad announced that it’s battery was getting low, so I took it indoors to charge and drew the rest from memory, nipping back indoors every now and then to check the source photo.  The spur and the cartoony looking tree on the left look good but I don't like the spur on the right.  For the people, I'd pencilled in some shapes, which I had a go at filling in, but I'm starting to think that I'd be better off putting Frank Clarke style "carrot people" in my oil pastel paintings.  I've not yet mastered the art of drawing fiddly shapes with oil pastels.

Finally I did a lot of fiddling with the inside of the tunnel on the right but never managed to replicate the shadow and light in the source photo.

I'm left with a mixed photo.  The front of the bridge is brilliant but the rest of the painting is disappointing.  It's definitely my worst oil pastel painting since I switched to the 12*9 inch pad.  It just about makes it to the sale window though.

Once Upon A Time In The West Again

Time for a watercolour again and today was looking like a good day to be painting in the garden.  After yesterday's success with a Western and the previous failure with a local painting, I was going for a Western again.  I'm back to the opening scene of Once Upon A Time In The West, a Sergio Leone spaghetti Western that worked for me once before.  Let's see how things went today.

I went for the key of purple cool today as I wanted there to be a bit of a chill going on.  My warm blue was French ultramarine, my cool red quinacridone magenta and my cool yellow transparent yellow.  Hematite violet genuine is the fourth headline star.  Raw sienna and Payne's grey also had roles to play (while still fitting in the purple cool key) and the red and yellow cadmiums came on for a spattering at the end.

I made some smart composition decisions today.  The shot from the film was too wide, so I've narrowed the gap between figures two and three.  I left out a tall telegraph pole on the left that would have dragged the viewer out of the painting.  I removed lots of horizontal planks from the fence, leaving not much more than vertical posts - I just didn't think I needed any more horizontal lines.  I decided that the one point perspective in the platform planks/stones would point towards the most distant figure.  And I added a hill in the far distance as the hills on the left and right might have looked a bit boring otherwise.  The left side of the distant hill is parallel to the telegraph wires; I quite like this, although I suspect it might break some composition rules. And I should have changed the direction of the shadows so that the second figure from the left wasn't standing in the third figure's shadow.

After marking everything out in pencil. I went in with the masking fluid.  I protected the outlines of all four figures and all the fence posts, spattered some spots over the station platform, reserved a highlight along the edge of the platform on the right and drew in some telegraph wires with a mapping pen and a ruler.

Next up was the sky in French ultramarine with some quinacridone magenta and hematite violet there to make things interesting.  Hematite violet definitely makes things interesting, with its granulation giving the a cracked but dirty appearance, as if I've dripped charcoal dust on the painting and tried to wipe it off.  While the sky was wet, I laid down a first coat for the left and right.

Then I started on the foreground.  First, I marked the edges of the planks/stones with the hematite violet.  After this had dried, I covered the platform with random blues, yellows and magentas, trying to veer towards blue in shadowy areas and yellow in the sun.  The third coat was made from a neutral mix of all three primaries, painting the platform stone by stone and slightly varying the mix of colours as I went along.  Then I did more work on the gaps between the stones, adding yellow in places and refining the shapes of the hematite violet marks in places.  Then I added some shadows in blue and hematite violet.  Next I put in a single glaze of raw sienna to bring the whole platform together.  Finally, I tinkered a bit by darkening the shadows and adding some random hematite violet to the stones in places.

While waiting for all these bits of work on the platform to dry, I went over my left and right hills with harder edges, added the distant hill and filled in the grassy middle ground.

Then it was on to the fun bit.  I removed the masking fluid from the people and the fence posts, then painted in the posts.  Before starting in the figures, I have them a spattering of masking fluid.  I had no control of the spattering, so most of it went onto the sky and the platform but that wasn't a big deal - the spattering. Pile be removed later without damaging the painting underneath.  And then it was on to the figures.

I was disappointed with the dark that I could make from my three primaries, so decided to reach into my box of spares for the Payne's grey.  Rather than outlining the figures with the grey and filling them with primaries, I adopted a new strategy, keeping things abstract but trying to add a hint of detail, so:

- the grey was used in the most shadowy areas, on the left side of the figures in particular

- the yellow was used for the sunniest bits

- I hinted at borders of shapes (arms, coat folds, bottom of coat, shoulders, bottom of hats, etc) with the Payne's grey, painting both positive and negative shapes.

As a very last step, I spattered the red and yellow cadmiums over the figures and platforms and, once the spattering was dry, rubbed off all the masking fluid spatters.

Final verdict?  This is acceptable and going up for sale.  These abstractified Western paintings tend to get good feedback.  The one thing that bugs me about this one is the values.  That middle figure's feet and shins are all dark, just like the shadowy boards underneath them.  I should either have made the figure lighter to contrast against the boards or merged the bottom of the figure into the shadows, Charles Reid style.  A bit frustrating as I see in my notes on purple cool that it's important to not make values too dark in this key.  Still, I've done much worse and it's good to be able to produce an acceptable watercolour for the first time in a while.

She Wore A Yellow Ribbon

After such a miserable effort yesterday, I had to go back to the oil pastels today. With the watercolours it's still touch and go whether I can produce something to be proud of but the oil pastels seem to work every time.  Was I always a master oil pasteller, or is it just all those years of experience with a more difficult medium (watercolour) that oil pastels seem so easy to use?  I have no idea.  Probably setting myself up for a big oil pastel fail at some point but they say that if you never fail you never learn.

Anyway, it's been a while since I last painted a scene from a Western, so I thought I'd get back on my horse today.  I looked through a list of all the Weaterns I have on DVD and looked for stills from my favourites.  Unlike with the watercolour Western paintings, I wasn't looking for figures to be the (abstractified) stars: I wanted some rolling scenery.  I ended up with this scene from She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, a 1949 John Ford / John Wayne masterpiece.  There were some foreground rocks and a background butte to have gun with and lots of shadows, including a Native American silhouette, to challenge me.  And it was also a scene in which I could see the deep red and delft blue playing a part.

I started with the sky as usual but then, rather than just working from the back to the front, some shapes skipped the queue.  I wanted to mark out all the shadows, just to make sure I didn’t lose them.  So I shaded them in gently with the sides of my star blue and red pastels.  That was enough to secure their future.

And then it was just working from the back to the front.  The butte, the background grass in front of the butte, cliff on the right, hill on the right, cliff on the left, hill on the left, triangle in the bottom right.  Some of these shapes had shadows in them: in all cases I coloured in the shadow areas straight after the lit areas and made sure the two shared lots of colours in common for consistency.

Then there was the foreground silhouette.  This was difficult.  The colour ended up looking quite bland compared to the shadows on the right, so I deliberately added lots of red and blue tones to it in different places.  It looks better now but still not as lively as I really wanted.  It's hard to tell the red and blue areas from the photo I took.  The second problem with the silhouette was the shape of the Native American.  I hadn't managed to replicate the shape from my source shot, not that the shape there was quite right anyway.  I did a lot of tinkering with my shape, both reclaiming and surrendering areas from/to the hillside.  I eventually ended up with something just about acceptable but still blurred the left hand border of the shape for a bit of energy and ambiguity.

Finally, the was more tinkering, adding greenage and fiddling with the edge of the sky shape, trying to get hard edges.  And then I stopped.

I've actually ended up with something I'm happy with.  The hill and cliffside on the right are the best bit, with the shadows setting up a great atmosphere for the painting.  I've caught this bit of the painting out of the corner of my eye a couple of times and been shocked by the realism.  There's also some vibration in there from the complementary reds and greens competing against each other.  The worst bit about this one is the colour of the shadow in the bottom left.  It's a little too muddy for my taste but that's not a big problem.

This one is up for sale.  A no brainier.

BronwynS

So here's today's second effort.  A debut for BronwynS.  I won't spend too long writing this one up.  It doesn't deserve the time.

I stared trying to do this as a monotone in indigo.  Before adding water, I decided I needed a second colour and went for leaf green.  Then I added the water.  I didn't like what I ended up with, so added some fuchsia and bright blue and added the water.  Still didn't like it, so I darkened all the shadows on the body with indigo, ignoring how large shadows on the body have been proven on this blog not to work. And because everything was already ruined, I saw no harm in adding a shadow at the back in bark and brightening up the background with sun yellow and tangerine.

And, you know what?  I ended up with a complete mess, worse even than today's first effort.  It's so rushed that there's even a dribble of indigo ink down Bronwyn's left thigh where I couldn't wait for everything to dry before taking a photo.

That's two rushed paintings today that have ended up as disasters.  It's a fine ambition to try to paint as often as possible but I really to be better at recognising when I'm not in the right mood to paint.

<A few days later and this is starting to grow on me.  There's movement there, as if Bronwyn's leaning forwards and there are multiple exposures.>

The Return Of Jazmine

I'm doing two figure drawings today.  I bought a new cartridge pad the other week for my inktense drawings and started filling it out.  But then a couple of days ago I discovered the that there were five unused pages at the back of my previous pad.  This has upset all my OCD side as my collection of drawings in the pads will no longer be in chronological order.  And I need to do five inktense drawings as soon as possible to finish up that previous pad.

So today, I'm drawing two nudes.  First up is a second appearance for Jazmine..  She's a woman of colour and I can see all sorts of reds and greens in her skintones, making her a great subject.  For colours, I started with bark, baked earth leaf green, Shiraz, iris blue and mustard.  I played it light with the bark, not wanting big, dark shadows.  But things came out too light.  I need to remember that baked earth is quite a light, orange colour and not the burnt sienna clone that I keep thinking it is.

So with things being too light, I put on some outlines in bark, the first time I've added outlines in ages.  I was in too much of a hurry, see?  To try to hide the outlines and add some much needed dark values, I risked a second coat of pencils.  I darkened all the left facing edges with indigo and all the right facing edges in violet.

The second coat was actually an improvement.  But things still weren't quite right.  The indigo and violet weren't really "connecting with" the first coat.  So I added a third coat.  I put some fuchsia next to the indigo and some iris blue next to the violet.  And some mustard between that fuchsia and blue, sometimes with empty white in the middle of the mustard.

Again, this was improvement.  The painting was still far from perfect but any more fiddling would have made it worse.

This is a pretty bad painting.  Its only redeeming feature is the rainbow colours in Jazmine's abdomen.  But there's so much that's bad about it:

- the hard edge on the violet mark on Jazmine's abdomen

- the still visible outlines

- the hair, something that's been going well recently in figure drawings, not great today

- whatever those things are on the ends of her arms (they're not hands)

- just about everything else

This is terrible.  I'm glad I have another painting to do today.  It's already outlined in pencil.  I really need to go lightly on the inks on this one.

Two Trees, Hartlip House

After a flop with the watercolours, I'm back to the oil pastels again, where everything always seems to go well and I can regain some confidence.

This is a view over the wall into the garden of Hartlip House from a footpath that leads from the Lower Hartlip Road up to the church.  I've already painted the bottom of the footpath and the front of Hartlip House where the footpath emerges.  Honestly, this village is covered in great painting material.  And the idea was that this one might give me a chance to give all the greens in my collection a runout.

I didn't put down any pencil outlines today or divide the paper into squares.  Instead I just put down some outlines using light English red, a pinkish oil pastel.  Then, in order, I filled in the sky, the yellowish background trees, the darker overhead branches, the boughs and branches, the brickwork and the ivy.  I scraped out a few lines to add texture to the brickwork.

Delft blue and deep red are officially my favourite two oil pastel colours.  They're going to appear on all my oil pastel paintings and I expect they'll end up defining my signature style.  I used them a lot in the boughs of the tree and the branches and later added a bit of them to the ivy and to the overhead branches as I wanted them to crop up all over the place.  Despite using these two colours and various others, the trees came out looking pink, probably as an after effect of my choice of outlining colour.  Even though the boughs in my source photo had a greenish tinge, I quite like the pink look.  It gives the painting what Ted Keller calls "wall presence".  It's what paintings need to look good on walls and to sell.

There was a fair bit of tinkering at the end, all of it on the overhead foliage and the ivy.  The overhead foliage was looking too light compared to the rest of the painting.  To be honest, if I'd not darkened it, the painting would have suffered from a lack of dark values.  While the foliage was initially dabbed and then mixed with finger tips, a lot of the darkening was just dabbed on and left.  The ivy started as lots of multicoloured spots (most of them in shades of green) that had been individually smudged rather than mixed together.  It didn't look right, so I smudged it using oil pastel strokes over the top that flopped downwards like leaves.  There are white and red marks smudging down and to the left and blue and sap green marks sloping down and to the right.  The marks are bigger at the bottom of the wall than at the top. The texture of the foliage and ivy both need up looking good while not distracting from the boughs of the trees who remain the stars of the show.

This one's definitely a success.  By making the ivy leaves bigger at the bottom and by tapering the bough of the tree on the left, I've ended up making this look like a worm's eye view.  Both of these features were deliberate but their impact was a happy accident, ending up more extreme than I expected.

This painting was donated as a raffle prize to raise money for Hartlip Church.  It was won by a former landlady of The Rose & Crown.  She's married to a highly talented artist and I have no idea whether she was happy to have someone else's art on the wall or was beating her costs on the floor about having even more artwork in the house.

Watercolor: Ted Keller - Book Review

I thought I'd treat myself to an art book after going through a lot this last month and decided to go for the Ted Keller book.  It's been floating around the middle of my wishlist for a while, behind those that I know will be useful and above those that I suspect that, while being interesting, might not teach me much.  The wish list looks a bit more well ordered after buying this book.

It's a paperback and only 136 pages long and its price has been pretty static at £17.99 for years.  So it's expensive looking.  Maybe it's self published.  People looking at my wishlist might have been out off by the price per page, so I think this was only ever going to be one that I bought myself.  Another reason for me to treat myself to this one.

Looking inside the book, from page 85 onwards is a gallery of Ted's work, so there's only 84 pages of tips and instructions.  I was aware if this when buying the book.  It has a high inspiration:education ratio but I was interested in Ted's style of painting, so it wasn't a problem that a lot of my payment went towards inspiration.

Let's talk about the inspiration thing while we're on the subject.  Ted admits himself he has a cartoony style and often exaggerates size proportions but I still like looking at his work.  He seems to apply the paint quite thickly, making his work look more like acrylics than watercolour.  He likes to paint thick outlines around his shapes.  But, most importantly, he's just as mad with the impressionistic colours as I am.  If you like to go bonkers with the impressionistic colours, you could do worse than looking at some of Ted's work.

Then there's the rest of the book with the tips and techniques.  Ted's style in this part of the book was very machine gunny.  There's no wasted wishy washy bit at the beginning about the joy of watercolour with photos of Ted in his garden surrounded by flowers.  No, this is all very concise and bullet pointy.  Bang, bang, bang.  It's like reading the notes I've made on other people's books.  I didn't pick up many new ideas from Ted in reading this section: most of the ideas were ones I'd picked up from other books, good ideas that they were.  There is something in there, though, on selling paintings via galleries that I've not seen in any other books and that might come in useful in future.

Oh, and there was a demonstration of a painting (a portrait of Abraham Lincoln) in about ten steps but with very little commentary and with a lot of work involved in step one.  I think the main point Ted was wanting to make was about not liking a couple of bits in the original painting and lifting out loads of paint before redoing those areas.  Each to their own but this feels like the sort of thing that would ruin one of my paintings.

Then there's writing style.  Those first 85 pages are, like I said, machine gunny but there's definitely some personality that comes through.  Ted's opinionated.  There are techniques that work for him and there are things like perspective and composition rules that he's not that interested in.  I quite like that.  This is all about Ted's style and Ted does make the point that we shouldn’t just copy him and that we need to develop  any identify our own signature styles.  He comes across as less dogmatic and grumpy than Joseph Stoddard, another artist who's book was very much about their own style.  I can see why Ted's such a popular teacher.

I do wonder, though, whether Ted actually enjoyed writing the book.  85 pages of meaty bullet points with no sauce to bind it together, with the rest of the book made up of a gallery of his work.  It's as if he knew he had lots to say but just wrote it down as quickly as possible and then found he had space to fill.  At one point he says his next book will be on faces.  No sign of that book yet, eight years later.  Yeah, I'm thinking great teacher, not such a great writer.

And then we come to the rating.  There are useful tips in there (albeit tips that I'd seen in other places) and some inspiration to be taken from looking through Ted's work.  If the book had cost me a tenner, I might be thinking differently but I think, according to my rating criteria, this is the archetypal two palette book (but three stars on Amazon).  While I don't regret buying it, it's not one that I'd be looking to replace if my house burnt down.  And the price per page definitely counts against it.

🎨🎨

Round The Back Of Hartlip Church

I'm finally back onto the watercolours today.  The weather looked good outside but the rain came along so I moved to the garage.  It would have been easy for me to take the easy option today and run off another abstract landscape but that felt lazy, so I thought I'd have a go at a proper landscape.  Although I did take the second easiest option and did another painting of Hartlip Church.

The main colours today were Mayan blue, rose dore, raw sienna and Indian yellow, so I can't really classify it under a single colour key.  The green apatite genuine and hematite violet genuine also made appearances and titanium white, cadmium yellow and cadmium red came on for late flourishes.

I started with a pencil outline, cheating a bit by dividing the paper into a 4*3 grid of squares and using a ruler to put down some rough perspective lines.  I rubbed out the pencil to a point close to invisibility, then drew in freehand lines with a black rollerball, making sure to include the odd brick.  I then spattered on some masking fluid and masked out the flagpole me edges of the church ready for the sky to go down.

The sky is Mayan blue, hematite violet genuine and a little bit of rose dore.  Those two Daniel Smith colours are just beasts in the sky, performing all sorts of tricks.  I added a bit of greenage against the sky in both sides with the green apatite genuine and some little bits of blue and yellow.

And then onto painting the church.  I started with a very loose underpainting with all my main six colours, generally veering towards Indian yellow in the sun, the blues and violets in the shadows and the rose on the conventional brickwork but not worrying about edges within the church and just having fun.  Then I built up the church layer by layer, painting more accurately around edges.  At the end I put on two unifying layers of raw sienna with a bit of the hematite violet - without the unifying layer, the shapes never look like they belong together.  It's a three step process: underpainting to capture the light, then paint in the shapes, then the final unifying glaze.  That middle step might have multiple glazes.

I added some white highlights at the end but these didn’t really work and have ended up being mixed into other colours.  And I added white, yellow and red opaque spatters at the end.  The red spatters are good but the white ones turned grey (as usual) and the yellow ones may have been a bit too watery today.  I like the spatters in the sky - they make it look like a windy day.

Finally I added three birds in the hematite violet and rubbed off all the masking fluid spatters.

Final result?  Well, I've caught a bit if sunlight and wind but there are some muddy bits in there.  This reminds me of another church painting but feels inferior to that one.  Still, the locals here can't get enough of these church paintings, so this will be going up for sale.

It still doesn’t feel like my watercolour work has properly kicked off for 2022.  If I was picked as a wildcard for Landscape Artist Of The Year and asked to film tomorrow, I'd probably be packing the oil pastels.

Animal Biscuit Valley, New Zealand

I'm still on the oil pastels but it's a landscape in New Zealand today.  Well kind of.  I've been a bit smart today and left out some rocks that weren't adding much to the picture and added a load of grass.  I need to be a bit less reproductive in my landscapes and start making paintings rather than trying to create photographic reproductions.  Even today, there's something in the painting that I should have left out.

One good thing about landscapes is that I can be a bit more free and easy putting down the initial drawing.  With the figure drawing, I've been starting by putting down a 3*4 grid of squares to help me get all the proportions and positioning right.  With this painting, I just put down some freehand outlines with an oil pastel.  Then a second outline when I wasn't happy with the first.

I started with the sky.  I don't like to do plain blue skies, so I put in some clouds.  They were initially sloping down from left to right but didn't really work that way, so I changed them to slope the other way, which is my default sky colour sloping direction, to be fair.  Note also how the top left corner is a sky blue but the top right is a darker blue.  This is something I always try to do with the oil pastels.

And then the rest of the painting.  I wanted to get all the rocks right before adding the grass.  The rocks on the left  came out the way I wanted really quickly.  They look like a chess knight, which I really like.  Then I moved on to the rest of the rocks.  It took me a while to get them looking consistent (not identical - I need to think about the sunlight) with those on the left.  In particular, I wanted the red and the dark blue to show up as individual colours within the rocks.  I got there eventually.

Finally, I added a bit of greenage, taking advantage of the wide range of greens in the 24-colour Sennelier landscape collection.  These came out well, especially after I added some yellow and white flowery dots and scraped out some grasses.

The best bits about this one are the colours in the rocks and the knight-shaped rock on the left.  The bits I like least are the clouds (edges not fluffy bough), the cave on the right (should have been left out) and the grey rocks a bit down and left from the cave (might be the first time I've created mud with oil pastels).  On balance, though, this feels like a success and is going up for sale.

Rory Burns

I noticed the other day that I'd still not used my black oil pastel.  With watercolours, black's a pretty boring colour and a bad mixer.  I can only ever imagine using black in a monotone painting or, even better, in a chiaroscuro painting with only black and white.  Anyway, I thought I'd give the black oil pastel a go today.

I picked out Rory Burns as my subject today.  Black and white makes me think of chess, Newcastle and cricket.  After thinking a bit, I decided Rory might make a decent subject for a black and white painting.  For anyone that doesn’t know, Rory's an opening batsman for Surrey.  He'd had a long run opening the batting for England but was dropped for the forthcoming series in the West Indies after having a bad Ashes tour.  I hope he’ll be back soon.

Most if the painting uses just two pastels: black and white.  Just as with my chiaroscuro paintings and drawings, I started from the darkest areas rather then the lightest.  It's an unorthodox technique but it works for me.  I also added a brown in the eyes just to add a bit of character and interest - I think it was burnt sienna.  The background is deliberately graduated from light values at the top to stand out against the helmet to dark values at the bottom to stand out against the whites.

I found this to be quite a messy experience and that I don't really like using black.  Maybe I've become used to mixing three different colours everywhere and feel too constrained just using just black and white.  If I ever end up using all of the black pastel (and that's a big if, even though that pastel took quite a pounding today), I don't see myself replacing it.  Maybe I'd bring in an orange or a violet.

There were some good things about this painting:

- the rough England badge on the helmet works

- the clothes work again, with the energetic sweep of the neck of the t-shirt looking especially good

- there's a look of regret in Rory's eyes and mouth that reflect the torrid time he had in Australia

On the other hand, the likeness isn't really right and black doesn't really make for an attractive painting.  Which is why I've never really seen the point of charcoal drawings.  But Rory's grown on me since I first put up this post.  He's up for sale.

Annual Self Portrait 2022

It's time for the annual self portrait and after two years of inktense pencils, this year's portrait is in oil pastels.  I have a long way to go before I attempt this in watercolour.

I used a James Gurney tip on this one, which was to divide the face into three horizontal stripes.  The cheeks should have a red tinge, everything above that gold and everything below it blue/green/grey.  I've included plenty of other colours in there too, as usual.  I enjoyed following the contours of the face with my fingers.

The eyes came out right really quickly, which gave my confidence a boost.  The suit and shirt also came out well.  This is the first time I've included any clothes in a self portrait.  Oil pastels make some of this stuff so easy though.  Where I had most trouble was with the ear.  I painted it before the rest of the face and it’s colour didn't harmonise with the rest of the face.  Lesson learned there - do the ear and the face together next year.  It took me a while to get to a background that I liked but repeatedly going over mistakes has left me with an amazing textured look.

I like this.  I'm amazed at how well it came out.  In places it looks like my brother and it's always good when family resemblances come out in portraits.  I don't think anybody will want a painting of me looking pissed off, though, so this one won't be going up for sale.

KylieB Sitting On A Box

Back to the figure drawing with the inktense pencils today.  I've been doing a lot of these during 2022 and I expect people are getting bored with them.  I would have been back on the oil pastels doing another landscape or the 2022 annual self portrait but my white pastel is very worn down and close to the end of its life, so I'm waiting for some new pastels to arrive on the post before I head back down that road.

Anyway, it's a second appearance today for Kylie B.  I picked this pose because of the huge black shadow on and under her right thigh.  At some point, the message will get through to me that huge shadows in source material and, in particular, lots of different shadows that I want to unify into one big dark shape, mean that I should be using markers or watercolours, not the inktense pencils.

Anyway, moving on, I started with charcoal grey in the darkest places, moving on to bark when things got slightly lighter.  I added leaf green in lots of places, sometimes as a third darkest value and sometimes just to separate shapes.  Finally, just as with Gabrielle, I added a bit of iris blue to some of the right facing surfaces.  More blue was added after the first attempt at the painting had dried: there were places where there needed to be more distinction between shapes or outlining of the body.

Overall, this is a flop.  It's that big dark shadow in the bottom half, some of which is on the box, some on the left calf and some on the right thigh that doesn't work.  There are media where it's ok to combine shadow shapes like this but inktense pencils aren’t one of them.  Let's move on.  I might need a little break from the inktense pencils figure drawing.

Torres Del Paine National Park

Enough with the naked women, I'm back onto landscapes.  This is three artworks in successive days, which is pretty unusual for me.

The subject matter is a scene form a National park in Chile that's been on my to do list for two or three years.  I wanted to a landscape using a similar technique to that behind Sarah Ann a couple of days ago, using lots of pastel colours to create neutrals but with yellows, blues and greens being still visible and there being a lot of energy to the painting.  So a rocky scene was always going to be the subject.

And I followed all my usual pastel techniques.  Pencil drawing first, the applying all the pastels before mixing them together with fingers and colour shapers.  In a small deviation from usual, a lot of the initial pastel marks were stripes rather than dots, which made sense for this scene.

After my first attempt, which resulted in an acceptable painting, I stopped to think about what else I could do with it.  This is the great thing about oil pastels (and presumably oils): tinkering can improve a painting whereas for watercolours and inktense pencils, tinkering can only make things worse.  I'm now beginning to understand those artists who have to be told to down their brushes on the telly - something I'd never need to be told with watercolour, having finished an hour before, but that I can imagine having to be dragged away from my pastels.  Anyway, I did three things, the second and third of which I can imagine doing every time and defining my style:

- I added a little bit of yellow, blue, red and green to the snow in places and smoothed it in

- I darkened the shadows in a few places

- I added reds, blues and yellows to the neutrals but left them to show up as themselves rather than neutralising them

I really like the overall result and this is definitely going up for sale.  Watercolour takes years to master but oil pastels, like inktense pencils, are a medium that seems to make you look like an accomplished artist really quickly.

KeiraG

I didn't want to go straight back to the oil pastels today.  I had this feeling that if I did go for them I'd be impatient and rushed.  Better to leave them where they were and go for the inktense pencils.  Today's model is Keira G.  She's making her debut but has another pose that's high up on my to paint list.

I started with a faint graphite pencil drawing, then added the inktense pencils.  For colours, I started with bark in the darkest places.  I then added poppy red to all the hair, being especially heavy with the red on the ends of the strands.  Then I applied some leaf green and iris blue to the body.  It felt like I needed a bit more colour (when actually what I needed was less green) so I added some violet and fuchsia and a little more of the poppy red.

Finally I added the water, trying to follow the contours of the body as usual but also applying some squiggly marking on the ends of the hairs.

The hair actually ended up looking pretty good, with the red colour and the squiggly mark making both working.  And I managed to leave more white areas showing than usual, which was good.  But otherwise, this was my worst bit of figure drawing in a long while.  It's the initial graphite pencil drawing that's let it down.  Keira's right arm looks too small and her lower torso too wide and too tall.  She looks pregnant to be honest.  And leaf green and purple (a) don't go well together and, (b) have both been overused in th8s painting.  This one goes down as a big fail and won't be put up for sale.

Sarah Ann

After a few weeks away following the loss of my father, I'm back to the artwork.  And I'm glad I am.  It was great to spend an hour and a half away from everything.

I thought I'd start by going back to the oil pastels.  It felt like there was unfinished business after my first attempt at figure drawing using oil pastels.   I couldn't just stop there: I needed to have another go just to see whether this might be an interesting new direction.  So I picked out a pose by Sarah Ann (making her debut) and got to work.  I thought this close up pose might be better suited to the pastels, where my finger smudging sculpting might have a comparative advantage over inktense pencils.  That doesn't mean that the oil pastels will be better than the inktenses at close up poses: it just means that if I had to divide up the work between the two, I'd be giving the closeups to the oil pastels and the full shots to the inktenses.  The inktense sculpting with the water brush feels more controlled, so better suited to more complicated subject matter with arms, legs and all sorts.

My method for this one was just to put down a faint pencil outline and then charge in with the oil pastels.  As usual I dabbed in the oil pastels with lots of spots, then sculpted/smoothed them out with a finger and with a rubber tool on a stick where a fingertip was too big.  After smoothing, I'd add on more colour if I wanted to change things.  I did a lot of this: fiddling is a very bad habit with watercolours but great with the oil pastels.  I started with blues, reds, ochres, a very bright yellow and white but it wasn't until I added some sap and pine greens that the painting started to come to life.  I have no idea why this was but I'm loving these greens.  My oil pastel set was put together for landscapes but is great for figure drawing.

I put some white over the background fingerprints because there was one place (at the back of the neck) where I'd coloured outside my pencil outlines and ruined the shapes.  I think this correction worked.  As a very last step, I added some bright blues, yellows and reds in places because I wanted these colours to be visible in the final painting rather than just contributing to mixtures.  I think this was a really smart move.

The impressionistic colours in the final version remind me of the cover to Contemporary Figures In Watercolour by Crane and Butler, a book currently flying high in my wishlist.  The more I look at it, the more I like it.  I rate it a success and am putting it up for sale.