Contemporary Figures In Watercolour: Leo Crane & Joseph Butler - Book Review

This is a really good looking book.  It's 128 pages long and not just a hard app back but a hardback where all the words on the cover have been embossed.  It’s not just the colourful painting on the front that makes me want to keep running my fingers all over the cover.  I bought this the other day after spotting that the price had dropped to £8.70 after being stuck at around £14 in the eight months since it was released.  Honestly, if you have a list of books or CDs that you're wanting to buy when the prices drop to a certain level, you should check out U.K.camelcamelcamel.com and get it monitoring prices for you.  I get no commission or anything like that for giving you that advice.

This is one of those books, like the David Bellamy Arctic Light and Arabian Light books that I don't have  and maybe the Bill Buchman book that I do, where most (if not all) of the benefit I get from the book is by  looking at the pictures.  The artwork in the book is generally fantastic and I find myself looking closely at it, trying to work out what all the marks mean and how I could do something similar with my own work.

I found text in the book, though, to be pretty lacking.  There's the usual bit in there about equipment, mark making and the colour wheel that I already know about but otherwise there wasn't very much constructive advice in there.  The writing style had some passion but the passion was all funnelled into a lot of arty farty stuff that didn’t make much sense.  That's not to say there weren't any useful tips - it's just that they were either given in a very roundabout way or buried under faff.

At about page 100, the authors seem to have run out of things to say.  The book at this point abandons figure drawing and moves on to animals, still lifes, landscapes and saying some nice things about some of the models in the book.

All in all, when I look at my criteria for rating books, this is a two or three palette book.  It feels a step down from some of the other books I've awarded three palettes.  Three stars, though, on Amazon for all the inspiration I get from it (and you'll notice Leo Crane has been added to my list of links to favourite artists).  Palettes are not the same as stars.

🎨🎨

Christ's College Hall From Second Court

The artwork's slowed down this week as I've not quite been tickety.  But I was feeling well enough to do something quick today, so I went for a line and wash painting.  I was also in the mood for something like this after watching a Liz Chaderton demonstration on YouTube.  Liz has a book out on line and wash paintings that's not yet on my wishlist but is on my bubbling under list, ready for promotion in the summer when my main list is hopefully trashed for my birthday.

In the demo, Liz puts the watercolour down first, then the penwork but I did this the other way round.  My pen drawing was much more detailed than I would normally do in any drawing or painting but that's the way to go in this style of painting.   Make the penwork really detailed and then the watercolour really loose.  With the penwork, you'll see I also tried to black out some small shadowy areas.

This painting isn't in any particular colour key - I just threw in whatever colour I liked the look of at the time, and there were lots of them.  First I painted the sky.  I started with Mayan blue and added in rose dore, Indian yellow and maybe a bit of French ultramarine.  It's really loose but I could have gone looser, leaving more white spaces and some brushmarks.  Maybe next time.

And then I moved onto the buildings.  For the first wash, I started with lots of transparent yellow and added in rose dore, quinacridone magenta, Mayan blue, French ultramarine, cerulean blue, hematite violet genuine and green apatite genuine.  I tried to use the rose dore more for the red brickwork and dark colours for the windows, but otherwise just added colour where it felt right.  Again, I think I could have been looser, leaving more white space.

And finally I added a second coat of watercolour: just a French ultramarine glaze for the shadows.  And then I was done,

And you know what?  I quite like this.  It looks like the sort of work urban sketchers put all over YouTube but with a bit of my style thrown in.  It's up for sale.

And there's more.  I enjoyed this one so much I added the Liz Chaderton book to my wishlist the following day.  Along with a set of waterproof black fine liners of varying thicknesses - it was a bit frustrating using just the one pen for all lines and black areas on this one.

Daniella

I would have been back on the watercolour today but there were various things breaking up my day and watercolour requires a bit of focus so I thought I'd carry in with the inktense pencils for another day.  Today's model is Daniella, making her debut on this blog.

Colour-wise, I initially started with bark, willow, baked earth and leaf green with the intention of using these (in that order) as four values and of working from a black and white photo.  Before adding any water, I decided that this looked a little boring, so added some chilli red on the left facing surfaces and teal green in the right facing.

Then I added the water and learned some lessons.  Bark's value is far, far darker than willow, so they can't function as the two darkest colours in a painting.  If I have bark as the darkest value, the next value needs to be lightly applied bark.  With anything else, there's too big a step down.  And baked earth, which I always think of as a burnt sienna type brown is more of a yellowy orange.  The baked earth in this painting was dominated to hell by the bark and the chilli red.  It needs to be given space to shine.  And  I need to stop thinking it as an earthy neutral and start thinking if it more as an earthy orange, closer to the outer rim of those colour wheels that have primaries around the outside and earthy colours towards the middle.  And teal green can be a bit garish, so only needs to be applied in moderation.

So, after waiting for the first coat to dry, I added a second.  I added a light touch of bark to the edges of my bark shapes in an attempt to blend them into the lighter values.  I put some (cool, I greenish) sea blue on top of the teal green to try to bring it back towards normality.  And I may have added a bit more of the chilli red in places.

The result is OK and this is going up for sale.  The biggest lesson from this, though, is that bark might be better in monotone paintings rather than as the darkest value in a colourful painting.  And I'm starting to like how chilli red and teal green work together - they're probably opposite each other on the colour wheel.

Raven S

I was in the mood for drawing today and if I've learned anything over the last couple of months, being in (or not in) the mood makes a big difference to the quality of my artwork.  So I had to get out the inktense pencils.  Today's model is Raven S, making her debut.

Colour wise, I always start by choosing the colour that I'll have in my shadows.  Indigo?  Violet?  Willow? Bark?  Today I wanted to be different and decided that I'd use a red and a blue in my painting but to choose a combination that I could use together to create my darkest shadows.  I went for Shiraz and sea blue: how I chose these two colours is described in a separate post.  I also used chilli red, leaf green and mustard.

Here are the original pencil marks I put down:

I was pretty pleased with these and hoped the water would do them justice.

I then added the water, trying to sculpt the body with strokes of my water brush.  Everything seemed to come out reasonably well although I identified a few places where shadows could be strengthened.  And I did do this with a second set of marks and water once the first set had dried.

This one's grown on me since the original posting.  There are some white areas that seem to reflect the sun, especially on the breasts.  And there's a lost edge on the left arm, which also adds to the sunlit feel.  Most of all, though, it's the way the pose oozes dynamism.  The hand and forearm aren't great but the pose grabs the viewer's attention so much, they just skulk in the shadows.  This one's up for sale.

Inktense Purple Mix Testing

As I explain in the next post, I wanted to test out what sort of purples I could get from mixing the reds and blues in my inktense pencils.  Here's what I came up with in my swatches.  The best purples are all those that use fuchsia as the red (third column).  But what I needed today was a bright (ie non indigo) blue and bright red (which all of them are) that together produced the sort of dark colour that I could use in shadowy areas.  So Shiraz and sea blue is looking interesting…

L Staircase, Christ's College

For my first watercolour in 26 days (!) I'm back to Christ's College again.  This is the entry to L staircase, a part of the college I'm very familiar with as I was lucky enough to be living in room L3 in my second year.  Second years generally lived outside the college at that time, many of them quite a way outside.  I got a room in college for getting a first in my first year.  Let me tell you about the room.

As you step into the staircase, you'll see there's a step down.  This isn't the original design but a consequence of the street level in this part of Cambridge being raised a foot at some point in the past.  Anyway, after stepping downwards, you ascend a spiral staircase.  One floor up you find room L1 with views over First Court and St Andrew's Street and a bathroom that all three of us on the staircase shared.  Up one more floor and there's room L2, again with views over First Court and the outside world and there was (at least in my day) some cooking equipment if we wanted to use it.  And then up a few more steps was L3.  L3 is the room at the top of the College's main gate.  It has a bay window with a view over First Court.  There's a separate bedroom and a sort of pantry/storage room.  With so many people living outside the college, L3 became a hangout room for all my friends that year.  I remember times when I'd come back from a lecture with a load of mathies to hang around in my room for a couple of hours between lectures.  Halfway through those two hours, more people would finish lectures and come and join us.  Then I'd go off to my second lecture, leaving all the non-mathies behind.  After my lecture, back to the room and the people I'd left there would be gone and more would be there in their place.  Crazy, fantastic times.

Whenever there was a royal birthday, one of the college porters would let me know and ask that I just pull my door to that night without applying the extra lock from the inside.  As sunrise, the porter on duty would let his way into my room, climb a ladder through a trapdoor in the ceiling of the pantry to the roof of the tower and put up a flag.  I was never disturbed, being in the separate bedroom.  Anyway, the positive side of this was that I had access to the roof with amazing views through the battlements of the college and the street outside.  On one occasion I built a snowman up there.

Anyway, enough of the history, on to the painting.  The main colours today were Mayan blue, raw sienna, transparent yellow, viridian, quinacridone magenta and hematite violet genuine, with some opaque colours making guest appearances later.  I consider this painting to be in the key of green cool.

I started with a pencil drawing, spattering on some masking fluid and highlighting some whites to reserve, notably in the L and list of names on the wall just inside the staircase.  The inside of the staircase and the Darwin plaque on the wall were finished first.  There's not much explanation needed for these; where I had the mist gun was with the walls and paving slabs.  First I put on some a shadows and dark areas on the walls using a neutral mix of primaries.  I started with quite a colourful initial wash.  Then for the slabs I just used the violet and the viridian but for the walls I used the magenta, viridian, blue and transparent yellow (not the raw sienna at this stage).  The painting looked really bright and garish at this stage but this was all part of the plan.

The next step was to apply a raw sienna glaze all over the walls to try to get them to a sensible colour while not losing the impressionistic undertones from the first wash.  In adding this glaze, I painted one brick at a time, leaving gaps between them to distinguish them from each other.  I added salt and water spatters when I was done.  Things weren't quite right yet and I didn't like how the colours of the walls on the left and right of the painting we’re too similar.  So I added another glaze over the left of the painting made from raw sienna and a little bit of the magenta.  Again, I did this one brick at a time and added salt and water spatters.  This looked so good that I repeated it on the right of the painting.

And then it was all about applying the finishing touches.  I tried to distinguish individuals bricks and slabs by applying bit of blue and violet in places and dabbing in the odd boundary with a neutral mix.  I rubbed off all the masking fluid spatters, then spattered on some cadmium yellow, cadmium red and (in a change to normal) cobalt blue.  Then I added some white highlights and tinkered in a few places and I was done.

And that's it.  Some of the perspective lines aren't quite right and I might have overdone the spattering.  But there's a lot to like about this one.  The blue and violet are amazing granulators and make for some interesting looking shadows.  I like the orangey colour in the bricks (although, in retrospect, I might have been better off with a warm red than with the magenta) and their impressionistic undertones and worn looking appearance.  There's history there.  This one's up for sale.

Tree In Christ's Fellows' Garden

It's been 13 days since my last painting.  I've just not been in the mood.  But today I'm back.  I thought I'd go for the oil pastels as a gentle way back in: it's harder to go wrong with the pastels.  That was a bad mistake though: it's hot outside and I was painting at midday.  So many of my pastels were starting to melt, which made them difficult to use.  At times I felt I was painting in oils.  With my fingers.  So the oil pastels might be given a break for the rest of the summer.  I've put them in the beer fridge in the garage for now, hoping that they'll solidify a bit in the meantime.

The subject today is a huge old tree in the Fellows' Garden at Christ's College, Cambridge.  I was in Cambridge yesterday for a dropoff and took the chance of nipping into my college to take some photos and checking out the latest state of the building works that are going on.

As usual, I put down a pencil outline first, then the pastels, starting with the sky.  I did something different today though.  For the tree, rather than starting with my favourite red and blue, I started with some fairly neutral opaque colours (mummy, grey green and light English red) and burnt sienna.  Only later on did I start adding blues, reds, greens, yellows and white to liven it up.

For the greenery, I dabbed in all my greens and yellows and a couple of blues, trying to keep the yellows near the top for a bit of sun.  I dabbed all my dabs with my fingers, sometimes applying sweeping dabs to add a bit of energy.  And I scraped out a few lines with a scalpel.

And that was about it.  My hands ended up filthy from dabbing  all those melted pastels.  The painting itself isn't perfect - there are sky shapes that don't match their closest other sky shapes.  On the other hand, I like the colours in the tree, especially  near the top where a happy accident has resulted in lighter values and an impression of sunlight.  The greenery is also OK and I like how the perspective in my initial sketch worked how I wanted it to, making the viewer stare up into the top of the tree.

This is good enough to go in the shop window.

Artwork For Sale

Tomorrow (Saturday 16 April) is the Hartlip Craft Fair.  It's open from 9 to 12 at the Rose & Crown.  I have a table booked there and will be bringing along lots of paintings to sell.  My (limited) previous experience if these events is that people would rather look through my work in their own time.  That's why I now have business cards and this website.  So I'm hoping lots of people will pick up cards and come here to look through my work.

If you're one of those people, hello.  Just in a case you're looking at this website on your phone (where it's less user friendly), here are links to the artwork that I have up for sale.  If you're on a PC or tablet, you'll see these links on the top right of the screen.

8*12 inch framed oil pastels and watercolours, £40

Weird stuff, £40

10*12 inch watercolours on crackle pasted boards, unframed, £30

Smaller paintings/drawings, framed, £30 if I can find suitable frames

X-rated 7*10 inch framed ink pencil painting, £30 if I can find suitable frames

Marker drawing collections, framed, various

5*8 inch marker drawings, framed, £20

Shaun Wallace, The Dark Destroyer

In yesterday's Bob Willis portrait, I felt a bit frustrated at how difficult it was to get a likeness using oil pastels when the face was so small.  It was like trying to build a Lego model wearing boxing gloves.  So today I thought I'd have a go at a l more full on portrait.  Today's model is Shaun Wallace from The Chase, also known as the Dark Destroyer.  He's always struck me as the sort person that I could enjoy a beer with, despite only being an accountant.

I really struggled with the likeness today.  I redid the eyes, nose and mouth numerous times.  The mouth was where I had the most problems: the size, position, shape and colour all caused me problems at various times and I'm still not happy with how it ended up.

I'm not that keen on these backgrounds either.  I would leave them out if I could leave a nice white background behind the subject but my paper always end up covered with my dabs, so that idea is a non starter.   Today the background came in quite handy, allowing me to overlap the right side of Shaun's face and narrow it a bit.

I do like the colours today though.  I like all those impressionistic reds, blues, golds and greens in the top of the face and the bottom of the face, even if they don't match after I overworked the bottom half looking for a likeness.  No reaching for the burnt sienna and raw umber for a gentleman of colour!  The sunlight on the left side of Shaun's head is also great.  I also like the ear, although once I've told you it looks like a slab of meat, you can never I see that.

Because of the lack of likeness, this one won't be going up for a sale.  But I'm not going to call it a failure.  The colours and highlights make this a big success - it's just that this was a successful experiment rather than a successful painting.

Bob Willis

Look, I'll make this quick today.  I was in the mood to draw a portrait and decided to go for an oil pastel of the late Bob Willis.  I started outdoors but moved inside as it was too windy out there.

This is what I've ended up with.  I obviously wasn't in the right mood to draw hands properly.  There's no likeness in the face.  It wasn't too bad early on but I thought I could do better so did some fiddling.  The result of the fiddling is that Bob's face is much to dark compared to his arms.  And you can't do unlimited fiddling with oil pastels: you can fiddle much more than with watercolour but you do eventually reach the point where the paint is on too thick and lots of it has been absorbed into the paper.  That's what's happened here: I can't do any more with this now.

The clothes are good and the hair was good at one point.  I did put this one on the reject pile but it started getting positive comments on Facebook, so I'm putting it up for sale.

Katya's Back

It's been five days since the last painting as I've not quite felt in the right mood and I know from experience that if I'm not in the right move my paintings are rubbish.  I'm in the right mood today but stuck indoors, so I'm back to the inktense pencils.  Today's subject is Katya, someone I've painted before.  And, actually, this is exactly the same pose as before but from a different angle.

I went with three main colours today: violet, iris blue and chilli red.  I thought I needed a break from the leaf green that I like so much.  Charcoal grey was used for the background.  The red and blue together make an interesting purpley grey and make me wonder whether a painting with just those two colours would work.

As usual, I was wanting  to leave as much white paper as possible.  I succeeded in that today but I'm never 100% happy with these works.  Today, the violet looks a bit too strong compared to the red and blue and Katya's left shoulder wasn't quite right and needed a bit of retouching.  Still, this feels good enough to go up for sale.

The Road To Glencoe

I risked doing an oil pastel painting indoors today.  This landscape is based on the road into Glencoe from the East.  I've been to Glencoe a couple of times and would recommend the Clachaig Inn as a great place to stay if you like a beer and don't mind being surrounded by people as young as I was when I visited.

As usual, there's not much to say about my methodology.  I put down a pencil outline, then filled up the shaped from the back to the front, trying to keep a good mix of colours everywhere.

I wonder whether I'm being a bit too literal with my values.  I was often looking at my photo and trying to put down darks in the same places as on the photo.  It's probably not that useful having an iPad plugged into the mains as it lets me develop these bad habits.  The mountains didn't come out too bad but I spent too long in the foreground trying to get those darks right.  The foreground ended up turning to mud and had to have some heavy scraping with a credit card.  Even then, lots of mud stayed put because these Sennelier oil pastels do like to soak into the paper.  I ended up putting another foreground over the top but it's still too dark and muddy.

I tried to distract attention from that foreground by turning it into a middleground by adding super foreground in the two bottom corners.  I scribbled in red grasses on the left against a blue middleground and vice versa on the right, then scraped out some marks with a credit card.

What I've ended up with is less than perfect, with the middleground being a let down.  Not good enough to go in the shop window.