Privates Charles Godfrey And Frank Pike

Again only time for one portrait but today it's a double.  Godfrey was played by Arnold Ridley and Pike by Ian Lavender.  Arnold and Ian were the oldest and youngest cast members and that, along with a decent source photo, was why I put the two of them together.  Apparently Jones is supposed to be older than Godfrey but we'll put that to one side: Clive Dunn was born in 1920 whereas Arnold Ridley (and John Laurie, who we'll eventually get to) were both born in the 19th century, which is humbling to say the least.

I followed a similar approach to that for Lance Corporal Jones, working in three shades of bla k and then coming in with two flesh colours, but I used different flash colours for the two characters.  I wanted Godfrey to look older, so his main flesh colour (almond) is lighter than Pike's (putty).  Both, though, also have ivory in the for lighter skin tones in places.

After all those colours were down, I compared the paintings to the rest of the collection.  And it will come as no surprise to hear that this painting felt too similar to that of Jones, with a very similar colour scheme but lacking that zap of colour that  was in Jones' stripes.  So I had to add some colour.  The source photo had the two of them standing in front of a window in a wooden wall, which gave me the idea of giving the two characters different backgrounds in an attempt to draw attention to their age different.  Godfrey, being in his twilight years, has a plain brown background (reminiscent of a coffin?) whereas Pike, having the world at his feet has more colours, brighter colours and a sunset with the promise of more adventures in the evening or the following day, while also going through his head as he wonders how many more sunsets Godfrey will see.  Look, it's in his eyes!

Overall, a decent effort but a step down from the last two.  I can tell who these two are, even if the likenesses aren't perfect.  And the age difference, accentuated by the background, is that extra little bit of story that I need.

Three more portraits to go and I need to plan the colour schemes carefully.  All three are already looking as if they'll have a lot of blacks or dark greys in them but I need to think about what guest colours to include and whether one or more of the final three need coloured backgrounds to balance this one.

Lance Corporal Jack Jones

Only time for one more portrait today and it's Lance Corporal Jack Jones, played by Clive Dunn.  I picked out this portrait because of all Jonesy's ribbon bars an display.  I made the bars the colour stars in this photo as a tribute all those that served in the British army between 1882 and 1918.  I would extend that range to 1945 but, to be honest, this whole collection is a tribute to all who served at home or overseas during World War II.

Here's a full list of Jonesy's medals which I found at the Dad's Army fan wiki page.  Just reading that list and now understanding what stripes like this mean pushed me towards making them the stars here.

Anyway, after getting down a pencil drawing using a grid, the first colours I put down were those of the medal stripes.  I then moved on to dark greys and then lighter greys.  I wasn't sure at the start whether I'd be adding flesh tones and/or background colours to negatively paint Jonesy's tache and hair respectively.  After having a ponder, I decided that a light flesh tone would do a better job than greys around the tache, so added this in.  Some (not all) of the white highlights on the face looked too bright so I putting some ivory, the lightest skin tone I have in my marker collection.  And then there was the decision on the background.  I thought the greys, the flesh tones and the ribbon colours were working so well together that any background colour would just ruin things, so I left the background white and added some light greys in the hair and on top of the hat where lost edges just wouldn't have worked.  And that was me done.

I rate this one as a big success.  It's not just that I got a good likeness of someone that I thought would be really difficult.  It's the personality.  A bit of suspicion in the eyes but also pride.  And there are those ribbon bars.  It's not often that my artwork stirs emotions in me but this one hits me quite hard.

Maurice Yeatman And The Reverend Timothy Farthing

Next up it's the verger and the vicar, played by Edward Sinclair and Frank Williams respectively.  Maybe not who people were expecting but two much under appreciated characters.  And they were playable characters on the 1970s **** **** board game, so they absolutely belonging this collection.

It was a no brainier to use black in their clothes and to have one huge black shape at the bottom.  With the verger's brown cap and a framed notice board in the background, it was also easy to pick brown as the guest colour in this one.  I also used brown for the glasses frames.  Despite me leaving the odd empty bit for highlights, there's a slight feeling of someone having messed about drawing glasses on people's faces but that's not a big problem.  It might even make them look a bit ridiculed, which added some personality and story to the painting.  For shadows in the faces, I used three different führend, starting with the darkest and then getting lighter.  There are people out there who that say you should putting the lighter values first but these paintings feel like filling a glass jar with pebbles, sand and water.  The only way to do it is big stuff first: pebbles, then sand, then water.  Starting a painting with light values feels to me like filling the jar with water first.  But that's just me.

Anyway, I stopped at this point and took a step back wondering whether I should darken some greys, bring in some flesh tones or put in some background colour either inside or outside the frame.  And O was shocked at what I'd achieved.  I put markers down.  The verger's likeness is pretty good.  In particular his mouth is close up enough to his nose for him to be pulling "that face".  But the vicar's likeness and that sad look in his eyes is off the charts.  And the lost edges in this one are amazing.  I just had to go over everything removing any pencil lines with an eraser and that was me done.

Job done.  Well chuffed with this one.

Private Joe Walker

Next up is Private Joe Walker, played by James Beck, one of my favourite two characters in this TV show.  What I liked about the source photo was the two tone background with a dark colour at the top contrasting with the light hat and the light colour at the bottom contrasting against the dark overcoat.   I made a first attempt at Joe yesterday, again starting with a dark grey and adding some lighter greys for mid values but this time I threw in some dark blue on the tie.

Here's where I stopped working:

I wasn't happy with this one, so didn't post it here, intending to have a go at rescuing things today.  My two biggest issues were the overcoat not really working and the blue in the tie being too jarring, even mod my purposes.

So this morning I identified another problem, which was that the dark grey wasn't as dark as I wanted it to be.  So I went over all my dark greys with a black marker, giving everything a more noir look and making Joe look a bit shiftier.  At the same time, I went over whole overcoat in black, deciding that it was more important that the black colour dominate the painting than that I showed off all the highlights and creases.  I also went over some of my light grey midtones with slightly darker greys.

I did. have a plan in reserve, which was to replace the white in the background with light blue of the dark blue in the tie was still too jarring but I thought it was fine, so held off.  I did., though, add a medium grey shadow on the wall behind Joe just use the amount of white on show and added some marks on the wall.  Both or these increased the noiriness of the painting.  And that was me done.

Just like Sergeant Wilson, Joe's recognisable but the likeness isn't quite right.  And I'm not keen on that black mark down the right edge of his face, even if it was there in the source photo.  But there's that noir mood coming through.  He looks genuinely shifty.  This feels like real life rather than a cozy family sitcom.  The collection's starting to come together.

Sergeant Arthur Wilson

I was away for a few days for a wedding in Leeds last weekend and just started playing in a correspondence chess tournament.  With too much brain invested in the chess and not wanting it distracted by creativity and by a messy desk, the painting is currently on hold.  But I do need to keep in practice, so thought I'd risk some portraiture with the marker pens and kick off a new collection.

I have my eight source photos ready but no real plan for any overall methodology.  Instead I'll take the first few as they come and see which way they're pointing.

First up is Sergeant Arthur Wilson, played by John Le Mesurier.  I wanted to get as much of this portrait as possible done in monotone and selected a dark grey as a main colour.  After putting down a pencil outline (using a grid) I coloured in all the darkest bits with the dark grey.  Once the grey was down it was clear the painting needed some mid tones, so I added these with a lighter grey and with a flesh colour.  And that was me done.

Wilson's recognisable but not perfect.  As is always the case with these marker portrait collections, the real test will be when all eight portraits are viewed together, so we'll see.

I did come up with a second portrait after this one but it's looking a little bit unbalanced so I'm not putting it in a post just yet.  I'm going to take another look at it tomorrow and then maybe make some changes.

Painting Trees, Rob and Siân Dudley - Book Review

The latest of my birthday books to be scrutinised is this one by Rob and Siân Dudley.  It's about, guess what, painting trees.  It's a 176 page long paperback and one that feels quite text heavy.  It took me a while to get through it.

Contents-wise, we have:

- about 20 pages of introduction

- about 20 pages on materials

- about 15 pages on information gathering

- about 15 pages on designing the painting

- about 100 pages of demos

What's that add up to?  170, yeah, that's about right.  Let's talk about those five sections.

The 20 pages of introduction are a gentle warmup for what's ahead.  Lots about why the Dudleys like painting trees, trying to get us excited about what's to come.  Hey ho.

Then we have 20 pages on materials and this is where warning bells started ringing.  Because, as well as talking about watercolours, this chapter talks about water soluble oils (whatever they are!), gouache and graphite.  I was starting to wonder at this stage whether I'd made a mistake putting this one ob the wishlist.  If this chapter's anything to go on and watercolour advice makes up only 25% of the rest of the book, that 25% might be looking a bit expensive.

But before we be get on to how to paint in whatever medium, we have a chapter on information gathering.  Other books, when talking about this, tend to just tell me to buy a sketchbook and go out doing some simple sketches.  That doesn't really chime with me: even for a sketch in a sketchbook, there's all sorts of stuff to clear up after painting in watercolour.  It's like those recipe books that talk about simple quick recipes but still generate tons of washing up.  There seems little point in saving loads of cooking time if the washing up is still a time drain.  Anyway, back to Rob and Siân.  I actually found this chapter quite refreshing.  They talk about how information can be gathered not just by sketching but also via photos, collecting twigs/berries or even just by staring at something and committing it to memory.  And they talk about what makes one different information gathering tactic better than another in different conditions.  It shows us how to think!

Then we have the chapter in designing a painting.  This is great stuff, and applicable to more than just trees.  It's about a process that starts by thinking about why we want to paint something.  This might be to do with light, texture or colour.  Then we have to think about what sort of painting would show off that inspirational feature to best effect.  Which means we have to think about medium, support, size, orientation, colours, value range and textures.  And we need to gather the information we need to create the painting.  In all the demos in the rest of the book, Rob and Siân will go through all these steps.

And finally we get to the demos.  There are four chapters, devoted to four seasons of the year.  Each chapter has a painting of the same beech tree in it, not a demo but a chance for Rob and Siân to lead us gently into the chapter with some seasonal background.  And then we get three demos in each season, twelve demos in all.  The good news is that nine of those twelve demos are in watercolour, with the other three being in water soluble oils.  The water soluble oil demos aren't there to be skipped either: all the discussion of planning the paintings is valuable to artists painting in any medium, including watercolour.  And the demos have given me some ideas about how maybe use my oil pastels differently.

Which leaves the nine watercolour demos.  Wow!  Rob and Siân knock the ball out of the park here.  In both the planning stage and throughout the painting, they keep telling us why they're doing what they're doing.  There are even places where one of them with say something like look, the contrast between these dark and light shapes wasn't as big as I wanted (as discussed in the planning stage) so had to darken this walk (or whatever) but if you don't have that problem then don't darken the wall!  Authors generally seem to finally be getting the message that we need to hear about the why and not just the how.  Another thing I like about these demos is the density of the tips in there.  There are so many tips in there that come from experience and that I just can't imagine any other authors putting to paper.  Tips that are genuine tips and not just techniques.  Little things dropped in like be careful with this colour as it's a bit strong, don't make the wash too wet here because xxx, don’t use opaque colours in your underpainting because yyy, be quick and decisive when putting down shadows.  There's so much useful stuff in there.  I think even those readers who want to just copy the authors, work would be happy with these demos.  Oh, and those nine watercolour demos are all very different and the authors are careful to bring out within them how the seasons affect choices of colours, value ranges, etc.

At the end of the book I've come out feeling like I'm carrying too many ideas in my head to be able to remember without doing some paintings first and then going back and rereading the book again.  It's like going Christmas shopping and trying to make my way back to the car overburdened with stuff and not wanting to drop anything.  This one's definitely a galactico and I'd recommend it to any watercolour landscape artist.

🎨🎨🎨🎨🎨

LumenF

I didn't have much time today but still wanted to do some painting so went for a bit of figure drawing with the inktense pencils.  It's LumenF's debut today as a model.  I think her photos have only recently appeared at PoseSpace because I would have painted her before now if they hadn't: her poses seem really energetic, making for more interesting paintings.

Colour-wise, I opted for just shiraz and sea blue, having found out a while back that they work well together.  I started with both colours together in the darkest places, then the blue on its own for any semitones that were adjacent to the darks.  And that left me with some semitones on right-facing surfaces, where I used the red on its own.  Just add water.  And that was me done.

There's a lot to like about this one.  Lumen's right hand and arm, some painterly marks, the reproduction of the energy in pose.  I quite like it.  The worst thing about this one was the bit of head that I painted and the hardness of the shadow on her shoulder.  For this blog post, I've cropped out the worst bits but the page of inktense works up for sale shows the whole painting, which is only fair.

Anyway, yes, this is up for sale.

Disapproval From Mount Rushmore

Another watercolour today.  I wanted to have another go with the desert supergranulators supplemented with cool blues after they worked out so well last time.  But I also thought that I should start having a go at watercolour portraits after reading a (not great, admittedly) book on them.  So the subject's a no brainer.  I'm having another go at Mount Rushmore.  Remember my first effort?

Colour wise today, the sky uses three blues: French ultramarine, Winsor blue (green shade) and cerulean.  And everything below it uses four of the desert supergranulators (green, brown, orange and yellow).  I didn’t use desert grey today.  With the warm French ultramarine only being used sparingly, I think this counts as being in the key of green warm.

Obviously, with this one having portrait-like characteristics, I started with a grid and put down a really average pencil drawing my measuring exactly where all ten important points on the faces should be.  I also marked out all the dark, shadowy shapes.  I know it's something the boom told me not to do but I don't always do as I'm told.

The sky is pretty straightforward.  French ultramarine in the top right for some violety warmth but otherwise Winsor blue GS at the top and cerulean blue at the bottom - remember that cold blues in the sky make the desert colours underneath look even warmer.

After the sky was down, I painted in all the darkest areas with desert green which, being a mix of red and green pigments is a pretty dark colour.  Once the darkest bits were in, I watered the paint down and uses it to put in all the semitones, including those in the background rocks as well as those in the faces.  At this point, the painting looked like this and I must admit I was tempted to stop here.  But the wife told me to carry on.

While I remember, I should probably introduce you to the models.  From left to right, that's George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.

So I carried on.  I decided at this point that I wasn't going to be using desert grey: desert green was doing fine on its own as a dark color, thank you very much.  I also decided that desert brown, being semi-opaque would only be used in moderation and that most of my cliffside colour would be made up of the semi-transparent desert yellow and orange.  So I started with a watery glaze of desert yellow, being careful not to disturb the desert green underneath it.  And I dropped in desert orange in lots of places and desert brown in just a few.  All my brushmarks were motivated by either shadows, colour balance or textural effects.

One of the things that the David Thomas book kind of told me that I used here was that you can tinker around with lots of layers in watercolour portraits, so I did a lot of tinkering today, along more desert colours over the top until I was happy with everything.  I even used desert green, going over all my shadows fro: the first layer and adding some semitones by putting on watery desert green and dabbing it off quickly with kitchen paper.  Kitchen paper also has the side benefit of creating even more granulation.  And once I was happy with everything, that was me done.

And I'm so happy with how this one turned out.  The cool sky and desert colours gave me the heat I was looking for and there's some  blue vs brown/orange clashing going on.  The faces aren’t perfect like eases but I don't care because there's some personality coming through.  And most of that personality is disapproval.  Washington's mouth being slightly too high making his expression look taut, Jefferson's sideways glance, Roosevelt's disgust and Lincoln being disappointed and close to tears, it all adds up to a Story and makes it easy for me to name this one.  And, dare I say it, I can't see anything in this one that I don't like.  A successful day in the studio today.

This one's up for sale.

Good to see it getting a reaction from Mark Hector on YouTube too 😂

Inverie In Tundra Colours

I didn't stay away long.  I'm back to paint Inverie again, this time using the tundra supergranulators.  I've chosen a different viewpoint and was so loose with the drawing of the buildings that I don’t think the pub on the far left is right, so this is being named after the village rather than the pub.

So, outline down first, looser than normal (I’m slowly trying to tone down the draftmanship).  I made a compositional decision to make the hill at the back much taller than it is in reality: I wanted the hills to dominate the village.  And after reserving whites on the building, in the water, on some carefully chosen stones and spattered on the beach , I was ready to start.

I generally made my way from top to bottom.  The one exception was when I painted in the rooves and some ‘ the windows while the sky was drying.  Anyway, it was the sky first.  I wet it thoroughly, then dropped in loads of colours and sprayed it with the fuchsia sprayet hoping to get a repeat of last time but to no avail.  Maybe the supergranulating watercolours just behave differently.  Still, I did experiment.  Today's discovery was that I can make the sky granulate by laying a bit of kitchen paper gently over it with no pressing down.  At one point I did press down and ended up with a weird spot in the middle with paint out, so had to put down another layer of sky colours to get rid of it.

Next wet the hills.  The big challenge here was to keep them distinct from the sky and from each other and I thin’ I managed to do that.  I might have tried a bit too hard, though, which is why I ended up with some really hard edges along the tops of two of them.

The trees behind the buildings went OK today.  I found myself reaching for cadmium yellow (an opaque yellow but one which seems to go well with the tundra colours) to help the green of the trees to contrast against any greens in the hills behind them.

There's not much to say about the buildings except that I was smart enough to add shadows on any left facing surfaces and under the fronts of the rooves.  And there's even more cadmium yellow in the thin band of lawn in front of them, which I wanted to shine.

Then there's sea wall, painted pretty well like last time by dotting in all the different colours plus titanium white, then dabbing slightly at it with kitchen paper.

And the black and the water were the highlight for me today.  I got the colours bang on; it helped that by this stage my brushes, water and palette were all pretty dirty.  And the salt that I added to the beach worked out well.  I added shadows to the sides of the most important rocks in tundra violet: there are some important rocks in the middle at the bottom leading the viewer up into the painting, although I guess I could have made the line curve more.

And that was me done.  I achieved my two of objectives of creating a scene that looked cold and where the buildings were dwarfed by the hills.  I didn't get the sky I wanted though.  The high spots of this one are the sea wall, the beach and the water, the worst bit the middle right hill which is too hard edged and starting to turn to mud.  Still, the feelings in this one are spot on.  This one's going up for sale.

The Old Forge In Watercolour

I'm back on the watercolours and couldn't resist having another go at The Old Forge in Ivernie.  It was tempting have a go at this scene in tundra colours (maybe tomorrow) but I need to restrict my use of cheat code paints if I'm to keep getting better at this painting lark.

I quite fancied having some sunset colours in the sky so was thinking about using French ultramarine, Indian yellow and Winsor red.  But then looking through my notes to see whether this could give me the purples I needed for rooves, loses these three colours were all warm and would result in an inappropriately hot feeling painting.  So, I switched the blue to Winsor blue (green shade), which my notes tell me should result in a painting that looks cold outside but with the heating switched on indoors.  I've also told myself it makes great sunsets and that there can be some good green/orange clashes going on.  So let's see.

So the scene went down in pencil, using a grid but with a lot less careful draftmanship than normal.  I then reserved loads of white edges and chimneys with masking fluid and masked out the edges of the big white shapes.  I also put a few small spatters over the beach.

The first shape to go down was sky.  After wetting the paper it went down in four bands: blue, red, yellow and red from top to bottom.  The blue and yellow bands have to be kept apart to prevent green appearing in the sky.  But what about the blue and the red?  They were blending together to give an ugly muddy colour rather than purple.  I tried to solve this problem by putting in clouds using  a combination of lifting paint out with kitchen paper and dropping in a shadowy colour mixed from all three primaries.  But things still looked ugly: I'd covered up the boundary between the blue and red bands but the was no link between the two colours and it was difficult to imagine how they might be merging behind the clouds.  So I have up on that idea and sprayed water all over the sky using a cheap "fuchsia sprayer" that I'd picked up in Poundland a couple of day ago.  The paint started running down the page, so I tipped it sideways and got the amazing result that you can see here.

Most of the rest of the painting was done one area at a time and in several layers, starting with an underpainting.  Specifically:

– I've not much to say about the two background hills on the right.  They both took three layers of colour.  I tried to keep the values light (especially for the furthest hill) by lifting paint out with kitchen paper.  I managed to get to the bluish colour with variegation that I wanted.

– the trees along the top of the hill also took three layers, generally with more yellow along the top and darks along the bottom.  It was a mistake for me to put in a hard smooth edge along the top rather than a jagged edge or an edge that blended into the sky – you can see the smooth edge if you look for it.  I tried to negatively paint tree trunks along the bottom without success, so added trunks later on in titanium white.

– the first layer on that orange hillside came out so well that I couldn't bring myself to all more layers.  I just added some dry textural marks after mixing up a dark colour and, late on, shadows from those poles.  Poles that I should really have left out of the painting.

– the trees behind the buildings have just two layers.  The first was wetting wet into the orange hillside; the second was wet into dry with some fairly standard evergreen tree marks.

– there are two layers of paint on the rooves, mixed from the red and blue with the odd bit of red or blue charged in for variation.  Doors and windows were kept simple, stabbed on quickly in two layers.  After the masking fluid came off, I added shadows on left facing walls (including left facing sides of chimney stacks) and under the gutters.

– the sea wall took a bit of work.  After two layers I wasn't happy, so for the third layer I took a tiny brush and covered the wall in loads of tiny dots in different colours (including mixes) until it was full and the spots started to merge.  Later on, I covered it with watery titanium white and gently dabbed off just enough of the white to leave a bit of texture behind.

– the sea and beach took three layers.  As a finishing touch I added some white foam between them in places and a few dark stones.  I was careful to add a dark side on the left of all the white spots that had been spattered on the beach.

And after adding three birds in the sky, that was me done.

There's so much to like about this one.  The sky, the well lit orange hillside, the houses, the beach.  Even those trees along the top of the hill look great if you can unsee the smooth edge along the top of the top of them from the underpainting.  There's also an interesting green/orange clash and some interesting compositional shapes that fit together into a jigsaw.

So what don't I like?  Apart from that smooth edge along the top of the trees?  Well, there are two things.  First, there's the size of the trees along the top of the hill.  I've managed to make the hill look big and, with the hill being that big, those trees must be absolute monsters.  And, second, despite me liking all the big six elements (sky, background, trees, orange hill, buildings and beach) and how some of them work together as pairs, I have a vague feeling that as a team of six they don't really gel: diversity, no make that tension, is a good thing but there might be too much of it here.

Still, I'm my own worst critic and this is good enough to go in the shop window.

The Old Forge, Inverie

This, or at least the building on the far left, is The Old Forge, a pub in the village of Inverie on the Knoydart Peninsula.  It was in the news today because it's just reopened, making it Britain's remotest mainland pub, inaccessible by road and just an 18 mile walk or 7 mile boat trip from the car.  And a big row of white buildings in front of a huge hill always makes for a good painting.  I used the tinted charcoals today but I'll be back with watercolours soon, maybe as soon as tomorrow.

I used mainly the charcoal pencils, resorting to the XL blocks only in the sky and in the sea in the bottom right.  I used white paper as I wanted the buildings to be white and to contrast sharply against the trees behind them.  For once I didn't blend everything in, instead leaving sharp(ish) edges for rooves and windows and some treetrunk–Like textures in the bottom half of the trees along the top of the hill.  The other technique that's worth mentioning is that I applied colour in the sky in diagonal stripes from top right to bottom left and smoothed it in the same way.  And in cleaning up, I used a big brush to wipe off crumbs in the same direction.  The effect of all this is faintly visible in the sky, giving the impression of  rain falling.  There's also some faint evidence there of an unsuccessful attempt at creating some sunbeams in the same direction with an eraser.

I guess this is OK but I'm still not putting any charcoal paintings up for sale.  It's not just that I don't have a feel for whether they're any good: I'm also worried about my fixative technique and whether I'm ruining paintings.  I'm also starting to wonder whether I'm any good at charcoal landscapes and whether I might be better off trying charcoal figures and portraits.  But we'll see.

Drawing & Painting Portraits In Watercolour, David Thomas - Book Review

Another book review and this time it's a foray into the world of watercolour portraits, surely a direction that I'll be travelling at some point in the near future.  This 128 page paperback was the only book out there on this subject for a long time and generally gets good reviews and it's been on my wishlist for a while, so let's see how it goes.

We start with ten pages of introduction, including a list of materials.  Not a great start to be honest.  A book on painting portraits isn't going to be anybody's first book, so we're already wasting trees.

Then we have 25 pages on design.  So that's things like lighting, pose and choice of background as well as composition.  There wasn’t really anything here that I didn’t know and what should have been 10 pages of advice is spread out over a whopping 25 pages by David showing some of his paintings as examples.  Let's move on.

We then have 20 pages on "using line".  We're encouraged to go out sketching, shown some of David's sketches, given some vague advice on photos and taken through a couple of demonstrations, one with graphite pencil and one with charcoal.  Still no use of watercolour and we're up to page 57.

Ah, here we go, a chapter on watercolour about 25 pages long.  Most of this chapter is really basic stuff.  How to put down a wash, how to blend colours on the paper, how to use masking fluid, colour temperatures, colour wheels.  Like I said earlier, no beginner is going to be buying this book.  What a waste of paper.  Then towards the end of the chapter we get some woolly demonstration of painting from life or from photos and a few examples of David’s work that don't really add anything apart from providing inspiration.  Commentary along the lines of "This portrait is based on a tiny bit of a much bigger photo that I blew up, so I only had something pretty blurry to work from." doesn't teach me anything.

We then get eight pages on hair, eyes, hands and age.  The sort of thing I was hoping to see covered much more extensively.  And there's very little advice here.  We're told to observe the subject carefully and not much more than that.

And we finish off with three demonstrations of the paint-along-with-me variety, with David even encouraging the reader to copy his portraits.  The demos are broken down into loads of different steps and are like knitting patterns, telling us exactly which colours and brushes to use in every step.  But it's all how and no why.  Why are we using these particular colours?  Why are we reaching for cerulean blue at this point?  Why are you telling us to strengthen the shadows on the neck at this point?  Is it because you looked at your painting and saw that the colour wasn't strong enough?  Is it possible that my colour might already be strong enough and not need this extra layer?  Give us some answers, man!

I have two more complaints about that final chapter:

- there's a reference to stumbling on watercolour paint.  What does this mean?  It's not something that was explained earlier when we were being talked to as if we'd never picked up a brush before

- and the quality of the paintings in these demos isn't great.  I think David knows this because that's the only reason I can think of for him redoing all three and showing us both finished versions in all three cases.

What about the voice and the inspiration?  The voice didn’t really come through.  I didn't detect much passion and felt as it I was being talked down to a lot of the time.  Inspiration-wise there's a lot of very good work in here but it's stuff that I don't feel any closer to being able to paint than I did before I read the book.

So, yeah, not great.  For portraiture in any medium I'd recommend going for the William Maughan book and, if wanting to do portraits in watercolour, supplementing this with either Painting By Design or The Natural Way To Paint by Charles Reid, both of which include far more advice on watercolour portraits than you'll find here, including much better explanations of how to mix flesh tones.  Of the two Charles Reid books, The Natural Way To Paint is the more people focused, even if it covers figures as well as portraits.  There are a couple of new books coming out in 2023 on watercolour portraits that I'm hoping I can learn more from and these have both gone onto my Amazon List. 

This, for me, is an easy one palette.  I feel angry just writing up this review.  If you want to read a calmer and more polite review (albeit one along very similar lines), check out this one by Theo Yi Chie.

🎨

<Edit: Hiroko Shibasaki has written a great book on watercolour portraits of you like to paint using realistic colours 

and Liz Chaderton's book would make a great complement to the Bill Maughan book if you prefer to paint impressionistically.>

Torre Nubia

After that View From Ardtinish Castle, that dear old boy Howard has done it again and come up with another amazing holiday photo made up of simple shapes and with with a vivid blue sky.  And that means he's inspired another painting.  This is Torre Nubia, near Trapani on the Western tip of Sicily.  It's an old watchtower dating from the century and overlooks salt lakes that have a distinctive pink colour.

Colours were easy to choose today.  I needed a vivid cool blue for the sky, so that was Winsor blue green shade.  To give it a tamer cool blue to blend into lower down, I went for cerulean blue.  I went for rose dore for some much needed pink.  And after looking at the oranges and greens I could get from triads containing Winsor blue GS and rose dore, I decided that raw sienna was the best choice of yellow.  I also threw in burnt sienna to help be get the right colours for the tower and later used some Winsor red in the lake when the rose dore was getting overpowered by blues.  With a cool yellow, two cool blues and three warm reds, this is in the key of green warm.

I started by putting down a drawing with some pretty accurate craftsmanship.  I added some highlights with masking fluid and then gently stroked a candle over the stonework along the edge of the lake, not expecting it to have much effect.

Then I stared on the colours, going from top to bottom.  The sky was Winsor blue GS at the top and cerulean blue at the horizon.  I wanted some vestiges of purple at the very top and should have put in some French ultramarine like I did for The Mukurob but instead tried dropping in some rose dore.  The rose dore looked so horrible and blotchy that I added a second layer of colour all over the sky which I didn’t mind as I wanted the sky to be vivid and because (as it turned out) this made the left face of the tower look especially sunny.  While the sky was wet, I adding some of the greenery on the horizon and allowing it to blend in.

Next after the sky was the tower.  This was always going to be two or three layers of paint.  The shadowy side took three layers, the final layer having various primaries charged in in places for a bit of variation.  The bright side only needed two layers and I was sorely tempted to stick with just the one layer after first coat came out really well.  And after the tower, I filled in all the flat lands on both sides of it, right down to the river line.

I was actually being quite patient up to this point, enjoying a sneaky bit of dad dancing waiting for paint to dry before adding more layers.  But when it came to the water I had to act fast.  Everything had to be painted wet into wet and allowed to blend on the paper.  So that was some stone and grass reflections along the top, cerulean blue water underneath it, Winsor blue GS under that, rose dore salty water at y; bottom and reflections of the sunny and shadowy sides of the Tower in the middle.  I found that the blues were running down into the pink at the bottom and turning it into a muddy neutral colour, so I found myself adding a second layer with Winsor red to get a stronger red that could compete against the blues.  I also put in some horizontal ripples by lifting off paint with kitchen paper. 

As an afterthought I threw some salt in the lake when it was almost dry.  Then when everything was dry I rubbed off all the salt and masking fluid and out raw sienna over any white highlights that I thought were too strong.  And that was me done.

And this came out pretty well I reckon.  There's lots to like about it:

- the textures on the stones that the candle unexpectedly created

- the salty marks in what's actually supposed to be salty water

- a bit of pink in the lake.  Maybe not as much as I wanted but it's not too much, which is a good thing.

- an acceptable reflection in the water

- some good, unsaturated greens along the back.  Liron Yanconsky would appreciate these

- and, most if all, the light in the painting.  The dark values sky and the shadow on the right of the tower make the left side look like it's in bright sunshine.

So, yes, this one has to go in the shop window.

Breaking The Rules Of Watercolour, Shirley Trevena - Book Review

Another book review and, for the second time in a row, it's a book that had a different focus to what I was expecting.  I did put this book on my wishlist a good few years ago then, after seeing it in a shop and having a flickthrough, decided I didn't like the artwork in it.  Then, a couple of years ago, I decided I did like it and out it back on my list, right up near the top. I guess it's one of those books that you need to be ready for and that it takes a while to get to that position as an artist.

Yeah, anyway, this book wasn't what I was expecting.  I don’t know whether that's because I never knew what this book was about or because I did know once but forgot.  With a name like Breaking The Rules Of Watercolour and chapter headings that sound as if each one concerns breaking a particular rule, this sounds like one of those books that's all about freshening up your watercolours.  New ideas to make your work different.  Like a book by, say, Ann Blockley or Gordon MacKenzie.  But it's not.

No, this is a book about painting abstracts.  In particular, almost all the work in here is abstractified still life (although there's a bit of landscape too).  There's no big chunky bits of of advice here either: it's just Shirley talking through ten of her paintings.  And these aren't those "paint along with me" knitting pattern exercises that I hate.  In fact I wouldn't even all them demonstrations.  Because they're not about how Shirley painted them: they're about how Shirley thought her way through them.  How she picked the subject, where she started painting, how she changed her mind in the middle and why, how she arranged objects in the painting, how she arranged colours and set up balances and clashes.  It's all the sort of stuff that I'm interested in hearing about, especially for an abstract painting.

It’s not a book that's easy to take notes on.  It's a book to immerse yourself in.  Like Spock on Star Trek doing a mind meld, this is about getting into Shirley's head.  Finding out not what she's thinking but how and why she's thinking particular things.  You come out at the end of the book thinking differently rather than knowing new stuff.  It's so hard to explain.

But I know now that this is a book about abstracts that I definitely needed.  Painting abstracts is one of those subjects where understanding all the thought put into is so much more important than just understanding how to draw or make brisk marks or add textures, making it very different to other forms of artwork.  And this book is a great way to learn about abstracts.

As for the other things that I always talk about:

- this is a 128-page hardback

- the book has a voice.  That should be obvious as we're really getting into Shirley's head.

- is the artwork inspiring?  Maybe a little.  But should it be?  This is a book on abstracts - we should all be doing our own thing.

Anyway, this review looks a bit all over the place and not focused.  But that's because this isn't a book of nicely organised and ordered tips: it's ten random journeys through somebody's brain, sometimes taking in the same scenes.  I can't chop it up into well defined sections.

I do need to give it a score though.  Although this is really is a very good book and the first of its type that I've seen, I don't think it's a galactico, so it gets four palettes here (and five stars on Amazon).

🎨🎨🎨🎨

View From Ardtornish Castle

An old mate from Uni, Howard, was recently on holiday in the Scottish Highlands and Islands and posted loads of photos on Facebook.  The one on which this painting was based was a pretty simple one, with just four shapes with different values.  It was just asking for the charcoal treatment and it got it today.  I varied slightly from the original photo by adding a large moon in the sky, the moon's reflection, some clouds partly covering the moon and a bit of fog drifting along the far shore.

After coming away from the last charcoal painting with the feeling that I'd put on too much colour because the XL blocks were too highly pigmented, I thought I'd  do this one entirely with charcoal pencils, trying to teach myself to build up dark values slowly.  I'm also giving the tinted paper a go for the first time: blue seemed the most appropriate colour, matching the sea, the cold and Scotland.

For most of the painting I worked the four shapes individually from top to bottom, coming back at the end to make small changes to all of them.  The sky was built up from greys and blues, with some purples and oranges in the clouds.  The clouds were really easy to create: I just left white spaces, put in the odd bit of orange or purple and blurred the edges.  The peninsula at the back was built up from greys, greens and purples with some oranges along the top and bottom.  I deliberately made the top edge soft, made up of oranges and purples.  The sea then used the same colours as the sky but with some white in places for moon reflections and foam in the waves.  And then the foreground used the same colours as the peninsula but with more green in the mix.

And then I came to the finishing touches.  I started by putting an extra layer of colour in each shape and using fingers and kitchen paper to rub it in with energetic sweeps that I wanted to show up in the final painting.  The sky was to have spirally swirls sweeping out from the centre of the painting but these didn't really come through.  The downward sloping cliff-like lines in the far peninsula did work really well though.  The lines in the sea are all straight, converging in the little bay on the left hand edge of the painting.  And the foreground has grassy upward sloping textures in it.

The other final adjustment I made was the one I'm most proud of.  I went into the far peninsula and added hard edges along the two closest rocky promontories and blended them downwards, leaving the hard edges along the top.  This brought out the fog behind them, adding to the atmosphere.  And having one bit of the painting in focus and the rest out of focus is always good.

So that was me done.  I feel like I'm slowly getting there.  I'm still not putting any charcoal paintings up for sale, not just because I don't yet have a feel for what makes a good charcoal painting of mine but because I also want to see how my use of fixative works out.  But, yeah, feeling reasonably good about this one.

The Mukurob (Finger Of God)

So after finishing Hazel Soan's African Watercolours I wanted to strike while the iron was hot and paint something influenced by the book.  For African subject matter I picked this rock formation in the Namid desert near Asab in Namibia.  This rock formation no longer exists – it collapsed back in 1988 and Hazel talks in her book about how she visited the site just a few weeks later.  I picked out a source photo that had one side of the finger in shadow, which is an interesting look.  Two other influencies that Hazel had on this painting were the cool sky colours and all the white highlights.

The colours today are the desert supergranulators, supplemented by cerulean blue, Winsor blue (green shade), French ultramarine, cadmium red and a little bit of sepia.  With the warm reds and cool yellows in the desert colours and most of the blue I'm bringing in being cool, I'm going to classify this one as being in the key of green warm.

First things first.  Preparation.  I put down a pencil outline using the grid method, including the outlines of the shadow shapes as well as the obvious edges.  I spattered on some masking fluid, mainly over the foreground rocks and being carefulness make the spatters directional, sloping downwards from left to right in the foreground and almost vertically downward in the neck of the formation.  Looking at Hazel's paintings, I've noticed that she highlights rocks in carefully chosen lines that are part of the composition.  I also added some highlights both scattered around the foreground and down the right side of some of the rocks using a candle – the first time I've ever used the wax resist method.  Again I tried to put the highlights in lines.  I also put more highlights down the right of the rocks like I'd normally do.  After seeing Hazel's work, of course.

Then it was time to paint, starting with the sky.  After seeing in Hazel's book (not just the African one but others too) how hot cool blue skies make the day seem hot, the obvious starting point was cerulean blue, a cool blue with granulating properties.  To keep the painting feeling hot, I didn't put in any clouds and this left the sky looking a bit, well, monotone.  So I also put in some Winsor blue (green shade) about half way down and some French ultramarine at the top.  These two blues are cool and warm respectively.  I think that keeping my brushstrokes at an angle also added a bit of interest.

Then for the rocks, I started with three layers.  The first was made up of all five tundra colours with the grey and green in the shadows and the yellow, orange and brown everywhere else.  I variegated the colours around and tried to get some granulation going by charging in little spots of paint here and there.  Everything was all put on together and allowed to mingle on the paper.

The second layer of colour was applied in two stages because I wanted hard edged shadows.  First I went over all the shadows with the desert grey and green and, only after this had dried, went over all the lighter areas with desert yellow, orange and red.  Again I tried to keep things variegated.  At this stage I also added in some wet into wet foreground rock shadows and background rocky cracks with the desert grey and green.

The third layer was mainly a thin glaze, again accentuating the shadows in grey and green but also distinguishing between the bigger rock shapes with big, non–variegated glazes of the yellow, orange and brown in different places.  I also spattered some cadmium red and sepia over the foreground (too early, with the paint still wet) and sprinkled in some salt (too late, with the paint too dry).

I thought that would be me done but I did two last bits of tinkering:

– I wanted the sandstone to look redder on the finger and in the foreground, so I added a really thin glaze of cadmium red in places.  Not like me to use an opaque colour like this but my excuse is that there was already a lot of cadmium red on the painting, within the desert brown and desert green.

– once the cadmium red glaze was dry, I added some hard edged shadowy foreground stones in desert green and desert grey.

And after removing all the masking fluid and any surplus salt, that was me done.

And how much is there to like about this one?  I wouldn't say that everything I did today was a success (the salt and the sepia and cadmium red spatters didn't work out) but I can say that nothing failed disastrously.  The wax resist with the candle worked out better than expected, the blue sky and highlights make the day seem baking hot, the complementary blues and oranges work well together, the shadows seem natural.  I'm even looking at this and thinking it looks like a Hazel Soan painting, even if her colour palette doesn't look like a set of Schmincke desert supergranulators.  This is my best watercolour for a while and is up for sale.

Hazel Soan's African Watercolours – Book Review

Time for another book review.  This 128–page paperback has been on my wishlist for a good few years, gradually making its way upwards as other books have made their way onto my shelves.  This one arrived at just the right time for me as I have the Schmincke desert supergranulators and and thought this book might generate some good ideas for paintings.  I wasn't expecting to learn much from this one, being under the impression that it was a travelogue, with lots of information about Africa illustrated with paintings but without much painting advice.

The book is probably the most structured book I've ever seen.  It's centred around a circular journey through South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe.  A lot of it's desert there are also seascapes, rivers, lakes, open plains and salt flats.  The journey is divided into ten sections, each of which gets its own identically structured twelve page chapter.  With one exception, which I'll get to.

So the way those ten twelve page chapters are structured is:

– On pages 1 and 2 we get a big painting, a geographical title for the chapter, a short poem (presumably written by Hazel) and an art–related subtitle.  Those art subtitles relate to things like brush marks, texture, composition,…. that kind of thing.

– On pages 3 and 4 Hazel waxes lyrical about what there is to see on that part of the journey and what great painting subset matter there is to see.  And there are some paintings scattered about with a bit of commentary.

– On pages 5 and 6 we start to get some art tips.  Not really related to the chapter subtitle but tips nonetheless.  And we again get scattered paintings with commentary.

– Page 7 starts with a big heading, and it's the art–related subheading that we saw on page 2.   Pages 7–10 then provide lots of painting advice focused around the area referred to in the subheading.  Obviously all illustrated with scattered paintings and commentary.

– Pages 11–12 then close off the chapter.  We have a page and a half of "Safari Sketchbook" with some much simpler paintings to look at and then the final half page is a "Campfire Tale" which normally involves scary meetings with wild animals on Hazel's travels.

The tenth chapter of the book is only ten pages long, with its version of pages 3–4 and 5–6 condensed into just two pages.  This breaking of the pattern upset me.  If you ever decide to rewrite this book, Hazel, please extend that chapter by two pages and drop a couple of pages from the introduction.  It's what this book deserves.

I always say that I enjoy art books more when the author "has a voice" when I can feel their passion coming through, and when I wouldn't mind being stuck next them in Starbucks while it was raining outside.  Needless to say, this is never a problem with Hazel.  The travel talk, the poems, the safari sketchbooks, the campfire tales,…it's a pleasure to read this book with Hazel for company.

I said at the start that I was expecting this book to be mainly about the travelling with a little bit of painting advice thrown in but it turned out to be the other way round.  Most of the advice, though, wasn't of great use to me at this stage of my career.  It's the level of advice you might expect to see in the first book you read after learning to paint.  The market's saturated with books providing advice at that level but this book stands out as unique, being themed around the story of a journey through Africa.  And I also like how it lacks demonstrations or advice on materials compared to those other books.

And, although the book had a different focus to what I was wrongly expecting, this made no difference to the value I got from it.  I was always expecting that the value for me was going to be in the form of inspiration, whether that was from talking about places in Africa that I could Google photos of or from just looking at Hazel's paintings.  And that's what I got out of the book.  I'll probably spot different things every time I look through it but right now I'm looking closely at:

– the white space Hazel leaves on paintings.  How much of it there is, where it is, how big it is and what shape it is.

– some of the paintings of wildlife that Hazel seems to create using just yellow ochre and either indigo or Prussian blue.  If I were to mimic this I'd be using raw sienna and Mayan blue genuine, as I'm sure y'all know.

So, onto the rating.  This definitely isn't a one palette book.  And a book that's all about inspiration and not about lessons is always going to struggle to get more than three palettes however good it is.  According to my book rating policy, the big question is over whether I'd buy this book again.  I'm not sure I would but I do love this book and it seems unfair to only award it two palettes.  Instead, I'm going to imagine I'm quite an inexperienced artist, in which case the painting advice in this book becomes more significant and I start to notice how this book compares favourably to other first–books–after–learning–to–paint.  I'm awarding three well deserved palettes (and four stars on Amazon).

🎨🎨🎨

Queendown Warren Car Park

So here's my first ever charcoal painting.  It's of the entrance to a car park in Queendown Warren, somewhere between Hartlip and Medway Services.  As promised, it's sparse, grim, dusty and brutal.

I had a few difficulties putting this one together:

– it was hard getting the paper to take in all the charcoal that I put on it, even when I tried rubbing it in with fingers, chamois, paper stumps and kitchen paper.  At times I was having to Hoover up all the crumbs from the paper.  Not sure what the solution is but I'll be trying out the tintedw, textured paper nex5 time – this was the smoother, white paper.s

– the sign was hard to get right.  I started by not masking it out for the underpainting, planning on removing charcoal with an eraser.  But the eraser was struggling to do its job, so I put white charcoal over the top and then farmer charcoals on top of that for letters.  But it was difficult putting letters on and the sign doesn't stand out as well against the background as well I was hoping.  Next time I'm masking the sign out when I do the underpainting.

– it took me a long time to get the big foreground shape as dark as I wanted it to be, partly as a result of the paper not wanting to take in all the charcoal dust.  In the end I had to use the black XL block to darken the colour but that shouldn't be necessary.  Let's see how I get on with more textured paper.

The colours in this one are all a bit muddy but I don't mind that as this is going to be my Nebraska/Tom Joad medium as I said before.  One thing I'm less happy about, though, is the lack of empty white paper.  Not just for that parking sign but in the rest of the paper.  Maybe I should have tried adding some highlights with the eraser.

There's one thing that I really do like about this one, though, and that's the one point perspective effect in the sky.  As I tidied up at the end I picked up some kitchen paper and made one last attempt at rubbing in charcoal crumbs but wondered whether I could also blur the edges of the height restriction bar.  And after doing one sweep with the kitchen paper I saw my chance to make things interesting and did a load of sweeps through the sky and trees radiating outwards from the parking sign.  And the looked great.  I would say I stopped there but I did plenty of tinkering in this one, trying to get everything right.

This seems ok as a first attempt with charcoal.  I've not put it up for sale but am waiting until I've used the charcoal a few more times and have some idea of how this ranks in my charcoal output.  I'm hoping, though, that future efforts will be so much better than this one that it never goes up for sale.

Charcoal Swatching

My Jackson’s order finally made it through yesterday so I was almost ready to start using the charcoals but first I set out to the shops.

I headed first to Frances Iles in Rochester, a long standing art shop and gallery that will unfortunately be closing down later this year.  I'd heard a rumour that they were selling off bunches if Derwent charcoal pencils cheaply.  And the rumours were true!  Five pencils for £3 was a ridiculous bargain.  There were four colours that I was keen to add to my collection and I found three of them (I couldn't find sunset pink) so went for those three plus a couple of others that I didn't have.

Next I headed for HobbyCraft.  Just for a look around and to see whether they had any open stock charcoal pencils.  They didn't.  But I did find a set of Derwent XL charcoal blocks for £15.  They're normally about £25 at Jackson’s, Ken Bromley and Amazon and tend to get smashed up while in the post, so it was a no brainier to buy these.  And I bought some smooth white paper to add to the textured coloured paper that had arrived that morning from Jacksons.

And then I stayed up late last night in the studio doing swatches.  I did two sets.  The one at the top on the white 220 gram Seawhite mixed media paper and the one underneath on the tinted 160 gram Tiziano pastel paper (I chose a light grey page).

So what did I discover?  Well:

- the texture really shows up on the pastel paper

- it was harder to smooth out colours on the pastel paper: they preferred to stay where they were on that paper whereas on the mixed media paper it's hard to tell the difference where the colour was laid down after it's been smoothed out

- the XL blocks contain much more colour than the charcoal pencils

- the XL blocks also feel different.  They're buttery, more like oil pastels than charcoal

- the colours are amazing.  I never knew blacks could be so varied.  And that elderberry colour is so elderberry.

- maybe I should experiment with a bit of colour mixing on some scrap paper before starting my first drawing.  I've heard that the white XL block mixes well with the other XLs

- I find myself preferring white paper for its texture and thickness.  After spraying with fixative, the tinted paper is buckling and feeling thinner than I'd prefer.  If t(y could make smooth 220gsm paper in a variety of tints, then I'd be in there like a shot.

Anyway, time for me to get started properly now.