A Different Medium

Part finished Painting

Members were in for a treat as well as something completely different this Friday evening, with a demonstration by local artist Bob Morley. His talk entitled “Working with Emulsion Gouache – a different medium” started with a little artistic history about himself and his transition from watercolour to a gouache/watercolour technique. Bob showed numerous works based on this process ranging from early to current paintings.

 For those of us who had previously seen and admired his unusual style, this was a real eye-opener to how Bob goes about this type of painting. His works are based on ordinary (Homebase – jokingly) white emulsion, to which he adds watercolour in varying strengths.
 Starting with a pre-prepared sketch with a little watercolour added, along with a flat plate which had a huge spoonful of thick emulsion in the centre with small amounts of watercolour dabbed from 5ml tubes in a circle around it, Bob showed us first how to mix the two mediums together. It was possible to get quite a large array of tones for each colour using this mixing technique, which could then be applied to the 140lb paper either mixing with wet watercolour on the paper, or going over dry watercolour. This emulsion could be applied in its neat form over a wrong or unwanted existing colour, and then repainted almost straight away!

 For creating beautiful looking trees, Bob first painted the trunk, branches and twigs, followed by paint with a sponge and watercolour, then neat with emulsion – again using the sponge, then again using different shades of colour. He then repainted some of the branches using a rigger. We were then amazed when he applied neat emulsion with a chisel ended brush between the branches in a negative painting way, to leave white or to re-apply the background colour. Bob demonstrated that any mistakes or unwanted parts could be completely blocked out in this fashion, by emulsioning over part of a hedge to add a gate. The build-up of gouache in this way added a textured look to the finished work.

Bob hard at work!

 Using gouache and a strong mix of watercolour like this, Bob said that it was possible to get really dark coloured areas in his work, breaking with convention often by using black. Another way that he would break with convention was to use a rigger with a dark tone in a linear fashion to add lines in various places, especially in horizontal strokes, which he explained added a peaceful feel to the work.

The evening concluded with us all “having a go” to get first-hand experience with this wonderful technique. Finally, we all got to go home with a handy pamphlet compiled by Bob explaining the technique – no expense spared!

Oil Miniatures

Self portrait - work in progress

   The thing is, with this painting lark, there are a multitude of avenues to pursue. For many years I painted purely in watercolour. It was lovely to push this translucent paint around the paper and watch the colours granulate, drop in other colour while still wet, see happy accidents appear when the paint decided to do it's own thing, etc.

Then I moved to acrylics with its garish colours and quick drying time, and bliss of bliss, opaque paint that you can paint light over dark .

Manic Bluetit - so named, as this little guy started
attacking his reflection in our dining room window!

I've made other excursions into soft pastels, oil pastels, charcoal, gouache and even lino cuts. Each has it's own merits, drawbacks and excitements.

Recently though, I've ventured into oils, a medium that I've steered clear of in the past because having dabbled in it many years ago, it always seemed a messy, smelly medium to use. The main joy with oils however, is the ability to blend colours and also the colour you put down when wet remains the same when dry, unlike watercolour that drys lighter and acrylics that dry darker or even gouache where light colours dry darker and dark colours dry lighter! With oils, the colour remains the same wet or dry. The only drawback (for me) is the long drying time. This is where alkyd oils come to the rescue though. I use mostly alkyd oils because on a warm day, they can be touch dry in a few hours and just about completely dry overnight.

Shady Canopy. One day when out walking, I looked up
and saw this. Here I've used a minimalist approach.

Having started with canvas paper, then moving on to small stretched canvases, inevitably I moved on to larger canvases, doing larger that life portraits and pets. This has gone on for a while, but now something different is happening. I have changed to doing a series of miniature works on six inch square MDF board. Where canvases seem to mop up the brushstrokes, I've noticed that the smoothness of MDF shows up brushstrokes beautifully and can be used to great effect adding texture and form to the work.

I don't know how long these miniatures will go on for - not much longer I should imagine, as my stocks are almost depleted and when I get some more, it most likely will be larger sizes for more experiments!

Right: Venus (Aphrodite). This was painted from a sculpture in the British Museum in London. I've used a split complimentary here with just three colours plus white.

A Fabulous Evening!

Generous with their knowledge, inspiration, advice, and stories MHAC members made appraisal night very enjoyable. Just a few topics included: Ken's painting experience with Terry Harris, David's mark making abstracts which have been accepted into the Alfred East Gallery, Cornelia's watercolour of the Naseby monument with history and painting strategy, Alan's awesome New Zealand water colour, Lynda's extended pictures into the frames, Francis limited colour acrylic painting, and Frank's 'impact portraits'. Everyone was amazed and marvelled at the quantity and quality of his portraits. He recommended that we all take a look at Julia Kay's portrait party on Flickr.

The star of the evening and the 'one to watch,' is our latest and youngest member Eden Coe. At sixteen her work has featured in the Leicester Open 27 exhibition. She shared her thoughts and creative process with the group. The 'pears/pairs' work intrigued us all.

Thank you to all participating members and guests for making it such an informative and enjoyable evening. No more dreary paintings for me; ideas, response and translate! 

Computer Generated Art

computer generated art

I have used the ASKetch app imported from iTunes
 to produce the orchid sketch. below This app is very good for line sketching and tonal input too, on my iPad.



The abstract has been drawn using  ArtRage. This app allows you to use different tools and colours and most excitingly you can fill in sections of your choosing, which is how the abstract shape has many exact colour infills. Thank goodness I have my 11 year old grandson Matthew to help me put it all on line.





I have also used the"Brushes"app, that David Hockney uses. Each app is differs from the other and how to use them too. I can't give a tutorial for each. What I did, was to go to Google search and ask for tutorials. There is plenty of advice out there but it is like looking at art books on how to paint, you really have to have a go and develop you own knowledge.
Have fun!

Simple Step-by-step Guide to Posting a Blog

Publishing a post on our blog is very simple, and this post aims to show you how in easy step-by-step stages.

First of all, you need to have 'contributor' status - just ask me at the next meeting or email at the club, and I'll send you an invite. Just follow the instructions in the email and click 'accept' and you will be up and running.

To create your first post, navigate to our blog pages ( http://marketharboroughartclub.blogspot.co.uk/ ) and click on the orange 'B' in the top left-hand corner (fig.1).

fig.1

This will bring you to the dashboard page that lists all the blogs you can contribute to. You will probably only see the club's blog if you need this tutorial. Next click on the new post icon (orange pencil in fig2.) This will bring up the post editor, where the first thing you need to do is enter the title (1 in fig.3). Now you are ready to type your article in the large box (2 in fig.3)

fig.2

You use can any of the tools in the toolbar across the top of the editor to format your text, or if you prefer, use your usual text editor/word processor and just paste it here. To add an image or photo, click on the little picture icon (after the 'link' button in the toolbar). Now you need to tell the editor where to get the image from, by selecting from the list on the left, or upload from your computer by selecting the 'choose files' button  to the right.

fig3

Once you've uploaded your image(s), select the one(s) you want so they have a thick blue border around them, then click on 'add selected' at the bottom right. They will now appear in your blog post, where you can drag them to where you need them or add a caption.

Don't forget to spell check your post by clicking on the ABC icon in the toolbar. You can preview your post before publishing by using the 'preview' button along the top of the page. This will show the post in another tab, if you are happy with it, close the tab, and then click on the 'publish' button highlighted in orange.
Your post will now appear along with the others in our blog.

Holiday sketch book, February 2012.

We have just enjoyed a cruise to the Caribbean. Whenever I go on holiday

I take a sketch book and a few pens, watercolour pencils and my small

travellers’ watercolour box. They make a light, easily packed painting gear

and for every drawing I usually write the day’s journal. It helps my memory. I

tend to use a pen, which is not permanent, one which will bleed when water

is added. This helps with tones. I usually only get at the most 15 minutes to

get down an impression and then paint later that day whilst it is fresh in my

memory, aided by a photograph of the location.  I suppose I should try 
to use some of these sketches to make a larger completed painting

later when at home.

 

I have attached a look at my recent trip’s sketchbook,

when we were on the island of Antigua. It’s a view of Nelson’s dockyard from Shirley battery point. The bus driver had given us 15 minutes to look around. Nelson commanded the Windward Islands from this base protected by artillery batteries at this point, and others, all able to communicate about French ships approaching, using signal flags. 




                                        
The Naval dockyard is now an interesting museum and docking for some very expensive yachts. 
I use a Daler Rowney 150g/m2 acid free cartridge paper, A5 landscape sketch book, fully bound. It allows me to paint over two pages .I won’t buy one with a ring binding.

The painting on the left here is a watercolour painting on ‘proper’ paper that I did on the previous cruise to St Petersburg. June 2011. That was a different experience but a great one. At least the paint didn't dry so quickly as in the Caribbean where it was a glorious 80 degrees every day we were there, away from the winter blues at home!

Catherine the Great's Palace,St Petersburg  

Abstraction

As our speaker did not turn up at our last meeting, vice-chairman David quickly organised an impromptu workshop, where we were each given a sheet of paper and some artists leaflets and asked to create an abstraction of the artist's work. We were more or less left to our own idea of what constitutes an 'abstraction', other than it should be something very simple based on the original work.







As I feel that art itself is for the most part an abstraction from life, I decided to do an abstraction of a photograph of the artist; well two actually as, these were speedy sketches!




Andrej Kahn was really just a straight sketch of the artist in biro and probably not really anything like what an 'abstraction' should be, but most of us were working in the dark here.


At this point I had a rethink, and set about my interpretation of 'abstraction' with the second drawing of Marc Chagall. This I think is was the very minimum I could bring the photograph down to without losing a likeness for the character, though I know that some talented artists can do just a couple of squiggles and it looks like the subject!


Well, I think we learned something from the evening, even if our speaker didn't turn up, and most of us got some enjoyment from it.