The clingfilm and salt experiment

The last class of the year was a bit random and experimental.

Clingfilm is the bane of my life. I can never tear it properly and my efforts to do so look like a poor score on the Generation Game (if you remember that?) And salt is something I put on food, not watercolours but I was game for it.

Clingfim is used by placing it on wet wash and manipulating the wet paint, creating a texture that’s quite organic. salt, when sprinkled on wet paint soaks up the pigment and creates a foam of white marks similar to ocean spray or a pebbled beach effect if you’re clever.

We had a choice of green beans or shells. everyone took the beans because our teacher had demonstrated using them. I went with shells and pebbles. the colours were amazing but I think I was supposed to use the clingfilm and salt on the background. I used them to 'enhance' the qualities of the shells – big mistake me thinks.

The main shell and stone to the right of it uses clingfilm mainly because  the shell was going wrong to the point of me aborting the whole study and the stone had a linear quality to it that demanded the clingfilm. The techniques saved the shell marginally and I’m happy with it. I used salt on the bottom right stone. This is really unfinished and is still too pale and needs work doing to it.

I can see real opportunities with both techniques and will be trying them out over the Christmas holiday.

Basket case

Didn’t fancy class last night. Still tired from the long haul back from Nashville but dragged myself to class with a basket of fruit under my weary arm.

Having missed a week, I was behind the rest of the students who had all worked up some nice pieces and there’s nothing worse than being on catch up.

The first part of the exercise was to really understand the composition’s tonal values by generating quick pencil sketches.

Ta Dah!

Eat your heart out Cézanne

Once I was happy with the composition and the light and shade areas, I proceeded with a watercolour painting and completely messed it up. Come back Cézanne....

I will work into this more and try to pull out the forms of the fruit more but the basket is a bitch frankly and I wish I had just stuck the flippin’ fruit on a plate.

Impressions of Autumn – Silver Birch

Spend a fair bit of my time at a wonderful Park/Nature Reserve on the Essex/Herts border.  The Lee Valley Park is a great space for nature and getting away from it all. I was attracted by a small patch of woodland that featured Silver Birch. The autumnal colours were beautifully framed by the silver grey lines of the Silver birch trunks. The variety of colours and swathe of lights and darks pushed me towards a painting that is largely impressionistic with touches of Pointillism (I wish)

Flower Power

Had a good evening class last night. To be honest, I wasn’t really in the mood to paint after a long day at work but once I walk through the door everything changed. The class always has a very positive and creative atmosphere and once that paper is taped to my board any stresses from the day are forgotten.

My teacher, Ann, is on a bit of a flora bender at the moment and the room was full of the most vivid yellow Chrysanthemums. One of the students, Pete, wasn’t impressed though. 'I hate painting bloomin' flowers' he uttered. Bad luck mate 'cos that’s what we’ve got I thought.

We kicked off with painting a study of an individual flower head. Again, we worked wet-in-wet and I tried desperately hard not to use too much water which is currently my achilles heel. Using a range of yellow tones and adding purple to get shadow colours was the name of the game here.

 We followed this up with another study but this time taking the profile of the flower with an emphasis on the underside of the flower and taking note of how the yellow tones were different from the first study.

This was 20 minute study and I think that watercolours capture the delicate nature of the subject perfectly. Without creating an 'exact' copy, the effect of the colour mixing and luminosity of the paint produce a quality that I feel gets the true personality of the flower.

To end the class, we were given a quick exercise where we had to sketch a composition in a matter of minutes. This in my opinion produced a lively and energetic study and quite possibly, my favourite piece from the class last night.

Flower arrangement study

This week at evening classes we worked from a still life of flowers in a jug. The idea was to understand the values of light and white space. I think I missed the point of white space though!

Flowers in jug

Cley Windmill – reworked

These are two studies of Cley windmill in Norfolk.

Glass study

This weeks class looked at the myriad of colours and tones you can see in glass. Reflections, show through and distortions all come together to create quite a challenge for a novice watercolorist like me.

Watercolours are unpredictable at the best of times and there was a real battle between wet paint and my dry brush to contain the levels which the paint wanted to disperse into one another.

Wine and olive oil bottles

Cley Windmill – a work in progress

Used a photo I took of the windmill on a recent trip to Norfolk. Looking at ways to interpret reedbeds but the colour intensity of this study is way too strong. I have noticed my paint usage tends to be a bit too bold sometimes.

Autumn Notes

Autumn 1

This has been the most difficult still life for me yet. I think the variety of shapes and colours and the fact I was working with the wet-in-wet technique made the thing quite daunting. I may have another crack at this soon.

Neutral tones. Mushroom and Garlic

Mushrooms and Garlic

Thursday’s evening class concentrated on subject matter with subtle neutral tones. This required a simple palette of Alizirin Crimson, Raw Sienna and Umber, Vandyke Brown, Yellow Ochre and Colbalt Blue.

Fairly happy with the mushroom but the garlic look a bit neglected. I then did a quick 10 minute study of a garlic bulb. Not convinced it worked very well.

Garlic

A Red Pepper Day

Evening class focused on using a single tone for this still life study. I know the first image is in colour because I prefer it to the monotone one below so I put it first!

Pineapple Study

A final study after a week of trying to capture the texture and tones of a whole pineapple.

Pear

This is the first watercolour I did in my evening class. Using a wet-in-wet technique and a lot of tilting of the paper produced some interesting results.