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.