Colin Ross Jack - Seascape in Acrylic

Demonstration painting - unfinished

What an excellent teacher Colin is. His combination of humour, story-telling and relevant information about the painting process was lively and engaging and he kept our interest in all he was doing. Much of his inspiration comes from the Fife coast, particularly Anstruther, where he grew up. Although he now lives in Worcester, he frequently visits the Kingdom. As my wife spent some of her childhood living on the Fife coast, I know to refer to Fife as the Kingdom.

Many paintings, including today's demonstration, include the Isle of May, which localises them to Anstruther. Some of the stories he told were about his father, James (Jimmy) Jack, who was coxswain of the Anstruther lifeboat for many years, He was rather fond of standing alongside his portrait in the Scottish Fisheries Museum (painted in 1964 by James Selbie). I have to say the museum is well worth a visit as is Anstruther and all the East Neuk villages.

Darkest and lightest values added

He normally paints in oils and uses acrylic only for underpainting but the demonstration used acrylic throughout. He works on canvas and primes it with masonry paint. You can see from this image that he begins with a simple drawing.

Here he has added the darkest tones (black) and the lightest (white). Cheap acrylics from The Works are used for this stage but then he moves on to heavy bodied (System 3) acrylics from Daler Rowney.

You can see more of his work on his website http://www.colinrossjack.co.uk/ though the images there are rather small and do not do justice to his work.

Tonal painting

Having established the extremes of value, he completes the tonal painting with mid-tones making use of Payne's Grey.








Only after establishing the tonal values does he add colour.

Progressing well

Paint is applied quite thickly so paintings have texture as well as colour. Notice the colour palette is quite restrained. He finds breaking waves the most difficult element in these paintings but it was fascinating to watch as he seemed to work quite swiftly and freely with both brush and palette knife for the spray.

This is as far as he was able to go. He will finish this in his studio.