Painting/Drawing Challenge

Here's a challenge for you. Produce a painting or drawing based on the photo showing a knight from my Lewis chess set. If you wish you may send a digital image of your artwork to Knight Challenge. Depending on the response level, I'll post images on this blog.

I set this first of all as a challenge to myself. "I can't draw." That's what I've been telling myself for years. As a result many of my paintings rely on tracing from photos, sometimes with help from the computer. So I've set myself a target for 2017 - I shall learn to draw. Why wait for 2017? I made a start this week with the knight with black card behind and underneath. That helped me concentrate on the figure itself.

I was reasonably happy with my drawing, though I'd really like to get more variation between the dark values and the highlights. Perhaps I need to try ink or paint for the same figure.

Vicki Norman - Indian Townscape in Acrylics

Sketch

What an excellent teacher and communicator Vicki is!

She usually paints in oils en plein air but teaches in all media. For our demonstration she worked in acrylic using as reference a photograph she had taken in India.

A painting usually begins with thumbnails using just black shapes onto white paper to establish that the composition works. When working from a photograph she will also print it first in monochrome as that shows the values and if the picture doesn't work tonally it will not work in colour. The next step is a small scale sketch such as the one shown here.

Drawing prepared for demo

Vicki had prepared her drawing in advance and also added some texture to the upper right of the drawing using a heavy acrylic medium.

She would normally mix that in with her pigment but it takes a long time to dry so she had applied it well in advance so it formed a textured ground to paint over it during the demonstration.

Do take a look at her website http://www.vickinormanstudio.com/ to see more of her work.

Sue Sareen - Domestic Interior in Watercolour

What professionalism from Sue Sareen! She seemed to launch into her excellent demonstration without any sign of stress after a horrendous journey had delayed her arrival. It was well worth waiting for her.

She clearly demonstrated the importance of darker tones to provide contrast to bring light into a watercolour painting. I always think interiors present a challenge because you have to indicate space where you effectively have only fore and middle ground and nothing distant. Her reference photo had the light coming through a window facing the viewer so there was really nothing much of the outside to be seen. She suggested using a photo editing package to manipulate the light in photos as otherwise some of the information is not visible.

She had prepared two outline drawings of the same scene so she was able to first make a tonal painting using just one colour - indigo - and secondly to paint using a range of pigments. She worked very wet, putting on light tones first and at each stage adding deeper tones. One of the advantages of working so wet was that some of the pigment could be easily lifted with a tissue to maintain some lighter areas where needed.

Painting outdoors

My painting

Thanks to Herefordshire Painting Club's invite to a painting day at Queenswood Country Park, I plucked up the courage to paint in the open air for the first time. Why did I need courage? Firstly because I have been reluctant to do any sketching or painting where the public can see what I'm doing. A poor reason really as I've taken part in painting workshops and what I've attempted has been open for other participants to see and comment on. The second reason stems from an incident in 1970 when I had pencil and paper and was trying to sketch some birch trees on the Gareloch. I was held at gun-point by the Naval Provost Marshall's merry men while they established that I wasn't sketching the Clyde Submarine Base and that I was cleared to enter some parts of the base that might be barred to them.

What it really looked like

Several LAS members also belong to HPC and I plan to join when the summer programme starts up again in April. They have a weekly programme of visits to country houses, gardens and estates. I shall bring some leaflets with more details to the LAS demonstration on Tuesday 4 October. If you can't wait then take a look at their website http://www.herefordshire-painting-club.com/

Yet more pics from the exhibition

Here are more pictures from the exhibition. The quality is a bit variable as it was difficult to avoid having reflections on the glass. Some were taken during the process of setting up so the labels are in strange places. We try to get most onto the display boards to overcome a storage problem at handing in and then we rearrange and move labels to a consistent position.

Wrong time

When we set up the exhibition the display boards (heavy brutes that they are) have to be transported from the church tower to the venue on Friday morning and they are taken back on Sunday evening.



This would have done the job well but he only turned up on Saturday!

More from the Exhibition

We had good footfall over the two days, especially considering how wet it was on Saturday. We had 355 visitors, sold eight paintings (including two unframed from the browsers) and lots of cards.

I promised more pictures so here's the next batch.