Overview of walking Dovedale to Milldale in Derbyshire Part 1

October 11, 2016October 11, 2016Leave a comment

I think this walk is a classic! This is the one that me and my partner always go to when we want to get out into the fresh air, it’s ridiculously popular at certain points of the year and almost everyone I know in Derbyshire has done it.

Part 1 : Facilities

Let’s talk the basics guys, with regards to car parking we got there early at about 10am and the car park was pretty empty, by the time we had made it back at 2pm it was completely full with cars backed up all the way to the main road, about a quarter of a mile back. Brutal if you have a car full of kids and really need to pee….

There is a small cabin in the car park that sells ice creams and some drinks but no proper food. The toilets are well looked after and your standard public toilets to be honest, nothing fancy but exactly what you want when your desperate for a pee!

The walk is relatively flat with a couple of hills half way through, although there’s always a path to follow and steps to help you climb them. I will say that initially the walk on the left hand side of the river can get muddy and a bit awkward with loose stones and on the right hand side there is a proper path. You can cross the river at the stepping stones later on and the path stays clear from there but if you have a buggy or wheelchair I don’t recommend trying to cross the stones. The rivers not that deep but it’s fast and not worth the risk!

Once you get to Milldale there is a small village there that has a small tuckshop that sells hot food and snacks, i don’t think it’s open all year, thought it was open in February when we went.

I’ve created some sketches from my photos of the day, i’m still pretty new to landscape painting so have much to learn but i’m hoping with this practice i’ll get to a stage I can be proud of. All pictures were done with watercolours on cartridge paper. I hope you like them and if you have any sketches of your own, please share a link in the comment section below!

Watercolour Architecture – Using digital software to plan a traditional painting

July 31, 2016October 11, 2016Leave a comment

As an artist, i’m happy to use any tools that help me create my artistic vision. Over the centuries artists have been pretty amazing at creating simple tools to translate the incredibly complex world around them. The viewfinder is a perfect example of this, as is the plumbline: a rectangle with a hole in it and a piece of string with a weight on the end. Awesome.

But, the user still needs to understand the proces of using these simplistic tools. If you don’t understand the idea of negative shapes or how to find a good composition, a viewfinder is not going to make you an artist. It’ll make you into someone looking at the world through the hole in a rectangle.

Digital tools come under this same class for me, although I appreciate they are more complicated to work at times then the trusty viewfinder. For my most recent paintings of Kedleston Hall I wanted to focus on the architecture and how light plays off the different planes of the building. I didn’t want to just draw a fancy house, I wanted to add my own creative flair and vision to what I saw.
So, I kept my colour palette simple. Like, really simple. Three colours in total to create each painting, which would keep things nice and harmonious so I could concentrate on the interesting compositions instead.

In photoshop I adjusted a reference photo to play with tonal contrast and composition, the best way I find to do this is when it’s in black and white. Then I go back to the original photo and play around with colour. This helps me visualise lots of different combinations. Doing it digitally like this is a lot faster then trying to do it with traditional mediums, plus I can tweak them cleanly. The last image above has been pixelated so its easier to focus purely on the range of colours and no the compositions details.

Once I have my colours sorted, I can then choose which colours to have in my palette. From there I do a small mock up to help me figure out the best way to apply them and to get me used to mixing the colours. Then, when I come to create the final painting, i’ve already done all my prep so a lot of the stress has been taken away and I can relax and enjoy the painting process.

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Derby Museums Exhibition: EVERYONE

July 27, 2016July 24, 2016Leave a comment

Derby Museum and Gallery did a call out for artworks responding to the theme EVERYONE – Your place in the world. I have never responded to an artist call out before and I felt that this would be a lovely starter exhibition to enter.

As I want to develop my place to be outside painting, I chose an area of Derbyshire that I particularly liked, Dovedale in Ilam and created a design from a photo I recently took there. Obviously lots of deep thought going on for the idea behind this piece! Sometimes it’s nice just to paint your view of a place, which is what I set out to do here.

I sketched two designs first to give myself some practice and generate how I wanted the scene to look. The top once was too cold but quite cold to the actual colours, and the bottom one was a tad too psychadelic but I liked the idea of addng characters to the composition to give the view someone to connect to. I then sketched the design onto canvas! I’ve included below my rouch sketchbook pages to see the process i went through. Nothing very complicated but it helped to get my thoughts in order and I could figure out what colours mixed well with others and how I could eliminate other colour options that would ruin the balance of the piece.

I used Gouache as my medium as i’m used to watercolours but I want to learn more about how to layer opaque paints, making Gouache the perfect middle ground. They were very easy to wipe off though at the beginning when I was adding new layers but eventually I got my under painting to how I wanted the colour structure to go.

From there I just kept on refining the detail! I wish I had a good reference for a person in this kind of light but ended up having to work from memory and imagination ( dangerous combo when trying to get things looking realistic! ) and the final piece didn’t look too odd thankfully. I used some interactive acrylics for some colours I couldn’t make with my Gouache and for some of the whites.

Walk Draw Explore

Tag: Derbyshire

Overview of walking Dovedale to Milldale in Derbyshire Part 1

Watercolour Architecture – Using digital software to plan a traditional painting

Derby Museums Exhibition: EVERYONE