Colour play – Winsor and Newton designer gouache

September 10, 2017March 19, 2018Leave a comment

Hi,
So as mentioned before, I get serious creative blocks ATM and end up procrastinating around them rather then trying to start a painting. HOWEVER! I have tried to make them useful for a future where I am painting more again and have been creating colour charts for my different paint sets. I currently have a selection of tubes and pans from the Winsor and Newton Cotman range, as well as the Winsor and Newton designer gouache set of 10 colours. I also have a 48 watercolour pan set from Sennelier which I needed to test out fully. It’s a beautiful set and I mainly went on colour instinct when I was choosing my colours from it, which seems like quite a waste. To better plan my paintings I wanted to have a good overview of how the colours mixed with each other and doing a full colour chart looked like the best way to do this.

I am halfway through the watercolour charts but I have finished the gouache one which I’m posting here ( mistakes and all!)
I really like this set as you get such a vibrant range of colours but can easily tone them down. I used this set for my first attempts at plein air painting in 2016 and again at Gelts woods ( which you can see here. They were good as gouache can easily be layered and highlights can be added in later, which eased some of my nerves and allowed me to just have fun with sloshing paint around!)

Winsor and Newton designer gouache colour palette

Within this set you get

Zinc white
Primary yellow
Permanent yellow deep
Yellow ochre
Spectrum red
Primary red
Permanent green middle
Primary blue
Ultramarine
Ivory black

The primary colours they developed mixed nicely with each other greeting these beautiful clean colours. I have tried all the other combinations yet but you can see that mixing Ultramarine with primary red still makes a strong clean violet. You can create some nice olive greens with ivory black and primary yellow or Ultramarine blue. Mixing all the colours with the zinc white produces some lovely pastel colours as well. Using these on coloured paper would look beautiful.
I have also used this set to create a gift box for my niece and the colours painted beautifully onto a hobby craft cardboard gift box and dried nicely. As you can see, she’s rather fond of the trolls movie and anything colourful so these paints were perfect!

Preparing to go charcoal location sketching

September 9, 2017Leave a comment

I'm preparing to go into the Lake District again and try sketching with charcoal instead of watercolours. Limiting myself to just figuring out composition and tonal values will be good practice for me! The forecast is clouds, sunshine and rain so there should be some dramatic lighting for the day as the sun comes out and it's something the Lake District captures really nicely!
My main concern is that I rarely use charcoal as a medium and I tend to over to it and get muddy values as I try to building up textures…
So as it's the night before, I'm going to get some practice in and then just give it a go tomorrow. The worst case scenario is I don't like my pictures but it'll still be a good learning experience! Plus, messy techniques are always really satisfying!!

I used charcoal pencils, a range of rubbers and some blue pastel for these sketches. I also put a wash on a couple of pieces of cartridge paper and tried a few scenes on them which worked nice but I found it kill some of the highlights that would have made the pictures come alive.

Derwentwater plein air – First attempts

September 8, 2017Leave a comment

I've mentioned before that I recently moved to Cumbria in England. This has given my spirit an excellence burst of inspiration and energy and has allowed some of my creativity to come out. I'm still making lots of colour charts ( I'll show you my most recent one in another post shortly!) but I'm also getting outdoors while the weather permits and doing some sketching with watercolours.
I visited Derwentwater recently ( home to the Derwent sketching pencils, I did visit the museum and their shop but I didn't buy more pencils…I have to use the ones I've got already before I allow myself to buy even more!) and here are some of the sketches I managed on the day. I'm really pleased with the day's outcome and felt that I've taken a solid step forward to where I want to be as an artist with this.

This is the palette I put together for my outing

Lemon yellow
Cadmium yellow
Yellow ochre
Burnt sienna
Van Dyke Brown
French Ultramarine
Cerulean
Quinacridone magenta
Cadmium red
Sap green
Hookers green light
Payne grey
Ivory black

I felt that I mainly ended up using lemon yellow and yellow ochre mixed with all the combinations of the blues and greens to figure out the greens. Payne grey was my favourite for the clouds and water with cerulean for the sky. Having the readymade brown was handy to have, since I was using a very small mixing tray. I tested the colbalt turquoise but felt that cerulean and the Ultramarine were enough of a range for the palette

This is the colour range that I got from the set, I wanted a big range of greens from earthy to lush but not too many blue-greens as I know that I would mainly be trying to capture the forests and shrub land on the mountains. Very limited purples too which was fine as the heather isn't out yet. I also totally stopped round say greens name when I was labelling, oops!

On to the sketches! I warmed up with some pencil sketches before just sloshing paint about for the rest of the day.

I feel that I need more practice with my tonal values and compositions as I set up my sketches but I'm still really pleased with these ones and happy to share them with you all. If you've visited Derwentwater and did any sketches, post a like in the comments so I can see your stuff!

Getting out there

August 17, 2017Leave a comment

Turns out that working with Charcoal on large pieces of paper makes a lot of mess, which can be frowned upon when living with others.

So, my experiments didn’t last long but it was still good get my hand moving again and once I have a studio space set up again, I will continue my experimental mark making. In the meantime I have been getting out for walks in the Lake District and Northumberland.

I have included just a few sketches here. I mainly fell back to take photos as I explored new areas which was a lot quicker as I walked and gawped at things but didn’t help my practice that much. Plus my cameras pretty naff so the photos never do it justice.

Still I have managed a few blobby paintings as my first shaky steps back into things.

Deep breath. Drawing again.

April 16, 2017August 17, 2017Leave a comment

As I breathe deeply, I can smell the clear Cumbrian air.

It’s been’s perhaps 6 months or even longer since I sat down to explore drawing. I have moved and feel inspired to try again to recapture my creative practice. I am going to work through ‘ Drawing space, form and expression’ by Wayne Enstice to get my hand moving again. There’s a lot of good grounding for the practice to take root in again and help grow my skills to where they used to be.

I will be documenting my experiments on this site under the appropriately titled page ‘Experiments’.

To begin, I will be exploring the basics of mark-making and the tensions they create within the picture frame. I’ll be using charcoal to begin with as it’s easy to vary the tone and texture, allowing me to freely play and explore.

I’m taking inspiration from the following artists:

Gerhard Richter
Claude Monets drawing
Georges Seurat
Norman Ackroyd

Illustrators:

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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Walk Draw Explore

Tag: process