Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2020 i Artists & Illustrators

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Many of you will be familiar with the paintings and teaching of the late James Fletcher Watson, and his were among the first books I bought when learning to paint in watercolour. His former home and studio are in the Cotswolds and I was so pleased to be invited to teach there during the summer by his daughter Jo as part of Windrush Art Courses. I arrived a day or so early to explore this beautiful part of England and my journey took me to Taynton, a typical Cotswold village nestling in the Windrush Valley. I didn’t want to spend too much time in one place, but I had my sketching kit with me and there was a convenient bench right in front of this pretty subject. I find painters…

Save the shadow until last and simply add it as a wash over the underlying colour - don’t leave space for it. A drawn boundary on your paper makes it easier to judge the composition. The untouched white areas are not accidental. Their size and boundary shapes are quite carefully considered and must harmonise with the rest of the painting. The pen lines provide structure so the washes don’t need to be particularly carefully applied. A single stroke that overlaps or doesn’t quite meet the ink boundary looks better than a carefully filled-in section. In the middle and foreground sections, use two or three separate washes on dry paper each time. This creates variety and interest. If you want to emphasise certain parts, add more pen. I did so around…

I made a lot of mixed-media drawings of a flamenco dancer during a course I attended at Dance Base in Edinburgh. It was wonderful to have access to this powerful and dynamic dancer for an entire day. We were helped too by the well-ordered setup, thanks to tutor Damian Callan. The model maintained the same pose for between 10 and 20 minutes at a time and we were given ink and sticks, collage paper and drawing boards. In short, everything was sorted, the job for us as artists was simply to show up, be inspired and get moving. I would recommend that you give yourself the gift of preparation before you begin any art session. Even if you’re just drawing at home, set yourself up well before hand. Have your…

1 Take time to plan out the colour relationships relative to edges, chromatic intensities, scales and the overall elements of creating aerial perspective. 2 Problem solve and critique your work as you go, using the visual qualities discussed in the article to help you to make suitable adjustments and modifications. 3 Try to consider the overall depth relationships in a composition, rather than always focusing on painting interesting details or tackling favourite areas. 4 Evaluate the painting as a whole periodically throughout the entire painting process, especially the depth created by colour and its related relationships.…

•Paints Titanium White, Azo Yellow Light, Azo Yellow Medium, Cadmium Orange, Yellow Ochre, Burnt Sienna, Pyrrole Red, Primary Magenta, Permanent Green Light, Phthalo Green, Brilliant Blue, Primary Cyan, Phthalo Blue, Ultramarine Violet Light, Permanent Blue Violet, Prussian Blue (Phthalo) and Greenish Blue, all Amsterdam Standard Acrylic •Brushes Daler-Rowney System3 Sky Flow flat brushes, sizes 1”, 1.5”, 2” and 2.5” •Canvas Stretched cotton canvas, 51x61cm •Palette •Water pot…

In this article we will be continuing with our work on the Zorn palette, a limited set of four basic colours (black, white, red and yellow) that was often used by the Swedish master Anders Zorn. We will be looking in more detail at how to create a range of colours from the four pigments, while discussing colour mixing and making a colour chart. RECREATING A ZORN PALETTE Traditionally the four pigments used in the Zorn palette would have been Lead White, Yellow Ochre, Vermilion Red and Ivory Black. There are many modern equivalents and substitutes available to us and so it is important to find the right ones for you. I have been painting for 20 years and really love art materials, so I have become fussy about my…

TOP CLASS I would just like to put on record how much I enjoyed the article by Terence Clarke [Masterclass, Issue 418]. It was a beautiful painting of a vase of flowers and following his instruction I managed to replicate it really well [below] and learnt some useful techniques. It would be good to have further articles by him. Dee Scott, via email ROCK SOLID IDEA I just read July’s letters page and thought you might like to hear how I am filling my lockdown time. I still work as a bank cashier but with greatly reduced hours. While I was walking in a local park with my dog in March, I noticed painted stones had been placed around the area and thought it was a lovely idea. On my…

A difference between adjacent tones on the picture plane helps to define spatial relationships, showing that features lie one in front of another. The pencil lines drawn for a composition usually demarcate where the eye discerns individual objects, a perception which is due largely to tonal register. In principle, therefore, there should be an exchange of relative tone either side of a pencil line. This lighter than/darker than counterchange sets up the illusion of space between objects overlapping on the picture plane. If your painting looks flat, the way to give it depth and contrast is to increase and even exaggerate the counterchange, darkening the tones against lighter tones and vice versa. Having established individual areas of tonal exchange, make sure the overall balance makes visual sense, with the tones…

Asking an artist how they brew their tea may seem like an odd question when discussing their materials, but for Carne Griffiths’s illustrations the British staple is as vital as the ink itself. Look at any painting from his latest exhibition, Nature’s Riches, and you’ll begin to notice the tea’s presence, from the soft vanilla hues of a freshly-made jasmine tea to the earthy browns of a more robust blend. Alongside the eye-catching colours created by this unique combination of ink and tea, the drawings themselves also bring together pristine portraiture, intricate floral motives and free-flowing, abstract marks. The more you look at a piece, the more it fascinates as layer after layer of incredible detail reveals itself. In Nature’s Riches, the London-based artist wanted to explore how advertising uses…

BALLET DANCER I liked this chalk-and-collage drawing of my daughter in her ballet costume, there’s something pensive about the tilt of the head, attention resting on fixing her skirt. It was drawn in a few minutes on wrinkled paper. The watercolour based upon it turned out quite different. The angle of the head was tricky to replicate and this dancer seems older, perhaps a prima ballerina. I enjoyed moulding her form with the colours of the skin, mostly Cadmium Red, Yellow Ochre and Sap Green. DANCER WITH FAN The drawing on the far left ended up as a mixed-media painting too. I couldn’t resist using patterned paper for the flamboyant skirt and adding the blue fan. I turned the board as I was painting to enhance the diagonal pull of…

It is well known that colour can contribute to the illusion of spatial depth in a two-dimensional image or design. This is usually explained in terms of each colour attribute: hue, value, and saturation. HUE: WARMER COLOURS ADVANCE, COOLER COLOURS RECEDE In figure 1, a warm colour is flanked by two colours that get progressively cooler as they move away from the centre. All three are equal in saturation (bright muted colours) and value (around mid-tone). There are no linear signifiers such as overlap, size variation, or perspective to influence the spatial hierarchy, so hue is the only active agent in this example. The yellow-orange at the centre seems to advance while its neighbouring colours recede. VALUE: DARKER COLOURS ADVANCE, LIGHTER COLOURS RECEDE Figure 2 shows three colours unalike in…

Lockdown has been a time to delve into areas of artistic endeavours which may not have happened if it had not been for Covid-19 (not that anyone would wish it to have taken place). It has given us a break from normal day-to-day life. Hurray for Artists & Illustrators and the many splendid articles it has produced. During this period, I have returned to miniature painting. Although the articles in your magazine have proved to be beneficial, working in miniature has its challenges. Changing from working on 20x30cm canvases down to 2x3cm has been a different ball game in many respects. Scaling down and choosing what detail to leave out without spoiling the overall topic requires a lot of trial and error, but I had some success. Would it be…

June Collier Presence in figurative art is an underappreciated quality. It takes a certain skill to conjure the feeling that you’re not so much looking at a painting as simply viewing the real person through a veil daubed with pigment. Stand and stare at a Rembrandt portrait or one of Lucian Freud’s later works, for example, and one can’t escape the sensation that the subject is lurking somewhere behind the canvas, obscured from view by a few choice brushstrokes. The same could be said for June Collier’s work. Hers is a brand of figurative painting steeped in raw human emotion, so much so that if you stood close to one of her canvases, you’d swear you could hear them breathe. Portrait of Phil IV is one of at least nine…

“Spotting inspiring little snippets is a world away from copying” Being inspired by another artist is very different from copying their work. I am the first to admit that, like many of you, I am constantly looking, learning and being inspired by other creatives of all kinds, but, hand on heart, I’m never tempted to copy another person’s work. Here are a few thoughts for tapping into the brilliance of fellow artists to benefit your work and your individual style, without the danger of becoming an imitator. It’s important to relax and feel you can look and learn from other artists. No one is born able to make art any more than cook or ride a bike. We all learn and the more art you see, the deeper your understanding…

Drawing is a language. It’s a means of recording an observation or an idea in marks that appeal to the visual sense. In written language we use the same alphabet to write a washing machine manual as we do to pen a sonnet; by the same token the drawn vocabulary of line, tone and colour can be turned to drawing up architectural plans or dashing down a sketched portrait. The best drawings don’t just make use of drawn language as a vehicle for imagery, but as a means of conveying meaning through the nature of a mark – its weight and rhythm and speed – so that a good drawing can be thought of like a visual poem. And in much the same way that a poem can provide a…

In this demo, I wanted to show you a rhythm of drawing that I’ve found promotes good drawing habits and parallels with Kelly’s process. To put it into practice yourself, take simple still life objects and draw them one at a time, or in small groups, without any surrounding context. In the same way good ingredients are critical to simple cooking, the materials you use are very important for a simple drawing. Consider the paper you draw on – its weight, its texture, its colour, its resistance. Consider the drawing material used and its interaction with the paper’s surface. Do not use an eraser. 1 LOOK AT THE SUBJECT, LOOK AT YOUR PAPER... Settle down for the drawing, relax your shoulders, breathe. Begin by looking at your subject: notice…

Illusion of depth is one of the hallmarks of representational painting. The genres of landscape, still life, portraiture and figurative painting often depend on illusions of three-dimensional forms existing in a perceptual space. While some art does not require illusions of depth to convey its visual narrative, many do, particularly in traditional genres. Creating a visual sense of perceivable depth in a painting depends on several artistic principles working in combination with each other. A very important area is colour, but colour in and of itself might not create the full illusion of depth in a painting unless it is combined with the elements discussed below. Colour must be modified by – and added to – chromatic intensities, edge descriptions, brushwork types and details, and the size of colour touches…

It’s important on so many creative levels to allow a little bit of chaos to reign over your artistic process. This is how you’ll discover the most innovative and engaging aspects of your art. The naivety that allows you to make random marks without inhibition is exactly what many artists strive for, and most children have in abundance. We are generally corrupted in this aim by well-meaning instructions to perfect the mechanics or follow techniques in a very exacting manner. Yet fundamentally, great art needs a balance of chaotic innovation with a more orderly approach to technical mastery; make it too predictable and it looks dull, too chaotic and it leads to a complete mess. So, think of chaos as the mystery, the unexplainable. It does what it wants and…