Australian How To Paint magazine chooses a topic or style of art each issue and gives you a comprehensive guide for you to develop your skills. Over the series we will cover all major painting technques plus popular paint ideas.
I remember always being passionate about drawing, from childhood right through to now. I always knew, deep down, that being a pencil artist was my career path. Even as a youngster, I was never prolific ever, but would spend many hours absorbed totally, drawing a carefully considered work with lots of detail and accuracy. Pencils have always been my chosen medium, even though I learnt all other mediums. I thoroughly enjoy the feeling of using pencil and the effects created by pencil and can happily spend many hours with a pencil in hand. At university, I studied all forms of 2D and 3D art, but majored in printmaking, etching and lithography – both being a form of drawing. Graduating with a Diploma of Visual Arts and a Graduate Diploma of…
STEP ONE Fairy wrens are very social birds and spend a lot of time on the ground, so the theme of this image is the welcoming of one bird to a new group against the complex backdrop of the floor debris. All my works are carefully designed, including all the background details, negative spaces and the amount of colour to greylead. The latter is kept in my mind rather than put into the initial drawing. I like to keep some of the development spontaneous so the work keeps its freshness and life. Using a smooth paper and an F pencil, I sketched the work, firstly using blobs of shapes to place the birds and redrawing each bird accurately , . Lots of erasing at this stage, including moving the birds…
• Pencil is a wonderful medium to use, you can pick it up and draw for a short time with no cleaning up or preparation needed. This is very handy when you have lots of interruptions in the studio. • I use a hot press paper that is a pale cream colour (Fabriano Artistico 300gsm) as the smooth surface takes lots of layers of pencil and doesn’t disrupt any of the detail. • Keep your paper and work clean, use a piece of paper under your hand at all times and I wear a pair of white cotton gloves that have the thumb and first two fingers removed. This keeps any grease from your hand away from the paper. • Keep your pencils very sharp and use only light pressure,…
Brenda Holden spent her formative years in the foothills of Adelaide. Hiking around waterfalls in the area, she grew to love the abundant birdlife. While young, she spent many years in Broken Hill and outback Western Australia – all the while developing an appreciation for native wildlife. Her extensive travels in the country and the Australian Outback have lent authenticity to the wildlife habitats depicted in her paintings. Brenda worked mainly on commissions early in her career, then started to exhibit her work in the late ’90s. After joining the Wildlife Art Society of South Australia in 1996, she received the prize for ‘Best Watercolour’ at the society’s annual exhibition in 1997. She is an exhibiting member of The Wildlife Artist Society of Australasia and the Queensland Wildlife Artists Society;…
STEP ONE After deciding on size and format, I drew the foreground objects to size with as much detail as possible before transferring them onto my prepared board. When I airbrush a background (as in this painting), I mask the bird and the branch with masking fluid. STEP TWO I checked the bckground colour against photographs taken, making sure that the foreground would stand out and not get lost. Using a palette knife, the moss and bark were added to the branch. At this stage I was not looking for detail, but texture. STEP THREE I decided that another foreground branch was needed. This was added in the same way as the main branch. Using a Number 2 brush, I added the detail to the moss and the wood –…
• Get the nuts and bolts right! This means making sure the anatomy is correct, because it is no good having a ‘great painting’, only to discover that the bird, animal, perspective or anything else is wrong. • Spend time planning the whole painting. Make sure you have good reference material and study what you’re going to paint. Do sketches so that you learn how the bird moves and relates to its environment. • Through the whole painting process, I constantly stand back to observe my work. Sometimes I look at the painting in a mirror – this tricks the eye, and any mistakes become glaringly clear. • Last but not least, be passionate about what you are doing … and enjoy yourself!…
