Painting Hair

Yesterday evening at art class I painted the woman's hair. I started by painting the thick main strands in raw umber. After that I became a bit timid, I wanted to paint the thin wisps of hair that surrounded these main strands, but did not know how. Fortunately Julie came to the rescue (this after all is why I am attending an art class). Julie showed me how a flat brush, and the correct consistency of paint, leaves the bristles of the flat brush in thin little clumps which allow the painting of thin parallel lines which look just like wisps of hair. I used Winsor Newton Artisan Water Mixable Thinner to get a paint of just the correct thickness to achieve this effect. I finished the hair like this with mixes of raw umber, burnt sienna, ultramarine, and just the gentlest hint of white to show off highlights.

During the evening, one of my fellow students started to tell me what my painting told her about the character of the people I was painting. She told me that the fellow on the left was a serious person, but having fun in this painting; and that the woman in the painting has a generous personality. Hearing people read emotions into my painting has given me perhaps my greatest yet sense of satisfaction that I am beginning to achieve my goals.

Watercolour Project 4

Yesterday I completed the fourth in my series of ten watercolour projects from the book "Step-By-Step Guide to Painting Realistic Watercolors" and once again I feel that I have made some important steps forward. I am not, however, sufficiently satisfied with this image to move on without repeating the work.

The rose does not look sufficiently three-dimensional to me. This may be because I have not found the correct values, and could be the result of the rather "paint-by-numbers" approach I took to the painting (by which I mean that I copied the books instructions and believed that would be sufficient to complete the picture).

The wine looks very patchy, not at all evenly coloured in the glass. In part this was because I was trying to carefully paint around the reflections, and I think it dried out at different rates - next time I will try to paint out the reflections with latex, which might allow me to work a little faster. As well, the wine does not convey the curve of the glass, and I think a little improved contouring is in order.

There was a lot of fine detail which I was not able to achieve, at first I tried to use the very tip of the brush with little paint to draw the detail, but I found that the paint dried too fast, and spoiled the effect. Then I tried to work faster, with more paint, but it seems to me that the surface tension of the water limited the amount of detail I could achieve - perhaps a little ox gall would help to lower the surface tension.

So many things to try! Interestingly, the scan I made of the picture which you see here (you can see a larger image by clicking on the picture) does not show up these errors as they appear in the original watercolour. (230 x 305, Fabriano Acquarello 300 gsm hot pressed watercolour paper, Winsor Newton Artist's Watercolour, 21.10.07)

Joan Armatrading

I have taken the day off work today, so I can pick my son up from school, and I am spending some more time on my watercolour projects, listening to Joan Armatrading in the background. It is perfect music for painting watercolour. I'm taking time out to write this while my work is drying, and because - despite my cold - the music and the painting are putting me in a great mood.

I am really loving painting with watercolour. I'm not quite sure why. A part of it to be sure is the book I am working from. The projects give a feeling of accomplishing something while forcing me to practise the techniques of watercolour. I think another part of my enjoyment comes from the immediacy of watercolour. I paint a section, and stop. I cannot rework anything, that will destroy it. This is quite unlike any other media I have tried. Pastel, oil, acrylic, all allow me to rework and rework and it seems that I rarely finish anything. Watercolour is teaching me some important painting disciplines - planning, patience, colour accuracy, drawing accuracy.

I think that long term watercolour will not take me where I want to go. I suspect oil or acrylic has more room for experimentation, and I will want to try that. For the moment, I am very happy painting with watercolor.

(Later in the day) Well, I've finished this, my third watercolor. For all of the many, many errors in this painting, I'm very happy with this work. I have learned so many lessons over the last few days painting. The biggest problem I had with this painting was the background. I could not control the ballooning of the water into the blue paint no matter what I did, and then when I tried to repair it, I made things worse. The paint was Cobalt Blue - does it have any characteristics which make it especially hard to work with? How do I overcome this?

(230 x 305, Fabriano Acquarello 300 gsm hot pressed watercolour paper, Winsor Newton Artist's Watercolour, 16.10.07)

Watercolour III

I continue to work through the projects in "Step-By-Step Guide to Painting Realistic Watercolors."To the left is my first attempt at "Project 2." It has been quite a challenge. In particular I note three difficulties I have experienced in painting this project: (1) charging one color into another, and softening edges - for example the yellow and taupe shadows behind the card and in front of the truffle. On rereading the books instructions, I believe that I need to work on getting just the correct amount of moisture on both the paper and the brush; (2) Getting the colour depth correct - the brown of the truffle should be deeper; and (3) I cannot seem to paint smooth lines, so many of my lines have little bobbles along their length. This is most easily seen this on the lines of icing.

(230 x 305, Fabriano Acquarello 300 gsm hot pressed watercolour paper, Winsor Newton Artist's Watercolour, 13.10.07)

Family Art - I

My wife has attended Julie's art class in the last few months. Here is what she is achieving with pastel. It is not yet finished but I think that it is amazing.

The Couple - IV

Since restarting my art class I have been working a little more on "The Couple." It's coming along quite nicely I think. I have (1) removed the brown line in the background; (2) reshaped the eye of the woman - I think that it looks much better now; (3) worked a little more on the hair, this is going to be a real challenge to me. How do I suggest that I have painted every single hair individually, without actually doing so? I need some tips, and plenty of practice I think! Finally (4) I have been quietly and slowly building up better tones and colours, especially around the woman's neck. My plan going forward is to continue to slowly modify shapes and colours to complete the sculpting effect, (hopefully along the way the hair will also be finished) then it should be complete. The colours I used for her neck were: viridian, cadmium red medium, naples yellow and chinese white. I sketched in the hair with raw umber.

Watercolour II

On the left, you will see my recently repainted "Stained-glass Irises." I found the experience of using hot pressed paper for this painting to be measurably more pleasant than cold pressed paper I had used the first time. I do not know for sure how much the manufacturer of the paper influenced that feeling, so I shall have to try and procure some cold-pressed and hot-pressed from the same manufacturer to experiment with. I am much happier with the colours I mixed and I am also happier with how my colour gradients (from yellow to green on leaves) turned out. I found that in order to best create the gradient, it is important to understand the relative tinting strengths of the 2 colours I am trying to blend, ...and the only way I know how to discover this is to try it a few times on a scrap of paper. I was not quite so careful with keeping a good bead when blocking in the colours, and you can see a few spots of ballooning as a result. Once again I have seen the need for patience with art. Also, I often found that I had too much paint on the brush, and this led to what I feel is quite poor drafting of the soldered joints. Eventually I realised that I was dipping the whole brush into the paint, and all that was needed to properly fill the brush was to dip the tip in the paint, and let the brush draw up what it needs.

I read that watercolour brushes should have a sharp point, and I found that my brushes were not so well pointed that I had the degree of control I would have liked. I will perhaps look arond for some better brushes. All in all, after 4 hours of painting and despite the errors, I am much happier with this second attempt. I am looking forward to moving on to the second project in my book.

(230 x 305, Fabriano Acquarello 300 gsm hot pressed watercolour paper, Winsor Newton Artist's Watercolour, 4.10.07)

Handprint

In yesterday's blog I mentioned in passing one of my all-time favourite art websites "Handprint Watercolors." I first found this site while making some obscure technical search about paint pigments. Let me explain, I am a chemist - this stuff is important to me.

My blog, that you are reading now, is my journal, and so I was interested to read the almost poetic journal section of the Handprint website - the first pages in several ways record my own experiences of learning to paint from books, how my lack of technique and knowledge took away the pleasure in painting, how I bought many more supplies than I needed (perhaps in the mistaken belief that if I owned enough supplies I would become and artist).

But the thing that draws me back and back again to this site is the effort which the author has gone to, to prove to himself the various qualities of paints and papers and brushes; the arduous cataloging which has gone into this site; the well presented opinions on techniques, and books and choice of palettes and so much more. This is a treasure trove of information, written for his own use, with no time limit imposed (not for some target demographic, due for a publishing deadline), and shared freely with anyone. Even incomplete this site is better value than many of the books I own. Thank you Bruce MacEvoy!

I see that the author has also recently started up the "Handprint - Painting a Day" blog. As of this moment I cannot imagine me completing a painting a day, first - I have a day job, second I have a family, third I have an XBox360. My wife and I both have a dream of retiring early and spending our time travelling and painting, then it might happen. In the meantime I will try to ignore most "Painting a Day" blogs - but this one, I will probably visit many times as I continue my journey learning art.

Watercolour

On Friday, while at home for a day off work I decided to try my hand at watercolours. In part inspired by some of the work I had seen from my classmates, and in part inspired by the excellent watercolour website "handprint" and in part because of the opportunistic find of the book "Step-By-Step Guide to Painting Realistic Watercolors" by Dawn McLeod Heim, while I was in Christchurch recently visiting Scorpio Books.

Here, finally after several purchases of "how to paint watercolour" books I had found a book which passed on techniques in a way that only a proficient teacher can pass on - how to load a brush, how to blot a brush, how moist is moist, how to soften edges and much more. In particular she teaches how to paint a wash using a "bead." I can find only one other book in my watercolour collection which teaches about the "bead" and that book pays only scant attention to it. Yet, having tried this technique of laying a wash I have found it to be a most effective way of controlling your wash, which can also be used to fill in small shapes in your picture.

Above is my first painting - Project 1 from this book. It is by no means a perfect painting, I haven't always blended the greens with good technique, and there is some rather unsteady line drawing. The yellow background is too dark and the blue/violet mixes are not what I wished. I do not find the subject matter particularly interesting, but it is my first watercolour painting, and it only took about 2 hours, and I am impressed by how much I learned from completing this project. I will repeat the painting when I have some more time in the next few weeks - perhaps this time on hot pressed paper to see what it is like. "Painting Realistic Watercolors" is a great book, easily the best book I have which teaches the very basics of watercolour and then takes you through ten projects of increasing complexity and beauty. I look forward to working my way through this book.

(210 x 300, Bockingford cold pressed 300 gsm watercolour paper, Winsor Newton Artist's Watercolour, 28.9.07)

Julie's Art Site

I attended my art class for the first time in about 3 months on Thursday. (Having a day job and various family commitments had kept me away. I should also add that having purchased a copy of Halo 3 for the XBox360 did not keep me away from class this Thursday.) I was very happy to receive a warm welcome back to class after my "holiday." I was also rather surprised at how my perception of my unfinished painting "The Couple" had changed during my time away. I was very much happier with it on Thursday than I was 3 months ago, and now consider it not too far from being ready to be abandoned. I'll let you all see it in a few weeks I hope.

In the meantime I leave you with this link to Julie's (the art teacher) website. Click here. I've never personally known anyone crazy enough to hug a tiger before, but I guess that's art!

"Art is never finished, only abandoned." Leonardo da Vinci

That said, I am today posting two of my "abondoned" works of art. Abandoned? Perhaps not, these few are pictures which I stopped because I was overwhelmed with the technical complexity required to finish them. I will come back to them in time, after I have learned those skills - and I suspect also gained a certain degree more of patience.

Piazza San Marco is my first attempt at a pastel painting. What you see here as undergone many revisions. Starting with Winsor Newton pastels I found that I overworked the the picture so much that I lost the tooth, so I brushed a lot of the pastel off and moved to Faber Castell polychromos sticks and pitt pastel pencils. The much harder pastel allowed me a lot more control and I was much more pleased with my results (the face for example). Everything I read however seemed to point to the beauty of soft pastels, and after some months I purchased a collection of Schmincke soft pastels and went to work on the larger pigeon. It looked beautiful, and suddenly the pastel pencil work looked dull and lifeless.

I sprayed over the image with Schminke fixative in order that I could keep some tooth, and the colours changed. Especially the lighter colours immediately started to show the darker colours that I had layered beneath. I have read countless times about not overworking pastel, and here was the prrof. I was getting tired of repeating work over and over again, this and the complexity of the work led me to set this painting aside and start "learning" with a much simpler painting - Waitaria Bay, shown in an earlier post.

I like this image and very much wish to finish it, even if it means starting again from the beginning.

This second painting is my first attempt at an acrylic painting, and there are parts of this painting that I absolutely love - the luminosity of the yellow fence posts for example, and the expression on the boys face - he is taking every possible enjoyment in eating his icecream. My problem with this painting is two-fold. One, I painted the boys face, and then his arm, and found that the colours of the face and the arm didn't match. The solution - well I'm looking for advice on that! My thoughts are that I could try painting and layering the face and arm during the same sessions, and work up the whole painting at the same time rather than concentrating on tiny bits at a time. I tried this approach (to some degree) with "The Couple" and found it takes a lot of discipline not to fall back into my piecemeal style. Practice, practice and more practice.

My second problem lies (again) with painting the detail in the cobblestones, and the trees. If the only way to deal with this is to paint every leaf, and every cobblestone then perhaps I must. Preferably I would like to find a way of implying the detail, without ignoring it. The cobblestones almost worked, but not quite. I have no idea how to approach the branches and leaves.

Again, I very much like this photo, and would dearly love to see it hanging on my wall at home.

It's been a while!

In this last month I have not managed to find as much time as I would wish for painting. Fortunately my art classes ensure that I always find a few hours each week and I have been making slow but steady progress on the painting above.

Having completed a lot of work on 'him' I moved to 'her' some weeks ago and was quickly reminded of how difficult it is to match colours. Instead of a nice olive skin tone I ended up with a yellow skin tone, and after correcting this, although she looks much better, the tone is a little pink for my liking, and does not satisfactorily match the skin tones of him.

Do any of you out there have any good strategies for matching colours across a painting like this. It's something that I really could do with learning a little more about.

I have painted in the background in the hope that this would help me judge colours across the painting more effectively; and started working on the hair (his hair needs a lot of toning down still).

When I started this painting the class expressed a mixture of interest and doubt that the design of the painting would work. This week the comments were more about how well the painting was working. So that's good - another few months work and I might be satisfied myself.

Waitaria Bay

I finished this pastel painting in December last year. It is the first painting I actually finished and it is therefore a bit of a landmark for me. For all the accomplishment it represents I am not entirely happy with the painting. Most especially, I find that the photograph (which I took sometime around 1987) is in my eyes very much better than the painting. In particular: the shape of the boat is not correct; somehow the photo appears much better balanced than the painting, the painting does not have enough contrast; the stony beach is not well enough represented. On the other hand I was very pleased with the texture I managed to achieve on the boat, and the misty yellow green of the bay waters. I don't think I'm being too harsh on myself.

Maybe someday I will paint this photo again, and adress all these issues. Until then it hangs now in the living area of our home - after all, for all its faults it is my first completed painting.

Green Men and White Paint

Welcome to the growing number of my art class who are beginning to read this blog. Julie, my art teacher, has also started reading this blog. She comments "I'm glad I wasn't mentioned by name!" (Oops). I think I heard her scream this evening. Another student, looking at my painting said "Oh, he's turned green!" That was when I heard the scream - but I wasn't paying careful attention, so I might be wrong.

Admittedly, the moustache had been painted too dark, but the 5 o'clock shadow definitely looked green to me.

I have learned 2 things in recent weeks. Number one thing I have learned: when I apply paint to canvas I generally mix a colour very much too dark, this is something that I must correct, unfortunately it really only becomes obvious to me when Julie looks at my effort and goes a little quiet.

Or screams.

Number two thing I have learned: accidentally dark colours can be very easily lightened with white paint. Julie can fix anything with white paint, and I am rapidly learning this skill also. I don't think Julie wants me to learn this skill, but she taught me in the first place, so there can't be too much of an issue.

Have a look how much white paint was used in the sequence of paintings below.












Julie really is a very patient art teacher.

Horsemen

I am painting "The Horsemen" at home while painting "The Couple" at art class (see my first post). Painting at home is a completely different experience from painting at class. First; at class I am very happy for my art teacher to take over my brush and make any number of corrections to my work. I learn a lot from watching her puzzle over and then solve the problem that I was trying to deal with. I do not have this help at home and must press on even if I am not entirely happy with how I have dealt with the painting session. Second; there are only two hours of class each week, whereas at home I can manage anywhere up to about 4 hours each session if I plan things well.

For this painting I started by accurately drawing the main shapes, using a lined grid to transfer the picture from a photograph onto the canvas. I then tried to visualise the underlying single colour of the main shapes. By this (I think) I mean, browns and greys are made of mixtures of the three primary colours, but which of the primary colours lends most impact to that grey. I painted that visualised colour onto the canvas, with a transparent colour, varying the value by diluting with medium, or by my choice of pigment. So, referring to the second picture, the floor is not bright green, and the horse and the bricks are not yellow.

Two books come to mind as I try to explain what I wish to achieve. The first is "Capturing Radiant Light & Color in Oils and Soft Pastels" by Susan Sarback; and the second is "Making Color Sing" by Jeanne Dobie. I like both of these books very much and if I spent the same amount of time painting as I did reading these books I would quite possibly already have finished this painting. Sarback's book offers an approach to "full color seeing" and teaches artists how to see the colours of what they are painting rather than relying various colour formulas. The colours of her pictures are vibrant, even in stormy weather. I hope that, when finished, people will look at my painting and remark on the vitality of the colours, and yet I hope the colours will seem very realistic and not at odds with everyday perception.

Dobie's book is a watercolor book, and she teaches less how to see colours and more techniques to put down luminous colour. She talks about making colourful grays and I love the way she uses these mousy colours to set off jewels of more pure colours.

I will be experimenting in this painting with laying down transparent washes of oil colour to achieve effects like Dobie describes. Maybe I am biting off more than I can chew, already I am struggling - the dark green floor in picture 3 should have been dark yellow with a cast of green. I have so much to learn.

Have you had any experience with using washes of oils to create vibrant colours? I would love to hear your ideas about how to approach this picture.

1998

This was the first picture I drew, way back in 1998, having made the decision to try my hand at art. I was not happy. I was not happy at all. I was absolutely not happy at all. I walked out of the house and down to a local bookshop and was very fortunate enough to find the excellent book by Douglas R Graves entitled "Drawing a Likeness."

The reason this book caught my attention was the way it broke down the procedure necessary to draw a likeness into 45 steps, each step with an illustration. This seemed as close as was possible to having an art teacher standing beside me. The two pictures below are the second and third pictures that I drew - they are copies of one of the exercises in the Graves book, and I think they show how successful this book was at teaching me some of the techniques of drawing.

Interestingly, the key factor which improved my drawing was a short comment by the author underneath one of his gallery pictures - on page 26 - "This is a quick 45 minute sketch..." Until then I had expected a drawing to take maybe 15 minutes. When I learned that patience was one of the keys of drawing, my results improved enormously.

Finally happy with the results of my lessons I drew this next picture, a copy of an old family photo. It took an entire sunny afternoon to draw, lying on the bed where the sun was streaming in through the window.

It is amazing how one can improve over just a few days!

Over the next years I have bought 2 further books by Douglas R. Graves, "Figure Painting in Oil", and "Life Drawing in Charcoal," both excellent. In fact so far I have assembled a collection of 76 books. Many of them are good, not all of them are great, and that first purchase, "Drawing a Likeness" ranks as one of my most favourite.

First Post

I decided perhaps 9 years ago to rekindle an old childhood interest of mine - art - and began to try my hand at drawing (at which I was moderately successful) and painting (at which I made no progress at all). I needed some formal tuition and there was very little available in the city where I live.

Just last year however I stumbled across someone who was teaching a small group of people how to paint, and I quickly jumped at the opportunity of joining this group. So my first formal painting lessons started about one year ago. I was surprised at first by how many people in the class seem eager to sell their paintings, and the emphasis placed on creating 'saleable' paintings. For me, my pleasure is in painting, and in learning to paint. It is a test of myself - can I create a picture that I am pleased with. Perhaps in time my ideas on this will change, but for the moment I am trying to create paintings that have meaning to me, to my family and to my friends.

A case in point: "The Couple" - the painting to the left. To me the subject of this painting is important to me, and I am not concerned whether it is saleable or not. My task for now is to paint it and learn in doing so.

This is how I have started my first oil painting. I tried to draw an accurate value painting in charcoal before I started painting. I thought perhaps it would help me to mix the colours better if I could see the target value on the canvas. The teacher explained that having so much charcoal on the canvas was a big mistake - she was right - the charcoal dissolved in the oil as I put it on the canvas and moved and blended together as I brushed the colour on. I am pressing on regardless.