Venice Number 2

This is what I have been painting since March. I haven't had much time for painting over the last few months.
There has been much learning and many mistakes, but I reasonably pleased with the results so far. Lots more to do!

One petal and half a leaf

Yesterday, just before my art class, I arrived back from an very nice long weekend in Tauranga where I was most fortunate to be able to attend a three day watercolour workshop learning from Susan Harrison-Tustain (website). It was a rainy weekend, so good to be inside painting. I feel I've taken a big step forward in learning to paint watercolor.

Back when I first thought to paint, one of the very first books that I bought was Glorious Garden Flowers in Watercolor by Susan Harrison-Tustain. On reading the book I felt quite intimidated by the quality and detail of the painting and the after (very) briefly trying out a few exercises, consigned the book to a shelf, every so often pullingly it out for a browse and longingly wishing I could do something approaching the work therein.

More recently I purchased Susan's two instructional DVDs Susan Harrison-Tustain's One-on-One Watercolor Workshops and Susan Harrison-Tustain's Watercolor Portrait Workshop and I found that the DVDs helped me considerably to understand and use her watercolour techniques. The next logical step then was the workshop.

The result is shown above. One petal and half a leaf. One might have expected to have achieved a little more than this in three days! However I am a slow painter and Susan's techniques are painstaking. There was a lot to learn: how to mix colours, how to put the paint on the paper so that later washes don't move earlier washes, how to use a yellow underpainting to bring out the colour, and so much more. I would have liked more time to paint, that's true, but I am sufficiently pleased that I will be keeping a close eye out for any of her future workshops, and would rather hope to be able to attend her more advanced workshop should she choose to hold one in the future.

In the meantime I will continue painting the rose above - one petal at a time.



So thank you Susan and Richard, and thanks to all the participants, I had a great time, and learned a lot. Tauranga was a lovely town to hold the workshop.

Crisis in Venice

I took this photo of a gondola parking lot in Venice during my first ever trip to Europe in 1986. I chose to paint this because I thought that much of the painting would be large shapes without too much detail, and perhaps it could be completed reasonably quickly. Oh how wrong I was!

The photo is black and white, as are most of my photos from this period, and while I thought this would help me choose values, I realised that picking colours was going to be more difficult for me. The first thing I did was to scan around for a few photo references of Venice in order to get the colour scheme correct.

I chose to paint in Artisan Water Soluble Oils, and started by blocking in the larger shapes in approximately the colours and values I wanted. I thought this might help me achieve the colour and value judgements I needed to make as the painting progressed. In retrospect I think that painting in the windows was a mistake and should have been left until later.

Then I wanted to paint the evenly graded blue water - you know like one of those graded washes that every watercolour book teaches you how to do in lesson one, except it's never as easy as it seems. Well I have to say that in oil it just didn't work. I was painting with the oil undiluted, it was thick and did not spread well on the canvas. I achieved a gradation of sorts, as you can see, but it was nowhere near the even grade that I needed. I also started trying to correct the colour of the main building.

Having failed to achieve a graded colour with thick oil paints, I chose to paint over with several coats of a diluted pale blue (Artisan thinner) and then then build up the grade with several "glazes" of a thinned darker blue, or paler blue as necessary. At this stage I was starting to lose some of my important shapes but for the moment I was willing to accept that in order to learn how to achieve this wash.

Just back from art class. This is the result. My paint has had different ideas from mine. This is now a crisis. A disaster. This painting has beaten me. Simple shapes does not equal easy. I have a new-found respect for Mondrian.

Remember me talking about white paint? I think I'll start this painting again - in watercolour.

Scumbling

It has been a relaxing and busy Summer break since Christmas and I start work again on Monday. I have shared what little time I have had for painting between watercolour work and continuing to develop my oil of "The Couple" which has been going now for almost 1 year.

I have discovered 'scumbling' which has allowed me to produce subtle changes in colour that I have not been able to achieve in the past. It has allowed me match colours without having to premix on the palette, and so I have been able to take the time I need to develop the three dimensional sculpting I am searching for.

Scumbling has its disadvantages also: it makes a real mess of my brush! I still have lots to learn about scumbling and here are some of the technical characcteristics I have noted, and will have to learn to cope with. (1) When I wash the brush to change colours and then continue to use that brush to scumble, then I find that the moisture on the brush moves the earlier layers around too much - solution, use a dry brush always, or wait just a short while for the brush to dry. (2) If I correct something, for example by putting a light colour over a dark colour then I cannot immediately scumble over the top of the correction. If I do, then I find I will tend to remove the correction - solution, it takes several days, allowing the correction to at least partially dry, to build up a correction. (3) I have not yet tried to approach scumbling areas requiring fine detail, for example the eyebrows and around the eyes. I look forward to the challenge.