Another thoroughly enjoyable class on autumn fruits and fungi with a group of artists I teach twice a year in Derbyshire. We were working from photographs, as usual, which really help when trying to understand how a highlight works or what colour to paint the areas in shadow so that our images look three dimensional. In the class they all more or less do their own thing with slightly different preferences for paints and papers, and have differing techniques and work at differing speeds, but they still all arrive at a great image that will work on the wall. I strategically nudged them now and then to keep them on track or provided a solution when they got stuck. You can see from the photos that two of the artists decided to use black card; they had been on a plant photography course the previous week and photographed a gourd plant against a black velvet backdrop which they wanted to paint. One artist used a technique involving painting the space with white gouache first and then painting over the top with normal watercolour paints, the other used acrylics. Both interesting effects. For slow painters who are experienced artists I like to make sure that at least part of the painting is finished during the course and we’ve discussed how the rest of the image is going to be tackled so I know it will work when they are painting at home. If beginners are slow then I’ll encourage them to get on with putting some paint on the paper all over their image so we can look at the techniques of how to modify any mistakes – they are usually grumpy on day two because they think it doesn’t look very good and want to start again, but by the time they have learnt how to modify colours and tidy up any rough edges they are always pleased at what they have achieved. It does always surprise me though that new artists expect every brush stroke to be perfect and their painting to look amazing right from the start. “No, it’s not a mess, it just isn’t finished yet”. The great thing about looking at paintings as you see them in the photos at the end of the course is that you don’t know what difficulties each individual encountered along the way, or how old they are, even how long they have been painting – all you see is the image of a plant that excited them enough to spend three days painting it…which is how it should be :-)
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 18:31:54 +0000
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