At the workshop on October 1st. Ruth will be painting "Poppies" not a posy.

HANDING IN for the Exhibition is August 19th from 9-10 am. in the Palm Room. The private view is in the evening 7-30 to 9-30 pm. also in the Palm Room.

 

The next DEMONSTRATION EVENING is on August 24th when Caroline Rackham will talk about different types of digital art and do a demonstration picture.

OCTOBER WORKSHOP DAY

 

 On October 1st there will be a workshop day when Ruth Edwards will help with painting a posy in watercolour and Pat Garvey will run a card making workshop.

Claire will be taking names and giving further details at the next Demo evening.

Painting with Claire Harrison

 

Claire started painting at the early age of three and as, she was also very interested in natural history, gravitated towards the natural world for her subjects. She started her career by hiring a hall for an exhibition in six months time and then worked on producing the paintings to fill it!  These early works were produced using photographs and Photoshop to obtain manipulated images as a basis for her paintings.

 Now Claire spends longer on sketching than painting . She first draws in ink with a Rotring pen and produces photocopies of the drawing and then experiments with different colours on the copies.  She does a careful colour study for each painting using colour pencils as well as paint.

Pattern ideas come from an intensive study of Islamic Art. Also ideas based on  Fibonacci numbers and fractal patterns form a starting point for much of her work. Fractals are complex patterns repeated constantly and in diminishing size eg snowflakes or the chambers in a Nautilus shell. She repeats the main image in a pattern within it eg a daisy repeated as a pattern making the spirals on the daisy's centre. If the spirals on a daisy centre or pine cone are counted in one direction a Fibonacci number is arrived at. If counted in the other direction the result is the neighbouring number in the series. Each Fibonacci number is formed by adding the two numbers before it:-

                       0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 etc 

Claire then showed us some pictures of dragonfly wings, foxgloves, snail shells, dandelion heads and violas to illustrate the above points before demonstrating her working method for her daisy painting.

Gesso is not used on a base but she uses MDF board soaked with water and painted with a thin layer of acrylic allowing the colours to mix such as red, yellow or white.

This process is continued by putting on firstly thin layers of oil paint and then finally thick layers. This produces a translucency to the final painting as the lower layers shine through. The medium she uses for the first layers is Spectagel which is fast drying. Other layers are painted using Liquin as the medium and this allows the paint to run. Impasto medium is used for the final layers. Colours are mixed on the board.

Claire traces her daisy drawing onto the canvas and paints the daisies with thin watercolour and a fine brush. The petals are then sketched in. She then goes over the whole with oil paint with linseed oil and uses linseed oil to blend in the tonal areas where the petals join the disc.  The painting takes a week to dry in hot weather but normally 2 to 3 weeks. Claire usually allows a month for drying for an exhibition painting. As it usually takes 6 months to complete one painting it means that Claire is multi-tasking with a few paintings being produced at any one time.

This was a fascinating evening and hopefully inspired everyone to try to produce a close-up painting for the competition in September.

ADVENTUROUS ARTISTS AT THE SIR HAROLD HILLIER GARDENS

Our Adventurous Artists sketching  group had an enjoyable visit to Hiller Gardens. We were lucky with the weather because the rain cleared up.  The regional exhibition of the UK Coloured Pencil Society had some accomplished artwork. We saw Wendy Jelbert and she was delighted because one of her paintings had won a prize.

 

You can see us - Jean, June, Ali, Roy and Di working hard at our sketches. We noticed how much the regular practice has increased our individual drawing skills. Joan Bass was by the pond sketching the duck house when the photos were taken; but she met up with us in the cafė afterwards. Next month we will be very busy preparing for the summer exhibition, so the sketching group will not meet again until Friday 9th September. The venue will be announced nearer the time.

Di Alexander

Di

Roy

Ali

June and Jean

Alison and painting

In the tea break 

Final painting

Alison Board Demonstrates Watercolours with a Difference

 Alison enjoys a reputation as an experimental watercolour artist. She has used many different kinds of art materials since working in an art shop. She loves combining them with watercolour in unusual ways. A list of the materials that she used in the demonstration appears at the end of this article.

Alison prefers to allow the painting to develop without controlling it too much: ‘Don’t have an end result in mind, then you will not be disappointed’. She asks two questions at the beginning: ‘What does the subject need in order to bring it to life?’ and ‘What do I fancy using today?’                                                


We were surprised to see her begin by tracing the daisy heads from her photograph using a biro - but they were very simple shapes. A Maskaway eraser removed unwanted marks left by the tracing paper.                      


Alison’s usual palette consists of three ‘cold’ colours, in this case: Daniel Smith Prussian blue, cobalt violet and green gold plus one additional colour. She avoids mixing colours or overworking a painting. “Brushing the paint into the surface of the paper results in ‘dead’ colours.” She applied splashes of prussian blue and­­ green gold wet-in-wet and allowed them to run down. She said that half the fun of painting is ‘the unexpected’.                               


Demonstrating one of her favourite techniques – incorporating quotes or printed paper – Alison pasted strips from a map of the Totton area onto the paper using Bindex adhesive below and above them. She brushed Daniel Smith’s Watercolour Ground over and around parts of the strips. This enabled her to paint over an otherwise water-repellent surface. Watercolour Ground is very useful for increasing texture, making cut edges less noticeable or covering a painted area. It enables watercolours to be used on glass, metal, plastic and other surfaces.

Green gold watercolour was used for the daisy centres, followed by a clear wax resist stick over them instead of masking fluid. Brusho powder was brushed around the daisy petals and sprayed with water. The unpainted daisy petals provided areas of strong contrast i.e. white flowers against blue background, with even darker areas beneath the flower-heads.

This was the point at which Alison stepped back and asked herself “What does it need?” She has a wide variety of media at her disposal and enjoys choosing which ones to use. Her view on the painting process is:  “You have to enjoy it, or it’s not worth it”. She used scribbling strokes to shape the flower centres and add cobalt violet shadows. The flower stems were painted with Daniel Smith Zoisite Genuine which is a light blue-green. 

Nearing the end of the painting session she put herself on “faff alert” because she prefers to have unresolved areas rather than an overworked painting. She chose to leave the flower stems not anchored at the bottom. You should aim to finish half an hour before you would normally finish. Her finished painting proved that best quality watercolour paints and paper together with mixed media can achieve beautiful results. 

Materials (Most are available from the SAA website)                                               SAA White nylon No. 6 brush : Larger nylon & sable brush : Palette knife

Saunders Waterford Paper 140lb (not stretched)

Daniel Smith Watercolour paints squeezed into pans: Prussian blue, cobalt violet, green gold, zoisite genuine which is a blue-green.

(Alison loves lamp black, amethyst and sleeping beauty turquoise and hates paynes grey: an example of a hue containing more than two pigments.)

Brusho powdered ink : Daniel Smith Watercolour Ground : Clear wax stick

Tracedown paper : Maskaway masking fluid block (or putty eraser)

Pebeo Bindex adhesive : Torn strips printed map : Spray bottle of water