The process of my paintings on day 10,11,12 and 13 of 30 Paintings in 30 Days.

I’m on the committee of an art group called Network Arts. The group invites artists to run workshops for us 10 times a year. I created these paintings at a workshop given by Northants artist Lee Burrows. Here’s a little about the process.

1. A huge still life was set up. It was full of shapes and unusual objects with deliberately little colour.

2. I made a line drawing of some of the shapes, I like to simplify the objects and look at the gaps between them. Lee suggested turning the page as I drew to create more interesting relationships and mix up the composition.

I did many drawings, quickly and loosely.

3. I had my 4 boards ready to paint. Some had a stained layer of colour and one of the boards was just white. I drew out the drawing using charcoal across all 4 boards. I don’t have an image of just my drawing but this photo shows a little of the drawing as I started to add paint. You can see the orange and the yellow were actually the colour of the primed surface and you can also see some of my charcoal sketch marks.

4. I used a mixture of burnt sienna and phthalocyanine blue to give me a dark nearly black colour, to paint over the lines. Once the lines were painted I then used some earth colours (siennas and umbers) plus white to start blocking in areas intuitively. I deliberately pulled in areas on the lines to mix with the earthy paints , giving a tinge of blue to the edges.

5. Once I had got a little paint on the boards, I separated them and treated each one as an individual, allowing instinct to inform my decisions of colour choice and which lines to keep in the painting and which lines to paint out.

I really enjoyed this process and you’ll no doubt see me use the technique and in some of the other paintings I do this month. What I love about workshops is that every time I either attend one or run one , I learn or relearn a technique that can push my work in a different direction.

I used some of Lee Burrows earth colours, which I believe were Windsor and Newton and my own set of Michael Harding oils, the cadmium range, which are delicious!

some links for you.
www.networkarts.co.uk
leeburrowsfineart.co.uk/
www.michaelharding.co.uk/