Inspiration and practical advice for aspiring realist artists
Flowers are hard to paint.
Yellow flowers are particularly difficult.
It’s the shadows.
You see, especially on high chroma flowers, it’s often impossible to get high enough chroma in the shadows. In paint, we lose chroma quicky as we go down the value scale.
When spring comes to this part of the Cotswolds, the landscape is transformed.
There are two flowers that are responsible for this change, daffodils and oxlips. I love them both, they’ve come to mean spring to me since we moved to this lovely part of the countryside.
I’ve been itching to paint some since I spotted the first one a few days ago.
Tightness in paintings equals a lack of emotion and expression. Tightness is bad.
Looseness equates to freedom, expression and emotion. Looseness is good.
You hear this a lot.
Actually (and although I’m painting more loosely now) I couldn’t disagree more.
I read recently (I can’t rememeber where) a quote that went something like “your last painting will tell you what your next painting needs to be”.
That’s why I’ve kept this one in the studio for a while. It was telling me something about where I was heading, and how I might get there.
I didn’t know that apples could be an endangered species.
In fact, I realise now that I knew very little about apples before I met my friends the Brent-Smiths, who manage traditional English orchards at Day’s Cottage Farm.
In fact, I’m just beginning to realise how little I still know.
Today I’d like to ask for your help.
My teaching studio project is moving forwards. The big decision I’m facing at this point is the space itself.
I think it’s important that anyone who learns with me, and travels to do a workshop with me feels at ease in the space we’ll be working in.
This one started out as a demo on edge handling which I did as a live stream as part of our Threads artists’ community.
Somewhere along the way, a lot of the things I’ve been thinking about and working through lately came together in one piece.
My big project of this year is opening a permanent teaching studio.
As I move forward with it, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to different approaches to learning to paint.
I think there are broadly four approaches to teaching skilled representational painting these days:
Everyone who paints regularly knows that, on some level, painting means going willingly into the unknown.
To put it like that seems a little exciting. Romantic, even.
But uncertainty is anything but romantic.
It’s uncomfortable. It means constantly facing the spectre of failure, and sometimes living with it when it happens. Fear is not fun.
So why do we do it?
We all want to improve our painting. But often, I think we try to do that by just…painting more.
I don’t think that’s the best way to do it. There is a better way. Here’s how.
