We’d been on the motorway for 6 hours, stuck in a traffic Jam. The kids were going crazy. The cat, perched between the kids in the back, was miaowing loudly and clawing at the door of the cat box. Michelle and I had both had about an hour’s sleep the previous night, and we were
Williams Pears
Often I take a long time over putting together the setups for my small paintings. This one originally had other objects involved – at one point a mirror in the background, at another an antique silver spoon, and a collections of bowls – but after a few hours of squinting and looking at the shapes
Lemons and Bay
I’ve been looking at a lot of Northern Renaissance still life painting recently. I’ve had Dutch still life paintings drifting through my mind. Somehow, they must have seeped into me a little and I’ve become quite preoccupied with a handful of images. This, I guess, is what happens when some of that gets filtered through
Why I Don’t Paint from Photographs
I’ve been criticised for painting from photographs. Once, someone asked in the comments to a post why I was copy-painting (his term) a perfectly good photograph. Kind of ironic because it wasn’t a photograph at all, I was working from life. In fact, I never work from photographs. This is the picture that provoked that
Lemons, Bay Leaves and Chinese Bowl
I’ve combined a few favourite subjects here to make an arrangement in which I’ve tried to create a gentleness and hopefully harmony too, of colour and shape. There are deliberate echoes of curves, something I’ve been doing ever since I did a couple of years of composition practice based on Arthur Wesley Dow’s ideas. I
How I use Underpainting to Influence the Final Painting
Now that I’m full time at this and painting a lot more, I have more opportunity to try things out and develop my painting process as I go. I’m going to try to post a bit more here about how my process is changing currently, and how I put my paintings together, since it might
How to Choose the Right Pigments
How do you know which tube pigments you need to mix a colour you want? It’s bewildering. There are so many. And none of them are ever quite what you need. Most of them are too dark, too, so then you have to decide what to lighten them with. Quite often I get asked for
Drawing Exercise: Sight Size Block in
Last week, I posted about why I think accuracy training is so useful for realist artists. You can read that post here. One of the comments on that post came from someone who was a little put out that I hadn’t actually added any accuracy training exercises. Well, this site is pretty thick with drawing,
Why Accuracy?
I get asked quite a lot about the emphasis I put on accuracy. Most often, people are curious about whether I think you should always strive for accuracy, or whether it’s something you just do for a while, when you’re learning, and then relax at some point. The questions usually take one of two forms
You have to be so strong to live this life
Just recently, someone emailed me and said they saw me as an example of success. I’m glad, I’d love to inspire people to try to do what they love. But I was also surprised, because I don’t think of myself as having succeeded. So I emailed this person back and I told them how hard
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