Session five of the workshop will be here at:
6PM UK time (1PM Eastern, 10AM Pacific – check your timezone here)
on
Monday 25th April
What we’ll be doing
A beautiful new subject.
These wild primroses will be quite a challenge, and will require a different way of thinking and approaching the subject.
Obviously, there’s way too much detail and complexity here to paint every detail – too much to do if we try to paint things. So we must select which moments from this composition are going to bring it to life, firstly. And secondly, we must come up with a way to approach it that will create an overall impression of the arrangement, into which we can add those key compositional moments.
In this first session, we’ll be looking mostly at the colour mixing – creating light and shadow with the two local colours of the flowers, and the colours of the tea pot.
We’ll also look at ways we can apply the paint in order to create an impression of detail that isn’t really there – by introducing texture and direction to our brush strokes right at the start.
Try to let go of the need to create a finished painting from this subject. Try to approach it with a spirit of questioning and experiment. We’ll ask questions of the colours and find answers, and we’ll experiment a little with our materials and see what impression we can create with them. Try to look at this as a learning experience rather than an opportunity to create a finished piece.
It is obviously a challenging subject and deliberately so – if you try to paint every detail of this subject, you will really struggle!
What you’ll need
Materials
Palette and palette knife
I’ll be using an 8 x 10 inch ampersand panel (which will also be the size of the final painting), but you can use oil painting paper.
Medium: Linseed oil and a solvent
Paints:
- lead (or titanium) white
- a green yellow – cadmium yellow lemon. If you don’t have this, lemon yellow or perhaps hansa yellow
- cadmium yellow (cad yellow light if you’re using Winsor and Newton paint)
- Yellow Ochre
- quinacridone rose
- ultramarine blue
- permanent magenta
- raw umber
- ivory black
- phthalo green – I’ll be using Winsor and Newton Winsor green (yellow shade) but any phthalo green should be fine
Brushes: flat synthetics and hog bristles will both help you here.
