Session Five will be here on
Monday 24th October
at
6PM UK time (1Pm Eastern, 10AM Pacific check your timezone here)
What we’ll be doing
Over the final two sessions of the workshop, we’re going to work on a single subject.
You have a choice for how you treat this subject – and also a choice of two subjects.
Both reference photos have been cropped quite widely, so that you can decide for yourself how you’d like to arrange your own subject within the frame. You also have a choice of size and aspect ratio.
I don’t want to give you too many restrictions on this one, because I think it will be most useful for you if you begin to take the steps from painting along in a workshop setting towards making your own artistic choices about how to interpret your subject.
In this way, I hope that the transition to applying what you’ve learned in the workshop to your own work will be made easier and smaller.
Of course, you are very welcome to paint versions that are the same as the ones I’ll be doing if you’re more comfortable doing that.
In this session, I’ll demonstrating the two different approaches we’ve used for blocking in values and deciding on the composition, each with one of the reference photos.
The Rose and Coffee Pot Photo
I’ll be choosing a crop of this one by cropping the photo in photoshop (I will show this step live with a screenshare) and then painting a block in of value blocks as we did in the first few sessions, using a grid to lay out the drawing of the big shapes first
The Urn and Squashes Photo
I’ll be doing the first stage of this piece using the wipe out method, choosing the compositon arrangement on the fly using the second, more intuitive method.
What you need to do
- Choose one or the other of the reference photos for your subject
- Decide how large you want to work, and with what aspect ratio – also whether portrait or landscape
- Depending on which method of blocking in you prefer, either crop your reference photo in image editing software first (make sure it’s the same aspect ratio as your panel!) and have it ready for the start of this session, or paint along with me using the wipe out method in the second half of the session
In the sixth and final session, we’ll be taking the block-in stage further, working over the start we make in this session, developing the forms, edges and making corrections to produce a more complete value and composition study.
What you’ll need
Your own choice of surface
Paints
- Lead or titanium white
- Ivory black
- Raw umber or similar (burnt umber, transparent red oxide, burnt sienna will do as well)
Brushes
Kitchen roll, a clean rag or something similar if you’re using the wipe-out method
2 x half inch flat hogs
2 x smaller hogs
One or two soft flat synthetics for softening
Anything else you personally like to use
Medium
Linseed oil (cold pressed or refined) and a solvent
Preparation
Please have the five step value scale we’ve used for the last two sessions ready before we start.
Reference photos
Rose and Coffee Pot Reference Photo
