Learning to See

Inspiration and practical advice for aspiring realist artists

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Winter Roses Workshop Session One

Welcome to the first live session of the workshop!

The session will be here on:

Monday 11th January

at

6PM UK time (10AM Pacific, 1PM Eastern)

What we’ll be doing

We’re going to be kicking off the workshop with a close look at drawing, structure of form, and values.

By far the hardest thing about painting roses is being able to simplify down all that complexity into something more manageable. It’s so easy to steam straight in and get lost in all those lovely petals! But that’s when the mistakes start.

So we’ll begin by drawing out a single rose from our main workshop subject, focusing on simplifying the large forms and understanding how it’s put together.

Once we understand that, we can do an accurate value study. This is extremely important because nailing the values is largely responsible for the feeling of lightness and softness of the petals. And those values are very subtle!

So we’ll develop our careful form drawing into a value study, so that we can focus just on this for a little while without having to deal with colour as well (that will come next week…)

What you’ll need

Surface

A single panel, 10 by 8 inches will be fine. I’ll be using an ampersand panel. Other surfaces will be ok, but avoid anything with too much texture like canvas. Smooth surface s are better for the method we’ll be using.

Medium

Have your linseed oil and solvent (turps, gamsol or similar) at the ready! In every session, we’ll be using the “couch” method on outr painting surface – painting into a thin layer of oil. So it’s a good idea to get into doing this right at the start.

Brushes

Ideally a big brush (an inch or so) to throw down the oil couch, and rag or kitchen roll to wipe it back.

Then you’ll want a small-ish briush for drawing out – I usually use a 1/1 inch flat.

You’ll want a couple of half inch flats too for when we start laying in the values.

Paint

We’ll just be doing a value study, but have ivory black, titanium white and raw umber on hand. With slightly wearm neutrals, we can make a very pleasing study that can almost stand as a painting in its own right.

Reference Photos

Click on these photos to download them. I’d advise having them up on a separate screen to the one you’ll be viewing the live video on if you possibly can, that will enable you to have the relevant photo up all the time to paint from whilst also being able to see what’s happening in the live stream.

Photo One

This is a full colour photo of the rose we’ll be painting today

Photo Two

This is the photo above with a grid overlaid to help with drawing out

Photo Three

This is a value only photo, with a value scale overlaid to help with getting the values right

More info

The session will be two to three hours long. We’ll be taking a break every now and again so you can grab a cup of tea (or glass of wine..)

The session will be immediately available to watch again at this link if you can’t make it live, but not available to download until after the workshop is over and I upload all the session videos to main course home site.

It’s not required that you paint along of course, you can simply watch and then paint along at your own pace later. But we won’t be going too quickly, and it’s more fun if you get your brushes out 😀

There will be a chat box (on the right if you’re on a computer, right down the bottom of the page if you’re on a tablet) so you can ask questions as we go along.

Chat