Friday 30 April 2010

Ringwood Hall

Some time ago my daughter announced that she and her partner were to marry. We discussed various aspects of the proposed wedding and during that chat they asked me if I would do a watercolour of the venue that was finally chosen for the ceremony. I was obviously delighted and agreed enthusiastically. A few weeks ago the happy couple tied the proverbial knot by civil ceremony at Ringwood Hall near Chesterfield.

I don't wish to be unkind to Ringwood Hall but finding a suitbable viewpoint from which to make a presentable painting was not easy. I took dozens of photo's from all angles. Doing a painting of any part of the building wasn't going to be difficult, but making it a 'Landscape painting' rather than picture of bricks and mortar was a different matter.

After much deliberation I decided to try and recreate what the Hall might look like from a higher-than-normal viewpoint. This allowed me to pull in landscape from the surrounding countryside as well as include the wonderful relaxing and tranquil formal gardens. Getting my head round this 3-D object using only ground-level 2-D photo's was not easy but thank goodness for Google Maps. The satellite view of the Hall provided me with a wealth of useful information not only with regards to what was on the roof, but also the way the various parts of the building fitted together.
A lot of time was spent on preliminary pencil sketches and in drawing out the building itself onto the watercolour paper. Perspective was obviously going to be tricky.

At first I wasn't pleased with the finished result. One of my weaknesses is that I am too timid with colour, especially the darks. The 'finished' painting looked flat and disinteresting but some arty friends nudged me into getting some more darks in there and it has made a world of difference. Now I am very pleased with the painting. My daughter and Son-in-law haven't seen it yet and I'm keen to see their reaction .... just a tad nervous about it too.

Tuesday 27 April 2010

Bellis Perennis

I've long been a fan of these wonderful little flowers but only recently have I noticed their flowering habit. They are the Daisy family and only grow 4" tall but put out masses of little flowers. What has fascinated me about the way the flowers form is how it gradually develops from a 'daisy' type shape to a pom-pom.

First they create a tiny yellow head that looks much like an unopened bud, but it is only a cluster of stamen (I think). Very soon the yellow stamen around the outside edge of the flower begin to open producing tube-like petals. From time to time a stamen will produce a flower 'out of turn', as in this shot.


Gradually more and more stamen convert to petals ....

... nearly all done ....

.... until finally all we have is a perfectly formed pom-pom. It is only through the eyes of the macro lens that we appreciate that the pom-pom consists of scores of tiny tubes.

Thursday 8 April 2010

A modern English family home

A while ago I was approached by a friend who wanted a painting doing of her daughters house. I was very happy to oblige and she provided me with plenty of reference photo's and some very clear guidelines as to how she wanted the whole thing to look.

The painting is a combination of pen and watercolour. I do call it Pen and Wash but in my mind 'wash' implies loose transparent colours whereas this is more a pen drawing that's been coloured in with fairly strong colours.

Using pen has enabled me to add quite a lot of detail that I wouldn't normally include in a watercolour painting, like the house number set into the stained glass panel in the front door. Of course, these details aren't visible in small interent-based jpeg's.

Monday 22 February 2010

Barmouth Viking II

Some time ago I was on holiday in Snowdonia and visited Barmouth for the day. As we wandered around, I was snapping scenes that I thought might make potential painting subjects, as you do. One of my photo's was of this catamaran, Barmouth Viking II. She was sitting on the beach at low tide with her skipper doing a bit of routine maintenance on her.

As a small thank you to Skipper John for the use of the photograph let me tell you that Barmouth Viking II is 10 metres long and licensed and equipped to carry up to 12 persons and 2 crew for fishing trips up to 60 miles off-shore. Full details can be obtained from the Barmouth Viking II web site.

Saturday 9 January 2010

Northampton Town - Market Square

Well, as those of you who have followed the progress of this drawing will know, it is finally finished. To help the off-white Cartridge paper look white I've used a cream mount, and to compliment the cold monochrome pen work I've chosen a silver-effect frame. The photo doesn't do it justice but the overall effect is very good. To say I'm pleased would be a gross understatement.

Since I have a dozen photo's taken at various stages of this drawing, I've also decided to make a Work-In-Progress web page for my art site. Though I'm no expert myself, hopefully the page will still be of interest to anyone considering having a go at Line Drawing.

Tuesday 29 December 2009

Northampton Town in Pen

Though very much an art novice, I have to confess to being extremely pleased with the way my Water Mill pen drawing turned out. So much so that I have decided I'd like to try something more ambitious. Even if it turns out quite poor I hope to learn a lot from the experience. I've also decided to show the drawing as work-in-progress so that any more experienced artists can toss in any words of advice as I go along. I am showing the main reference photo so we can all see what I'm aiming at however, I will be drawing the Market Stalls across the bottom right corner which is more in keeping with their present deployment. They also have more colourful striped canvases which will be easier to depict than the drab plain blue canvases in the photo. My basic plan is to draw a grid to help get the proportions and perspectives as accurate as possible and then lightly pencil in the main shapes and structures. Then I will ink over those and erase all pencil marks. I will then pass over the drawing adding in detail and finally review the picture for tonal values. I learned from the Water Mill drawing that a lot of detail involving a lot of lines creates dark tones naturally. I can't judge at the moment which parts of my drawing will need extra shading and which won't, so I'll leave that till last. I've chosen a Medium Surface Cartridge paper, 130 gsm and size A3. I've never used this paper with pen before but a small test on a scrap of the paper caused me to think it should be ok. I will be using a selection of fine point pens of different thicknesses. In my forum I'm running this as a Work-in-Progress and we started right back at choosing the reference photo to work from. I'm posting my thoughts at each step and the full process from beginning to end will be documented. However, in this blog I will simply leave it at this one post, but the picture will be updated at each stage so if you wish to see it developing pop back frequently and I'll try and have an updated picture for you to see. If you want to follow it more closely, you can see my forum thread here.

Tuesday 1 December 2009

Rosie

This is a pencil portrait of 'Rosie', a German Shepherd owned by a friend of ours. I drew Rosie when she was a puppy but the only reference photo I had was of her looking into the bright sun with a very significant squint. I considered drawing her eyes open but they are so important that, without some reference, I was worried it wouldn't look like her.

Now she is a teenager. It's interesting drawing her without the fluffiness she had as a pup. Regrettably, the best photo of her had closed eyes again, but this time I had other photo's with eyes open that I could refer to.

I was in the process of scanning the image when my friend arrived. We were talking as the scanned image of Rosie scrolled down my monitor. My friends face was worth it's weight in gold because I could see for myself that she'd recognised Rosie straight off.