En Plein Air

I have managed to squeeze in 3 seperate en Plein Air painting days into my easter break. I think its the most fun that I have had paintings so far and will be doing it as much as I can in the future. All of the following paintings are 30cm wide and were done on my little pochade box setup.

The first trip was to Bluebell forest near my parents farm house. It was an interesting day: my debut at doing plein air work in public. It was much less of an ordeal than I had suposed it would be though. People were kind and despite it being very busy i was not interuppted all that much. About 2 hours each on these 2.


My next trip I was accompanied by the excellent Mr Sean Donaldson a fellow concept artist from my team at work. We journied over to Dimmingsdale near Alton (of Alton Towers fame). Dimmingsdale is a mind blowing location and I think we will be revisiting it again and again. We were spoilt for choice but settled down for the afternoon in front of the famous chained oak. It is in a bad way but was a very exciting subject to paint. Sorry for the glare on this photo! I think this is about 5 hours worth of pretty intense painting.

My final trip we got together a little group. Neil F Roberts, Aidan Wilson and Jon Cave (excllent fellow who runs a life drawing group at the Malt Cross on wed evenings in Nottingham) all met in a car park off of the A52 (sinister I know) and then went location hunting in the vicinity of Belvoir. It was an ace day.
Neil got me to take some wip shots of my first piece (i also included a photo of what I was painting):

We then went to a lovely country pub, had a pint of ale and then set off to find location 2, based on the barmaids recommendation! We got a cracking view of Belvoir castle from a nearbye village. Ace! Here is my last one on the easle.

Present

Hi all.

I painted this last week for my finest of friends Hannah, for her birthday. She is a truly splendid individual and it was great to make her a gift that she really seemed to like.

The painting is of her son Ted on the beach in Barcelona with his lovely auntie Heidi.

This one is on linen canvas and took around 10 hours. I have also included a wider shot so you can get some idea of context. My paintings never look so good on the blog as they do in the flesh and a friend suggested I take photos that show something of the surroundings in them.

Dr Sketchy April 11

Dr Sketchy Nottingham was particuarly ace today. Fun fun! These are all very quick... a whopping 15 mins on this one: 10 mins:

5 mins:

15 mins.

Cheers !

Studies and practice!

Hey everyone.

I am going back to the fundamentals for a while. I recently spent a morning at the studio of the wonderfully generous painter Marcus Hodge. You can see his work here: MARCUS HODGE

He was educated in Spain and is a tremendous direct painter. I cannot thank him enough for the time and expertise he gave me. He reviewed a selection of my recent paintings and then set me one hour to do a Sorolla self portrait study. The main aim of this was so he could see how I currently approach a piece. He then reviewed my terrible attempt and then proceeded to demo on the same canvas how he would have approached it. It was incredibly enlightening and has given me a great deal to consider in my work.

After that last studio painting taking so much time I was ready to get back to doing some studies and Marcus provided me with a few pointers as to what might benefit me the most. First up are a few master studies. I have limited myself to one and a half hours per painting on these. They have been great fun to do. Master studies are one of those things that I did digitally but really had glossed over. It is so interesting to paint from something where someone else has already solved all of the difficult decisions for you!

These are all oil on canvas board 40x34cm (I Think!) First 2 are Velasquez and the 3rd is a Sargent.

These next couple are from the portrait group as normal. They were done before I met up with Marcus. They are both done using the Zorn limited palette (well an equivilent one: titanium white, yellow ochre, cad red and lamp black). I still can't get these done in the hour and a bit painting time but I try!

I painted this next one in the garden on saturday. An hour and a half. It is my father in law Phil. He is an excellent chap and kindly sat for me. I wanted to take it further but got bored bless him!
This last one was pretty much a disaster but since this is more of a journal than a portfolio I will share it here. About 5 hours Plein Air in my front garden. The subject matter was tough and my greens are just foul! The first of many to come, onwards and upwards eh? haha!

I don't know if anyone actually reads my blog but if you are interested in representational painting then I would heartily recommend these 3 books as being incredible useful:

Richard Schmid: Alla Prima
Harold Speed: Practice and Science of Drawing
Harold SPeed: Paining techniques and materials.

Tsunami Charity Digital Painting.

Hi everyone. I decided to get involved with the Tsunami CFSL Project:
This image is based on two seperate news stories. The first was one about a dog that stayed with its injured mate. The second was about the town of Kesnnuma, which was devastated and had its tuna fleet dumped on top if it. It was some deeply affecting, iconic imagery. Get involved with the project if you have time. There are some amazing pieces submitted already.

A lttle about process. I gathered my ref and then thumbnailed different compositional ideas:

This shot below was my 5th thumb but i did not save it off before i fleshed it out to a more resolved state. Here I am still working in monochrome, concentrating on balancing out my tonal composition and the values of the various areas against each other.
You need to click on this one to make it larger! I added colours and details and got critique from friends once i reached a stage that i thought was going in the right direction. I cannot over emphasise the importance of getting feedback on your work. There will always be something that can be tweaked or fix that you are just not seeing. This piece has consolidated that reference is very important for me when working on something effectively realistic: I did not have my usual chopping and changing, nor did i end up painting vaguely (without direction) as I so often do.

Scarlet and Jonny

Hi everyone,
I have finally finished my first larger studio painting. It is on MDF and is 1m x 0.5m , considerably larger than the stuff i have been doing since I started painting again. I have had a set of panels made up at an extreme wide screen aspect ratio and will be bringing in some filmic composition into my upcoming pieces.
Th models in this piece are a very interesting real life couple. Ellie is a burlesque performer who works under the monica of Scarlet Daggers. Jonny is in a band called the Speedkings. They live a fine old life together! Here is the finished painting:


This time i tried out a very deliberate methodology, based on the Golden Age Illustrators methodology. I first did sheets of thumbnails designing tonal arrangements and compositions and exploring ideas.


Then we did a photo shoot using these thumbnails as a base. It was the first time I have done anything like that and it was a really interesting experience. Emma was very generous and let me play with her brilliant equipment as well as aiding me with lighting and some technical know how. She was very very helpful and I learned a lot through the process. If you have not been along to her blog then go check it out. She constantly does inspiring and brilliant things: MISS RAIN PHOTOGRAPHY.

Once I had my photographic reference I then sifted through it all and played around digitally with composing different figures together and tweaking shots. I am doing several paintings from the material we got from this shoot but i have so little time to paint that i think it will take a while before more images are finished.Next in the process was to paint a study of the final piece. The study is only about 12" wide but allowed me to run though the process in anticipation of the larger painting. I think I got too noodly on this tbh. Next time i will aim for a broader treatment more in keeping with the style and pace of my alla prima portrait work. I did not match the format of the intended larger painting as i really just needed to concentrate on the figures.

Here is a detail from the final painting...



It has surprised me how many hours I ended up sinking into this one. I am going to be concentrating on my drawing accuracy in the early stages of my next paintings as my more relaxed approach to blocking in is ending up costing me way to much painting time. In the Alla Prima book on drawing the wonderful Mr Schmid really emphasises the importance of putting down carefully measured, accurate work in the early stages and i think he is quite right (as usual!) If you have limited time to paint with you do not want to spend that time repainting things that were not done carefully enough in the first instance.

I have read many books on painting now and nothing comes close to the sheer quantity and quality of this text. Treat yourself!

I do not normally gabble on as much as that, sorry!

Dr Sketchy drawings Feb 2011

Hi all,
We had an absolute blast at Dr sketchy Nottingham yesterday. Wicked turn out from the gang and much fun all round. Big Shout out to Charlotte and Scarlett for organising such a consistantly fun and inspiring event.
These are my favourite drawing from yesterday plus another one (first in this post) from the November session last year (the model had the original off me). We had a whopping 20 mins on this drawing. This was a prize winner for me. Woohoo! I think its my favourite of all my Dr Sketchy images so far.Next one is 10 mins prisma colour black on newsprint with a little pentel brush pen action.
15 mins toned pastel paper with prismacolour, and black and white posca markers (these things are ace!)
5 minute prismacolour on newsprint. Zooom!
This one was a prize winner. 15 mins on toned pastel paper with all sorts of media! The red is more fabulous POSCA action.
Fun!