[Jack]

Day 6 (23/10/21)

• I read chapter 4 of Landscape Inside and Out on the planning and painting process.
  • Idea: what is your reason for wanting to paint the scene? That’s the idea/the focal point around which to design and edit a scene.
  • Unity: no colour, shape, position, or value has meaning without the others – the dominant idea always prevails
  • Harmony is achieved when there is both variety and repetition of value, colour, and shape. There must be both conflict/tension/contrast and resolution.
  • Planning process might include:
    • drafting a thumbnail of a scene in just black/white (notan?)
    • value plans
    • colour plans – simple big shapes of the scene that can become the lay-in of a larger piece

• I wanted to do something a bit different today, so inspired by Kyffin Williams, I tried to complete a sketch using palette knife alone (for the first time too). It was fairly challenging as the sketch is quite small and I only have one reasonably-large palette knife! My other focus was on using a lot of greys to depict a characteristically overcast wet day of a nearby hill. Really enjoyable 1-2 hours.

• After that, I stuck the fire on and set up a small still life in the living room. It’s the first time I’ve tried painting a still life and I’m really pleased how it turned out. I don’t really know why I like it so much, but I think it might be the best thing I’ve painted yet. I enjoyed trying to  get the red and green hues to sit together, with warm and cool temperatures of each, into the same form. The pear took very little time at all, but I spent a long while on the folds of the cloth – constantly darkening and knocking it back, trying to strike a balance between depicting form without it distracting from the pear. Drapery is tough work. It isn’t perfect, but a good effort for a first try. (3hrs)

Dydd da!

Practice Time: ~5hrs

[Jack]

Many thanks for your thoughtful feedback Meghana! One of the most enjoyable parts of painting at the moment is the pace of learning new things – every sketch feels like a big step.

You’re quite right about the diffused characteristic of light here in the UK, even when it’s sunny it lacks the sharp high sun of a California or Italy. I’d like to be able to capture the mood of my locale like Kyffin Williams, with pieces being very provincial in nature. Like they couldn’t be set anywhere else.

The background forest is supposed to be quite near, but in shadow due to the sun being above but behind the hill. But it was a lot lighter in the reference, and I ummed-and-ahhed about whether the photo was lighter/darker than reality. I could have played up the atmospheric effect, and perhaps lightened it. Hard to say, but I’d agree it doesn’t really read as near and in shadow! I might give it another try in a few weeks 🙂

Thanks again

[Jack]

Welcome Gary – what an interesting background you have! I looked through your gallery and particularly enjoyed your winter landscape in acrylics. Your portraits have realm warmth and vivacity about them too, you can tell they’re from life and not references.

I’m keen to explore pastel landscapes one day, there are sadly very few pastel courses on NMA.

Do check out the open critique forum, I’m sure there are beginners who would benefit from your experience!

Cheers, Jac

[Jack]

Welcome Blaze! Look forward to seeing your art.

[Jack]

Day 5 (22/10/21)

• Finished the chapter in Landscape Inside and Out on the relativity of colours, values, and edges.
  • Find the extremes: Ask yourself – what shape is largest/smallest? colour most intense/neutral? value lightest/darkest? edges sharpest/softest?
  • Design the relationships around the central idea of your painting.
  • Try: adding warm/cool colours into the same shapes or light/shadow families.
  • Try: distinguishing the focal point with high contrasts (value, colour, edges).
• I didn’t get much time to paint today, so I tried a three 30 minute tree studies. I went into these without much intention and, as a result I think, none felt particularly successful. All the foliage is the same, for instance, despite being three totally different trees! Phoning it in a bit.
• I think I’m going to mix it up tomorrow just to add a bit of  variation into my practice.

Practice Time: 1.5 hrs

 

• This reply was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by Jack.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by Jack.

[Jack]

Wow, that’s brilliant – thank you Julia! I watched the video in its entirety and your notes were very helpful (and the auto-translated subtitles, much less so).

There’s a lot of interesting ideas there and a few things I’m definitely guilty of (like painting sky with too much saturation) and a few I’m eager to try (like using white as little as possible when blocking in).

Thanks again.

[Jack]

Day 4 (21/10/21)

Not much time for learning art today as I have Welsh lessons in the evening.

• Read a few pages in Landscape Painting Inside & Out on value relationships and the relativity of colour.
  • Emphasised the importance of value studies, and among other things, ‘what range of values depict the atmosphere the best and sets the mood you want to convey’.  For me, I’m always trying to simply match values to what I see (from photo or life), but as Macpherson repeats, painters don’t have all the variety of nature – there’s an element of simplification, abstraction, and design. Choices, in other words.
  • Another key point I need to remember, is to keep changes of hue/saturation/temperature within the light/shadow family of the shape. Don’t refine shapes with value changes.
  • Value and colour contrasts attract attention.
  • Key a painting to its purest colour, other colours shouldn’t compete.
• As for practice, I made a quick shape plan using a reference photo of mine:

• Then I did a 2 hour sketch, which I abandoned after a lot of scraping away and repainting. I was never really happy with any part of it.
  • It’s the second time I’ve attempted to paint a tree canopy that is 50/50 sky, and it’s very tricky to depict the reflective, transparent, swaying texture. I wasn’t sure how many sky holes to put in, whether to use light/yellower greens to suggest transparent leaves, how to portray both a firm structure and its loose parts, etc.
  • The composition is a bit boring, I hoped it’d be similar to what Payne described as an L composition; the colours got a bit muddy with all the re-work.
  • I’d abandoned the effort before really dealing with the background.
  • Learnings: perhaps be more specific in the design stage about the shapes and really scrutinise the composition. Just keep practising what’s challenging!
  • Positives: I have enjoyed sneaking some saturated greens into the grass, a hint of Timkov.

 

Practice Time: ~2hrs

[Jack]

Thank you for the recommendation Julia! I had a quick look at the video, but will need to watch through it properly.

He achieves beautiful abstraction without compromising accuracy of the form. I really enjoy the chiselled, square brush marks – it gives the depiction real strength, and boldness as you say. He also gets a lot more variation in the mass in terms of hues and saturation. It really comes together at the end, I wish I could understand his explanations.

If you come across any other similar videos in your learning, please do share 🙂

[Jack]

Day 4 (20/10/21)

• I read a section of Landscape Inside and Out about ‘Shape Relationships’. There was an exercise about cutting a scene into large mosaic pieces, with the idea of beginning a painting from its big compositional shapes. Marco Bucci has a great video about shapes too. The book is fantastic, I’m taking it a few pages a day to try and absorb as much as possible – but I suspect it’ll take a few rereads.
• So for today’s exercise, I took a reference photo and created a simplified ‘mosaic’ of its main shapes, values, and hues as a starting point for a 2 hour sketch.

I really enjoyed this sketch – not least because it was the first time I felt I was trying to capture the mood/feeling of when I took the photo. For a bit of fun I tried to sneak in similarly valued colours into some of the shapes, trying to be conscious about the temperature/intensity relationships – the cool pines on the right, compared to the warm tree as the focal point – the saturated greens of the foreground shrub compared to the desaturated hedges, etc.

[Jack]

Hello Meghana,

I’m no great portrait artist, so it’s hard for me to say what you could improve upon (especially as you’ve erased some of the presumably less successful ones!). But I will say each head immediately ‘reads’ in terms of direction and position in space, it’s obviously not your first time drawing heads. It’s clear which are views from behind/front/side/beneath. Overall, the proportions seem right, and you’ve picked up on key points like the importance of the ear to turn the form. You’re also able to convey a lot of information in very few lines, which adds a sense of cleanness to the drawings.

In terms of displaying a view from beneath, or a head tilted upwards, it’s all about the digastric muscle (as Steve often mentions) – as this effectively gives depth to the mask of the face- foreshortening of the nose, and ear placement. The fourth from last head, for instance, has the nose quite low. Too low perhaps?  The more extreme the position, the less the standard way of dividing the proportions of the face apply. So if it’s a weakness, for now I’d simply pay close observation to the features that drastically change when seen from below and practice more.

The only advice I can really offer, is ensure you’re not restricting your practice to the same size drawing, medium, and reference model. Drawing a lot of small heads is fine, as long as it’s not the only practice you’re getting. Specificity is important – you get good at what you practice.

Enjoy the course, and post more work as you progress through it!

Cheers,

Jac

• This reply was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by Jack.

[Jack]

I’ll post my reply in open critique instead 🙂

• This reply was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by Jack.

[Jack]

Day 3 (19/10/21)

• I have a figure drawing class at a local college on Tuesday evenings. I signed up largely for access to a model, but I’m not sure how much I’m benefiting as the direction of the sessions is often quite narrow and the model, due to Covid restrictions, is fully-clothed. This week, we were restricted to using biro pens and only permitted to draw in line. It felt more like doodling. ~2hrs
•  I also read a chapter in The Artistic Anatomy of Trees on tone/values. A key point was to see trees as a single dome-like mass, with values changing as the planes turn away from the light source – but also allowing for gaps in the mass and the transparent effect of bright light filtering through leaves.
• I wanted to practice something landscape-related, so before bed I worked on a quick 30-minute sketch of a tree trunk from NMA’s reference photos. Unfinished. I just wanted to get the basic shape and tonal pattern down, emphasising the gnarly and twisted form. I have intended to do similar studies from life, as rendering texture is a big weakness of mine. Very enjoyable way to spend half an hour!

Total practice time (2.5hrs)

[Jack]

Day 2 (18/10/21)

• Read the first two chapters of Landscape Painting Inside and Out by Kevin Macpherson. Looks promising.
• Also read a chapter of The Artistic Anatomy of Trees  by Rex Vicat Cole. The chapter was on the line of boughs and branches. The book is undoubtedly full of useful information, but it’s really dense and the language outdated. It’s hard to pick out practical changes.
• I warmed-up with a postcard size view from my front window, focusing mostly on capturing the grey-greens of a rainy day. (~10mins)
• Completed 4 x 30-45 minute tree studies. My primary focus was on form and capturing a likeness of the trees. I wasn’t as disciplined on colour, but tried to match the values and think about edges. I obviously went too dark, as is often the case when using photos as references – I need to keep some room for paintings to go darker. I also think I could tinker with the hues amongst the foliage.

[Jack]

Hello Jake – thanks for your sharing your painting. I’m very much the beginner of landscape, so don’t take my advice too seriously! 🙂

Firstly, you may find Fenske’s tutorial on the sunset light effect useful -> https://www.nma.art/videolessons/introduction-to-landscape-painting-part-8-light-effects/?course=318059

He also completes a longer demo here -> https://www.nma.art/videolessons/introduction-to-landscape-painting-part-24-sunset/?course=318059

As for my own observations, naturally they’re entirely conditional on whether decisions you made were for aesthetic reasons. Anyway:

• Two key components to a sunset light effect are a bit off in your painting. (1) During sunsets, clouds are lit from beneath, with the side/upper planes in shadow, a reverse of daytime conditions, and (2) there’s a significant gradient effect in the sky that shows a shift in colour. Both of these feature in your reference photo. Especially the colour change, from blue, to green, to violet. For me, your clouds lack form and design – which is crucial as sunset lighting commands a lot of attention.
• The background mountains are too light in value, too saturated and include too much contrast. It causes them to compete with the light sky.
• I think the broken brushwork has colours that don’t harmonise well as they’re too saturated- the red in the water, for instance, is very intense, and the yellow around the pillars. There are even greens in there. That’s not to say you can’t have various colours in the water, only that it might be more pleasing if they were less out-of-the-tube, and more neutral.
• The tree on the right hand-side contains too many repeating shapes, like the Y-shaped branches.

Things you might consider for your next piece:

• Creating a really simple value plan. Use 5-7 values to describe your painting. This can help whilst you’re painting to ensure the design is interesting and that you’re maintaining your value hierarchy, and not painting things too light/dark. This can be done via thumbnail (which also helps you decide your composition), or sometimes I use pixlr to just draw simple diagrams over a reference photo. Like this:

• Another thing you might try, is mixing more neutral colours to try and achieve more colour harmony. Reserve your most saturated colours for specific moments. A simple, perhaps controversial(!) way of doing this, is to mix a ‘mud pool’ of any colour (I often use the leftover paint from my previous sketch, avoiding white as much as possible). Then add bits of this pool to every colour you mix, it ensures all your colours are slightly desaturated and shares a specific hue in common. I picked this up from Edgar Payne’s book. Worth experimenting with.

I did a quick (15 mins) postcode-sized painting using your reference photo, to see if my advice above was helpful – let me know if you fancy seeing it.

Good luck Jake!

 

 

 

 

• This reply was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by Jack.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by Jack.

[Jack]

I’m always impressed when artists can use bold outlines without it feeling heavy or oppressive – like Cezanne. My attempts always render the form flat and lifeless, but you’ve managed to keep the gesture and the liveliness of the model. I think the foreshortening of the arms and hands is very well done, achieving a lot with line/shape alone. The bend of the shoulders reads convincingly and the turn of the head is almost cinematic, like an old film, you’ve captured the expressive pose really well.

Only two points I might mention are (1) proportions – the lower half of the figure seems too short or the torso too long? It might be that she’s crouched, but the foreshortening of the legs isn’t reading? The left leg is clearly bent but the left hip is higher than the right hip, but the right leg looks straight? Maybe there’s a bit too much length around the hips? Unsure. (2) half-tones – on the one hand, the bold shadowing creates a really dramatic pose, it suits the gesture, but on the other hand it might be appealing to introduce more half-tones to blur the edges to guide the viewer away from some areas,  leaving contrast elsewhere to aim the gaze at specific points. The strong shadow/light separation might be  what’s making the hard outline work though.

A lovely drawing, keep it up!

[Author]

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