[Jack]

Day 6 15/07/2022 

First day back in work after a couple weeks off and, sadly, not as much time for art practice. I mustn’t lose the energy for practising that ample free time allowed to grow!

I worked on getting the second cadaver head to a satisfying place. It’s missing refined details, but I think I’ve done the heavy lifting of getting the planes in their right place (roughly speaking). That’s enough for now.

Practice Time: 2h

[Jack]

Day 5 14/07/2022 

• I spent a couple hours out on a footpath painting this fantastic oak tree. It doesn’t picture particularly well, but there’s something about the composition I really like. I did an initial lay-in with some thin colour, the plan is to go back a similar time over the weekend to have another stab. I’m enjoying the multi-day process of working on pieces – even if it means I have less resolved pictures to show each day.

• I also managed an hour or so to continue my second cadaver mask for the Russian Drawing course. The plan is to definitely finish this tomorrow, so I can work on a third before moving on. I’ve found out there’s a fortnightly live model session not too far from me – so I’m keen to progress to the figure.

• Aside from that, I managed a dozen or so pages on Elements of Landscape. There wasn’t any new information – although a section on the use of transparent vs opaque paint applications was a useful summary of some new stuff I have learned. I’m definitely paying more attention to opacity when painting shadows now.
• I did read a little bit of John Constable’s Skies. I’m onto the section that’s more about Constable’s understanding of meteorology, as opposed to new information that might help me paint skies. Still, it’s a good book that has me interested in the meteorological conditions featured in paintings.

Practice Time: 4.5h

[Jack]

Thanks Daniel, making a bit of progress 🙂

[Jack]

Reflections on the landscape course

So a week ago today I finished a four-day landscape course. It was the first in-person art course I have been on, so I thought I’d write up a few reflections.

In general, it was a brilliant few days, but not for the reasons I expected beforehand. It was a positive experience because:

• Long, free days dedicated to painting and nothing else. I don’t have a very demanding life, but it was still a real pleasure to carve out time to prioritise just one thing. I quickly got into a routine and all-of-a-sudden, 5-6 hours of painting a day wasn’t enough. he time was energising. Hopefully this carries over into my daily practice. For the first time, it made me wonder whether a life as a professional artist might be a very good thing.
• Meeting other students. It had never occurred to me that I took my art study and practice quite seriously, in fact, I’m constantly berating myself for not putting in more time and effort. But, without sounding too self-congratulatory, it was only by contrast to other attendees that it really struck me that this was something I’m taking very seriously.
• Time spent drawing is well-spent. I’m no great draughtsman, but it was really clear that decent drawing skills separated those who could paint well from those that couldn’t. Many students struggled with basic proportions, or foreshortening fields, etc. Some gave up on a representational depiction of landscape all together. Seeing the value of drawing carry over into painting felt like good justification (if I needed it) for ploughing on with the Russian Academic Drawing course.
• In person critiques and new techniques. I was a bit nervous going into the course as I had never painted in front of anyone, nor had anyone in-person provide critical feedback. Getting guidance mid-painting was helpful. I was also exposed to a few new techniques, like glazing and the use of transparent pigments, varnishing, etc.
• Muddy colours. The instructor’s style was higher key and more colourful than mine. Admittedly, I’m aiming for a more naturalistic, Barbizon-style of painting rather than impressionistic. But the instructor often commenting on the dullness of my palette – so this is something I’m thinking about and trying to correct.

What didn’t make much difference:

• The Instruction. Surprisingly, there wasn’t a great deal of theoretical instruction. The format was basically just outdoor painting with critiques. Which for me, was a positive, as I think most of the basics would have been covered in NMA’s course already. But there were attendees who had never done landscapes or worked in oils before. They struggled.
• No smoking gun. Part of me wanted there to be something big that I was missing in my learning and approach to painting, that I could fix and improve. But all the critiques were more around improving that one painting, rather than a impactful gap I could leverage.

I left the course energised and more pro-NMA than ever (3 people wrote down my recommendations for NMA courses to take, I hope they do). I wouldn’t recommend the course for a beginner, nor do I really think it was worth the money, but I’m still really glad I did it.

[Jack]

Day 4 13/07/2022 (continued)

I’m keen to continue with the Russian Drawing Course – so the plan is to work on cadaver heads before moving on. Here’s a start on the second of three.

Practice Time: 1h (4.5h for the day)

[Jack]

Day 4 13/07/2022 

I got up early to start a painting outdoors – it was a nice spot. I liked how  the thin tree stood proudly silhouetted against a misty backdrop. The sun soon came up and changed the sky considerably.

Usually, paintings start well, enthusiasm dips by about the 1 hour mark and I start to question “is this a stinker?”, and then I spend a few hours making something ugly better. This painting was the opposite, everything I’ve done from a good start has made it worse and worse! So I’ve decided to just let it dry and have another crack at it later – probably taking it back outside. Maybe it’s just badly composed and no amount of tinkering will help?

It got me thinking about whether I ought to alter my workflow; spending one session doing the drawing and value underpainting, then come back a second day to colour it. Might be worth experimenting with.

For next time, I need to fix:

• Three identical shapes of the hills.
• The foreground… don’t have a clue what’s going on there. I’m trying to make something out of nothing.
• Light effect / sky – what am I going for here? Overcast? Sunlit? Early morning? Hard to say from the current painting. Need to figure this out as it’ll have a big impact on everything else.

Practice Time: 3.5h

• This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by Jack.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by Jack.

[Jack]

Day 3 11/07/2022 

I had the month down as June previously… that says something about where my head is at.

Spent a good few hours today tweaking a painting started last week during the landscape course. It’s the last one. I disliked how cartoon-like it looked, so most of the adjustments were to try and infuse a sense of realism. Not a total success, but learned some (of the same) lessons.

1. Too much cad yellow. It makes the greens look like a highlighter.
2. Cool greens in the light next to even cooler green shadows, will make the light look warmer still.
3. Better to start with hillside background too blue and too low contrast, than the reverse.

 

 

I’ve also read a fair bit of Elements of Landscape, it’s better than I expected:

• Aerial perspective
  • Applies equally to the sky as it does the ground plane – a drop of contrast, sharper edges, less textural paint.
  • Organic perspective: Overlapping clouds implies depth, clouds will reduce in scale with distance, larger clouds near the top of the page, thicker paint pops forward, diagonal clouds suggest depth vs horizontal clouds
  • Remember a cloud has an under plane and sides. There is light and dark over the whole shape, but also individual elements within the shape.
•  Toned grounds
  • An orange ground complements and invigorates a blue sky of similar value. A neutral gray can be used too, as it will appear blue as the eyes try to eliminate the strong orange.
  • Applying thin coats of pigment mixed with linseed oil allows the underpainting to show through, adding depth and transparency.
  • For sunset skies, you can try a yellow ground; violet grey for winter; burnt umber for storms.
•  Palette
  • Pigments for skies should be considered for opacity, tinting strength, value, intensity, and temperature.
  • Scraping back a tone to reveal a layer beneath is called ‘draw down’.
•  Brush Technique
  • The sky should be applied without texture.
  • Scumbling – vigorous rubbing action with the tip of the brush at a steep angle, so that paint gets within the weave of the canvas. This allows paint to be applied on top, with speckles showing beneath.
  • Blending – appearance of a continuous surface by feathering to different values/colours. It’s best to mix and apply major transitions of value, leaving minor transitions to blending.
  • Flicker Stroke – paint applied in one direction looks flat – instead, use a random starburst pattern. This will reflect light and bring illiminosity to skies. To be used after scrambling.
  • Trailing Stroke – “. Dragging or gliding the brush across the surface and rocking the brush tip from side to side leaves a scattered brush mark.”
  • Curving Stroke – used for cumulus clouds, twist brush as you apply the paint. Use a dry brush to soften edges

 

Practice Time: 3h

[Jack]

Day 2 10/06/2022 (continued)

 

• Read some more of ‘Elements of Landscape’ – it’s proving useful thus far. Here are some notes:
• Blues:
  • Early morning sky often takes on a cool blue like robin’s egg
  • Afternoon sky has most dust and pollution from the day
  • Winter skies = pearly grey-violet blue
  • Summer skies = cobalt blue
  • Humid climates = cooler blue notes
  • Drier climates = warmer, richer, turquoise blue
•  Simple sky conditions -> Few clouds, mostly blue negative space between. When the sun is in an upward arc, the blue of the sky pales to a warmer colour closer to the horizon.
• Complex sky conditions -> Several layers of clouds at differing altitudes that overlap -> Indirect painting – paint from back to front -> blue sky, highest altitude clouds, medium, lower, etc. Allow paint to dry somewhat between layers.
• Dramatic sky -> Indirect painting relies on an intense toned ground and transparent layering
• Drawing clouds
  • Eliminate confusing or confusing elements by simplifying what you see
  • Exaggerate a sense of wind by emphasising the diagonals
  • Search for interesting positive vs negative shapes
  • High altitude clouds = cirrus, cirrocumulus, cirristatus
  • Middle altitude clouds = altocumulus, altostratus
  • Low altitude clouds = status, cumulus, nimbostratus, cumulonimbus

Speaking of clouds, There were fantastic clouds all day, in fact it was on the news. But I only managed to sneak outside for an hour to do some quick 30 min cloud studies. Mostly cirrus clouds with, I think, rows of little puffy cumulus clouds catching the last of the day’s sun.

Surprisingly tough – and you have little to show after 30 minutes. Getting the clouds to appear bright and luminous is a real challenge, by the second one I realised I had to lower the value of the sky if the clouds are going to stand any chance of being high value and colourful.

Practice Time: 1h

[Jack]

Day 2 10/06/2022

• I spent a couple hours finishing up a sketch of a nearby oak tree.
• The goal was to capture something of the morning light – but admittedly I spent most of the time just tweaking values to make some sense of the mass of green of the trees and ground foliage.

Conditions:

• 6:30am-8:30
• 10c, several days of dry warm weather, little moisture on the ground
• Little wind from the north (toward the viewer)
• High humidity (90-100%), but it was perfectly clear – I actually kept the purple haze in the sky from the day previous

 

Practice Time: 2.5h (hopefully get some more time this evening)

[Jack]

Day 1 09/06/2022

• Woke up bright and early to work on a morning scene of a tree – it’s a work in progress. There’s not much to the composition, just an exercise in painting a tree really… the plan is to get outside tomorrow as the weather looks good again. The intention behind the piece is to show a ‘drop off’ and distance between the two trees, to practice aerial perspective and drawing.

• Meanwhile, I spent another 2 hours just ‘tidying’ up a couple pictures I worked on during the week when I attended an in-person landscape course (reflection to follow).
• There are bits about each of them that I think is working – like the background of the left picture, and the compositional ‘key hole’ of the one of the right. But there’s still something about them that I dislike – they’re just a big ugly, the trees are cut out, they lack a unity of effect, or a sense of atmosphere. They’re a good benchmark, perhaps, for what this challenge is looking to help improve.

• I’ve also been reading John Constable’s Skies – but I’m onto the section that is evaluating Constable’s understanding of meteorology. Spoiler alert, he understood it just fine.
• Then, spur of the moment, I started The Elements of Landscape Oil Painting: Techniques for Rendering Sky, Terrain, Trees & Water by Suzanne Brooker. It’s pitched as a book for ‘intermediate’ painters, so it might be a bit of a stretch for me. I read the first chapter, which was already quite insightful.
  • Opacity of the pigment matter – transparent darks recede; opaque darks tend to come forward. So you want to mix your shadows using transparent pigments.
  • Indirect vs direct painting (ie phased layers vs going straight for final effect). The former emphasising ‘optical effects’, whilst the latter is gestural and expressive.
  • Fat-over-lean
    • Paint diluted with too much solvent will have little oil (binder) in it, so once dried will not stick to the surface.
    • Paint when used direct from the tube is ‘lean’ when thinly applied, and ‘fat’ when thickly applied.
  •  Pigment, Medium and Solvent
    • Once a picture is bone dry and had several layers of paint, apply a very thing layer of linseed olio even out it’s reflective surfaces and restore it’s darks. Don’t dry the picture vertically.
    • Use pigment, solvent and oil for blocking in on tinted surfaces
    • ‘Oily paint’ should be used for dark transparent pigments

Practice Time: 3h

[Jack]

Cheers, thanks Wolf!

[Jack]

So over all, I’m pleased to have completed another 100 day challenge. I’m usually pretty flaky with hobbies, but this art stuff seems to be sticking. I think my drawing continues to improve thanks to Russian Drawing. My landscapes are getting better as well. I think the biggest improvement has come from master studies – chiefly, Constable and the Barbizon artists. I just think their palette, value structure, and subjects better depict the countryside where I pay compared to say… the French and Californian impressionists, who I was emulating previously. It’s also meant I’ve had to adapt the lessons in NMA’s landscape courses.

On the improvement side of things, this challenge I missed more days and put pencil to paper fewer hours on days I did practice (2.6h per day, down to 2.4h). One of my goals this challenge was to average 3h a day, which I failed to do. I also read fewer books and watched fewer NMA courses – which would be fine if it meant I was practising more, but I wasn’t. So this is something I want to improve – upping my time commitment and dedication. This is for the next challenge!

—

103 days of practice
246 hours of practice in total, about 2.4hrs of practice day
28 days when I didn’t practice at all (including 9 days of holiday)

Courses watched:

• Elements of Traditional Composition (in progress)
• Mirochnik’s Complete Russian Academic Drawing (in progress)
• Finding your voice as an artist (in progress)

Books Read:

• Caddell’s Keys to Landscape Painting
• John Constable’s Skies (in progress)
• The Science and Practice of drawing (in progress)

[Jack]

Day 102 02/07/2022

I was going to wait to finish the above piece before calling an end to this 100 day challenge… but I don’t think I’ll get to it before starting a 4 day landscape course next week. I also managed to get out this morning and spend a few hours on an outdoor sketch that I’m pleased with. So let’s call this challenge done.

This piece felt like a real ‘step up’. It’s rare I come home pleased with an outdoor sketch. The notable difference seems to be starting with a deep reddish brown tone on the canvas – it just gave the picture warmth from the start. It also made all the shadows seem more vibrant – so I actually started from light to shadows, the reverse of my normal process. Interesting results.

I’ll do a little challenge round up later.

Practice Time: 3h

 

 

[Jack]

Day 100 +101 30/07/2022

I’m going to drag out this challenge for a couple days as I have a few pieces in progress. Today I got outside, but only long enough to get caught in a downpour.

It was a fantastic challenge trying to paint a very changeable sky. The time outdoors was thrilling, the same can’t be said for the few hours I’ve given the piece since I got home. I think the gist of what I’m trying to do is there, but it’s turned into a bit of a soup. I might leave it dry and come back to it.

I have been continuing to read Constable’s Skies too, only a few points to mention:

• Clouds are illuminated by direct sunlight, by light reflected from other clouds, and from the sky.
• During midday, clouds will appear whiter toward the horizon as you see less of their shadowed bottom plane and more of the side.  They will also appear bluer as there is more atmosphere between viewer and horizon
• Air brought from the north will be colder; from the south, warmer and drier. If brought from the sea, more humid.

Practice Time: 5h (over two days)

[Jack]

Day 98 28/06/2022

I spent 2.5 hours working on the previous day’s cadaver head. Feels totally like cheating to finish the 100 day challenge not practising from life – but I’m hoping to get out for the big 100 to finish on better form.

It doesn’t help that the weather has been too bad to paint outdoors.

Practice Time: 2.5h

Day 99 29/06/2022

As always, I could tinker away at these assignments for hours more – but I think most of the learning has been absorbed. Hard to tell if this is an improvement on previous skulls/busts. Iliya says to do 3… so I guess I’ve got another 2 to do!

I also read more of Constable’s Skies, it continues to be fascinating. Here are some notes:

• Atmosphere  controls aerial perspective – although the chemical composition of the atmosphere is consistent place-to-place, the amount of dust and water vapour is different.
• Mist Is caused by water droplets; haze by smoke or dust
• Visibility is best in Britain during sunny anticyclonic (high pressure) weather, when the airstreams is from the north (polar air) and therefore contains less dust and water vapour. Wind direction is therefore very important at a particular location in determining visibility.
• Aerial Perspective
  • As one looks further and further towards the horizon there is a change of hue towards the blue end of the spectrum, a decrease in saturation, lighter tone, and decrease in contrast.Air molecules and small particles scatter light of short wavelengths, hence blueness of distance (it being the colour of shortest wavelength alongside indigo).
  • The larger the particles, the wider the wavelength of light it scatters – contributing to ‘white’ light in the atmosphere.
  • When looking at the horizon, one is looking through the most dense part of the atmosphere.
  • For all these reasons, no two hours are the same for how the atmosphere looks.

Not totally related to art practice, but I watched a good lecture on how Dutch artists invented atmosphere (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZyr4cLgS5E) and I’m also in the midst of watching a lecture on Ruisdael (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvmmQQzerN4). I’ve got a book on Ruisdael that I haven’t read yet…

Practice Time: 1.5h

[Author]

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