No. 3 in my Horncliffe trilogy. Found this by far the hardest, probably because I had to finish off a lot at home from memory and photo.
This was Elliot, our teacher’s son, doing his first session modelling for our portrait class. It was a lovely face to draw.
This was a first sketch
I thought I’d have another go at watercolours using what I’d learned using acrylics. It didn’t really work. I limited my palette to 2 yellows, one blue, a red and a brown, two more colours than I used with my acrylic landscapes, not including white. And therein lies the problem. You have to use the white of the paper to add lightness and once that’s gone, it’s gone. I couldn’t mix lighter tones of the colours I wanted, I should have used thinner washes and built up. I’m really not sure about a limited palette with watercolours. Trying to mix colours seems to produce muddy effects unless you restrict yourself to transparent colours. Hey ho.
Posting this for posterity as Sue 1 has already seen it on Facebook. I do have a thing about the patterns in the water and hope that I can learn to paint the ripples without looking at photos. When looking at water in real life the patterns are so fleeting I liked the angles of the straight lines which cut across the rippling water. It fascinates me the variety of colours and tones that you get on the surface. I liked the overall effect of this painting but still unhappy with my laboured treatment of the boat. I guess I should now try and paint it from memory!
We did half an hour sketching at the quayside then used collage and other media to create an abstract from our sketches.
Considering the wonderful nature of the subject matter, I was quite disappointed with this. The colours look satisfyingly marine but that’s about it. I used sea water for all these paintings – I wonder what difference it makes to the final painting.
Here are a couple of photos of the breakwater which had been smoothed and moulded by the sea. The sad part was that we returned to this beach the next only to find a council worker with an angle grinder ‘repairing’ the breakwater
This was our task, to produce a painting which told a story. We went round the exhibition in the Granary and looked at paintings that seemed to have some unexplained back story. The tutor then gave us a random selection of objects to weave into a painting which had a narrative. I chose a bird skull, a bird wing and some feathers. I was thinking of the Picasso landscape with the man under the tree possibly dreaming the distant landscape into view. After a fruitless attempt to convert the bird wing into some kind of blanket or cape, I just scrubbed it out and without any reference (no willing bald men in the class to pose) I struggled to get the form of the body under the drape. I really didn’t like the colour palette I had chosen. What I wanted was a soft grey mist or haar from which the bird objects would emerge like parts of a landscape. A real tough challenge in 2 1/2 hours.
3 days camping in Pevensey. I managed three paintings; two here and one sent as a postcard which I didn’t photo before sending.
I decided to try a style which i could do quickly and wouldn’t stress me (!). Both paintings took exactly one hour and were 8 x 5.5 inches in size roughly. The story behind this one was, despite being a hot sunny day, the wind whipping across the beach and creating quite large breaking waves on the steep shingle beach. So I crouched behind a breakwater for shelter resting on the breakwater to paint. But every time a wave broke on the beach I was sprayed with a fine drizzle of sea water and had to anticipate, ducking down to avoid both getting wet and having my painting spoiled. What with trying to hold the pad flat and ducking and diving I think people must have thought I was a bit mad.
This was was more comfortable to paint although my head was getting hot by the time I finished.
The Alternative Grauniad Watercolour Club 