On Mersea Island

Near "The Company Shed" Watercolour/gouache 5"x8"

Mersea Island is a remarkable place on the East coast of Essex. We went there yesterday  with some friends to lunch at “The Company Shed”, a very simple restaurant that cooks whatever is caught that morning. They provide the plates and tables – you bring the wine, the bread, the mayo – whatever. You can’t book up so the wait might be 15 minutes or 2 hours. 90 minutes in this instance. Which gave me some time to sketch. Not a lot to say. I am nearly always more pleased with what I paint second rather than my first sketch. As was the case here. So here they are. The new gouache kit is working well for me. Here is the second sketch:

5"x8"

Dead Pheasant

Watercolour and gouache 5"x8"

I ran over this pheasant two days ago and even if I say so myself, did it rather cleanly. My wife was mortified, so to speak, only matched by her objection to my bringing it home. Anyway, we barbequed it last night. Needless to say I had no help plucking and gutting it! In all the fuss I nearly forgot to sketch it. But not quite!  This is watercolour and white gouache in my larger Moleskine.

I’m having no trouble now getting quick areas of darks laid down having added in to my tin box the following colours: Ivory Black, Indian Red, Hooker’s Green Dark and Sepia. No magic to the choice – they were all colours I already had in tubes, and the green when mixed with any red/orange (such as Indian Red) will produce deep chromatic greys.

First gouache – in the back garden

Warercolour and gouache 4"x6" View in the garden

Well, not too bad I suppose. But it has thrown up some immediate problems with my new “gouache” kit. Firstly, as soon as you get white gouache on your brush, it gets into the pans of paint and makes all colours pale and muddy. So this is why Nathan Fowkes (presumeably) has in his kit an old facecloth. I think he needs it to dab on the colour pans from time to time to clean them up. Second problem is that it takes too long to mix up a dark background colour with the small selection of pigments I have selected. So I need to squeeze in some extra colours in my box.

New Gouache kit

Watercolour and guache kit

Nathan Fowkes has a website and blog that I really like. He has a plein air approach that appeals to me and I’ve prepared for myself a compact kit shown above that is as close as I can get to the one he uses. Basically it’s a selection of watercolours in a tin with a tube of white gouache. This means I can paint watercolours (the purists hate this bit) from dark to light, much as in oils. I like this for where I’m at at the moment, because I want to stay in the oil painting zone.

I had an old watercolour japanned tin doing nothing, so I have adapted it and cut down a few suitable brushes. The large moleskine sketch book was given me by my big kids on my birthday, so away I go. In passing, it’s many years since I last bought watercolours in pans. You can buy empty pans for very little, and then fill them from large tubes of Artist’s quality watercolours. It takes a few days for them to dry out (they will still work fine because good quality watercolour has gum arabic in it which keeps the pigment moist.

My next post will be my first attempt at using this set-up. I haven’t done this before so it will be interesting I think.

An odd painting medium

I am about 99.99% certain you will not have seen one of these before. It is a waterproof marker, that can be applied on any surface including glass, and can be applied underwater as well. It dries very quickly and can be overlaid with another of the same type of marker. They were an experimental version of an industrial marker produced some years ago by Sakura for the edding brand. They never took off but at the time I worked in the art materials industry and I have a set of 20 of these. ….. which is an introduction to saying they are very hard to paint with. Here is my attempt at a small sketch made on my usual walk in the local Science Park. It had rained most of the day, but now at around 9pm the sun was struggling to make a late appearance.

Marker in Moleskine sketchbook. 3"x5"

So I doubt if I shall be using this regularly – unless of course I fancy painting on a piece of glass in the pouring rain. Mmm…now there’s an idea.

Pochade Box

my pochade box

I said I would post about my pochade box so here it is. I take this with me most times I go out. Always good to have it to hand “just in cases”  It’s an old box that once held a set of Sakura carre pastels. Anything will do as long as it’s sturdy. You can buy pochade boxes as well but they’re not cheap. This one measures 13″x9″x 2″ deep. So I stripped out the inside and divided

Inside pochade box

it up using the sort of sticky sided foam strip you use to keep out draughts on badly fitting windows. I stuck layer on layer to the required depth. I’m sure I could have done it better with bits of wood, but this has lasted me for years and is good enough.  The compartment at the front holds brushes and the like and the rest a mixture of medium and tubes of paint.

The lid can hold two thin prepared painting surfaces – in this case it’s primed hardboard approx. 8″x12″. I used this particular red board to paint the poppies a few days ago. I cut the palette from a thin piece of plywood using a fretsaw. this also fits in the lid. A few rags more or less stop the contents shaking around too much when the lid is closed. Finally, a plastic bag holds dirty rags after painting and also the palette if it has paint on in still. The main thing that is missing is a bush on the bottom so Ii can screw it onto a tripod. This would be neat, but of course to be of any use I would then have to have a tripod with me as well, and if I do that I may just as well carry my french easel. This setup is small, convenient, can be propped up on the steering wheel, or on a wall, or simply on the ground if I am sitting on a low folding canvas stool.  The big negative with this is essentially that I am painting too close to the canvas. I think this was why my painting of the Houses of Parliament was falling over sideways to start with – I was too close to the board.

Finally, what do I do with the wet painting? Well, I used to carry it in my other hand until I came up with this idea – sticking pads to each corner of the lid and then when I pack up to go I place the painting facing into the lid and the pads hold it a few mm away from the back of the lid. A bit of paint comes off on the pads but that’s not a big deal. So, there it is. Perhaps I’ll do a longer demo along the lines of the Houses of Parliament to show how I use the pochade box. Or maybe a time-lapse video! Woooo….

Poppies in Cottenham

Poppies, Oils on board 6"x8"

This has not photographed very well. The darks are not as dull as they look here. I sat down on this quiet little track in the Cambridgeshire fens and painted this on a red ground. Quite handy for the poppies of course. Made the mistake at one point of thinking I could get a lighter red than neat colour by adding white. No way. You get pink! This would be so different in watercolour where you would simply add water. I sat down on a small collapsible stool and rested my pochade box in the long grass. That was fine until I dropped the cap of one of my oil tubes by mistake and it disappeared forever. I should have put all the kit on the large plastic bag I was carrying.

Facing into the sunlight was a must – the saturation of the red through the petals was really strong. But in painting terms it’s impossible to reproduce it so I painted the undergrowth really dark to set the flower heads off.

Great Thurlow Mill under repair

Great Thurlow mill. Oils 8"x12"

Windmills are one of my enthusiasms, so I can’t help putting in detail. If I didn’t know how patent sails work, I wouldn’t know what I’m looking at, or what is missing.  I like painting mills as they are – and most of them are less than perfect. In this case under repair. By the look of it the fantail is getting attention at the moment. Getting windmills right is actually quite difficult. If  the body is tapered, as with tower mills, and most smock mills like this one, and you are painting from quite close-up, the perspective is slightly exaggerated and you can end up with the cap looking unnaturally small. So you have to compensate a bit.

I spent about an hour and a half on site, and packed up when I was feeling pretty much that this was not going well. But I took a few reference photos – much needed for the details – and had another stab at it in the studio. Slowly it started to come right. Somtimes I just have to persevere – scraping off where things are muddy or too thick, or washing bits off with turps and starting a section again. Even though there is more detail in this paintng than most I do, a lot is still unstated. I hate windmill paintings where every brick and every nail is put in. They inevitably look stiff - a photo would do the job better.

The black clap-board is interesting. Black is never black, expecially in sunlight. In this instance there was a lot of green algae making interesting variation in what amounts  to chromatic grays.

Pears

Pears - oils on MDF board 5"x7"

This is in direct response to Carole Marine’s recent posting of three pears. Hers is more abstract – more a composition – also more economical with brushstrokes. But I’m progressing. I like the way she lays in a dark background and then cuts in with light to create the shadows. Check out her blog on my blogroll.

I don’t really use “out of the tube” colours, but in this instance I used a very old olive green as the basis for the pear colour here and modified it with touches of  Indian Red (which I like, but it’s very powerful) Ultramarine, white and Michael Harding Yellow Lake (a mid yellow but slightly transparent which I’m not so keen on but a touch of Titanium white opaques it up).

Houses of Parliament, London

On Sunday I travelled to London with my son and father in law. I dropped them off at the Oval cricket ground to watch the 20/20 competition and I walked down to the River Thames to paint using my pochade box. I will do a proper explanation of my pochade method soon. It was about 4pm when I arrived and the weather was showery with with sunny intervals. The view I chose is very traditional, but I don’t get here very often so why not? I was painting with two blues, a yellow, white and two reds. I didn’t get far before it started to rain:

The rain can be seen on the painting. This is the good things about painting in oils outside though – it can rain and you can carry on painting. Well, as long as you are not getting soaked through. It wasn’t that bad however, and this is as far as I got in about an hour before I needed to move on to the South Bank:

I was a bit concerned that everything was leaning over the right a bit, but I could change that later. Also I made the shadow side of the left had tower much more red than it was – but that is how I saw it in my mind’s eye to that’s OK in my view. That was all yesterday. I have a neat way of getting a wet oil sketch back into the lid of the box without smudging it, and today I spent another half an hour straightening up the building, correcting proportions (I had taken a reference photograph so I was able to pull that up on my PC’s screen) and tweaking the foreground and sky. I think this could work well on a much bigger scale, and the reference photo provides the additional detail I will need.

Houses of Parliament. Oils on hardboard 8"x12"

I trudged back to the cricket ground, to discover that my son had nearly “caught” a straight six from in the crowd, but the ball had popped out of his hands! This was live on national TV (Sky) and needless to say he has been received a mixture of congrats and digs for his efforts, via messages and Facebook.

Sketching birds at 4am

Waiting for the dawn chorus to begin - pencil 4"x7"

Judy and I were up at 2.30am this morning to go with friends Dave and Ruth and their girls to the local Milton Country Park to hear the start of the dawn chorus – that moment when the silence of the ending night is broken by birds breaking into song. Here we are standing around in the gloaming in total silence wondering if anything was going to happen. And then almost like a light switch being turned on, at 3.50am precisely, the birds started to sing: Reed Warbler, Robin, Wren, Blackbird, Blackcap, Great Crested Grebe, Turtle Dove, Woodpigeon, Chiff chaff, Magpie, Rook, Green Woodpecker, Coot, Song Thrush. All heard though not all seen. Marvellous. We are not good at birds, but Dave is, and we are grateful – as always – when he shares his ornithological expertise.

In Milton Country Park -pencil

I was hoping for an opportunity to sketch some birds, seeing as I was given a bird-sketching book for Christmas. It’s a big challenge for the obvious reasons that birds tend to keep their distance and keep moving. I sketched the swan as it swamp slowly up to my feet. And the Great Crested Grebe was sketched while looking at it x20 through Dave’s spotter telescope. Easier than I thought actually; perhaps a measure of the quality of the telescope.

Swan - pencil 3"x4"

Great Crested Grebe 2"x3" - pencil

Dog rose

6"x8" oils on hardboard

I took my pochade box with me on my usual walk through the Science Park near my home in Cambridge. It’s very well landscaped so I thought there be bound  to be something to paint. This composition was right beside me on a handy bench. The sun kept going in and out but most difficult was the fact that the light was falling flat on most of the blooms and that made the colouring and shading very subtle and difficult to capture. The flower in the bottom left corner is the best, and that’s because the lighting and shadow threw the shape into relief.

There we go! Now, I’m pleased with that!

Unfinished stuff

I’m posting these three half painted efforts as a provocation to myself to try and finish them off:

Started this a week ago one evening – trying to get a nice view of the field daisies that are all around at the moment. Year after year I tell myself I will paint them but I never do because they are usually located on the sides of busy roads. This time I spotted them in a field and the setting looks good. I really hope I can complete this well.

The second is a painting I started in February – my daughter was in this half-marathon race – got frustrated, scrubbed the runners and the left side out. I’ve now put some runners back in and need to work on the left hand side. I don’t know how to give it a reasonable amount of detail without competing with the main subject. Ideas very welcome.

Thirdly, and going back even further to late summer 08, this is the breakwater at Porthleven in Cornwall as the sun has just set. The composition is bold and abstract and I just need to get into the right mood to move it along.

Rose

Oil on hardboard 6"x8"

This was my first oil sketch using the new setup – before I did the asparagus in fact. I’m surprised to realize this is my very first attempt at a still life. Yes, I’ve painted a few flowers etc in situ, but not in a studio setting. The flower head is actually hard to do. My “teacher” here is Quiang Huang who does roses with the utmost facility. Check out his paintings. Amazing. Anyway, I’m pretty pleased with the glassware (an old whisky bottle) and annoyed with the background which got away from me – far to fussy.

Still life set-up

This is my new still-life set-up based on an idea from the weblog of  Qiang Huang and I’m indebted to his generous sharing of his ideas in a recent article. Behind the cloth are two pieces of marine ply, hinged together and painted grey. Having the whole  thing lifted up to eye level is much easier for painting and produces a nice angle on the subject. I’ll be using this a lot more in the future.

Hijacked asparagus

Oil on hardboard 6"x8"

The photo is a bit flattering to be honest. I laboured over this and it looks like it. I wanted a much simpler, economic, painterly look. I have an excuse however. My wife nicked my subject claiming she had to cook it. To be fair I had stolen the bowl from the kitchen earlier.  So the fussy last 30 minutes was spent imagining colour and shape and getting it wrong, and the background wrong. So is the bowl Anyway, I said I would post everything so here it is. On the plus side it is a great subject and I look forward to trying again next year when asparagus is once again in season! In the meantime I will practice more simple still life. Actually it will be interesting to see if I have improved in a year’s time.

Hills and Holes 2

Oil on board 8"x12"

From the same spot as the last painting but this time focusing on one bush. Actually, the details of the fine branches were a subject in themselves (I was not facing into the sun here – the opposite in fact) but I had neither the time or the right brushes for it, so a more impressionistic sense of the scene is what I followed here. In both this and the previous sketch I was having some difficulty getting clear, dark colours. When I stopped painting and thought for a minute I realised why – I was getting muddy colour because I had not properly cleaned my brush from when I had a mix with a lot of white in it. Simple! Keep washing the brushes!

Hills and Holes 1

Oil on board 8"x12"

Hills and Holes is a wildlife area near the village of  Barnack in Cambridgeshire. Nearly a millenium ago limestone was excavated here to build Peterborough Cathedral, and the resulting landscape is reflected in the name. I painting this facing straight into the sun in late afternoon, reducing the shapes to more or less two contrasting values of green. It looks a bit like a stormy sea in my view and this thought comes across quite well.

Onions in flower

I painted this on Sunday afternoon in our garden as the sun was dipping at around 4pm. We’ve had rain and these alium heads won’t last more than a day or two now. I liked the spread-out shape – almost like a row of full stops. I wanted to show them against a simple deep green background so I exaggerated the depth of what was there - lots of thick paint. More than I usually do. I like it though. Perhaps subconsciously I am trying to save paint – definitely not a good move. 4″x8″ oil on MDF

Swaffham Prior windmill, Cambridgeshire

8"x12" oil on board Swaffham Prior mill

This is a beautiful working mill near Cambridge, still producing flour under the care of its owner, Jonathan Cook. I tried painting this mill years ago and gave up because it’s difficult to get a good view of it. Actually I wanted to get the old water tower in the picture because although it is modern compared with the mill, and takes wind from it, it is nonetheless part of what makes the setting different from that of other mills. And whenever I paint a mill, and try and pick out what is different about the mill or its setting.

Anyway, I found the angle I wanted last night, and painted this oil study as the light faded on what had been a dull, grey day. As I finished (9pm) the street lights were on, and the sails of the mills merging into the sky. It became a challenge to try and get the lighting on the sails just right. I enjoyed the fading light, and the sombre low-key result. This is a good study for a bigger painting.

On the subject of low-key high-key, someone once gave me a useful tip – in a high key subject always have some small area that is really dark, otherwise the whole image just looked washed out. The opposite is true in a low-key subject, which is why I have painted a small area (the cap) in white, although in reality is also was merging with the grey of the sky. Maybe I’ve overdone it a bit.