West Runton

and a nice photo of the beach last Sunday, just look at the reflections.....

My Dogs

Since I haven't any other pictures to show you here is a photo of Florrie and Coco...

More portraits

everyone else is working on more portrait work, my emphasis has been to encourage you to learn the proportions of a face, be observant, trust your judgement, and portray the image tonally, since it is tone which you truly see and which defines the three dimensional nature of the world around us. So we have had some gorgeous monotone watercolour paintings. This is a really effective way to portray a face, and the restriction to one colour, (though it needs to be a dark colour so that you can use it both very pale and very intensely, one of the subtle and wonderful advantages of watercolour) encourages you to focus on tone and not fret about flesh colours. Working with two colours will be next....
I will take some photos to put up here to show you next week, in the meantime keep looking at every face you can and notice all the aspects we have been looking at, eyes halfway up the head, and so on and so on, and notice what a small proportion of the head the actual face really is.

CATCHING UP......

this term there are subtle differences between our various classes, and it seems to keep me busier than usual to keep up, but at last here is an update...Monday morning sees us paying homage to Beryl Cook ( courtesy of Christine G )at the moment, (amongst other things) as part of a general interest in portraits, and how to portray them. I will post the pics up here when they are finished.
You will see here a final blast from last term's Shirley Trevena inspired water colour work

the photo doesn't do the work justice, photos seldom do, but you can see the impact and dynamism of this style and approach. There will be more to come from the Marsham Tuesday group who are now embarking on this same water colour journey that the rest of you made last term, when they were busy oil painting. You might notice that every inch is important in these paintings, a hugely different outcome from a more traditional format featuring a vase, flowers and a lot of white paper!

 The new Portrait group, (slightly longer timescale of three hours as against our usual two and a half) is also going really well, we have a sitter every week, and I have volunteer models, lured perhaps by the token £10 payment and the offer of ad-lib tea and biscuits, lined up for the remainder of the term. The experience of working from a real model is so valuable, interesting, challenging and enjoyable. I am really grateful to the models who so kindly give up their afternoons for us.

I have instigated a different pace to each lesson so far, see some examples and the artists at work here in pastel. Oil paint next!