Wishing everyone a very Happy Christmas and a peaceful, prosperous and healthy New Year. The painting shown here is one of my Christmas Candle series, which was last featured on my Christmas card quite a few years ago. So, I thought that it was time for a return visit, to convey my good wishes to you all.
I’ll be back with more from my artist’s blog in the New Year, with new sketches, paintings and tuition articles. Meanwhile, Happy Painting to all artists wherever they are!
Usually the autumn finds me hard at work teaching groups of watercolour students. Indeed, I have been doing that, but not on a regular weekly basis as before. Early this year I made the decision to retire from teaching weekly groups, to allow more time for painting, walking and travel. These days I tutor more occasional groups, usually here at the studio.
With a bit of free time available, Margaret and I decided to head down to South Africa in early November, for three weeks of game watching and walking. A great country and I hope that the recent passing of Nelson Mandella will not cause any difficulties there. We were certainly made very welcome by people of all different races, during our stay in Kwazulu Natal.
If you’re expecting to see paintings of the rhino, elephant and giraffe that we saw, you’ll have to be patient as they are still in my head, not on the paper. I took a lot of photographs though. There was certainly plenty of wildlife to be seen, although no lion or leopard regrettably. There was no opportunity to sketch on the game drives, as we were in a group, but when we got to the Drakensberg Mountains, I managed to do a few quick sketches in ink. Here’s one, and you can see why the Drakensbergs are so called – the Dragon’s Mountains, with peaks like sharp teeth. Some great walking, but steep, phew!
The Wash, our local piece of water, has been in the news lately with extensive flooding in some areas. Luckily, the Stephen Martyn Studio remained high and dry, although in 1953 the water reached to within a few yards of where our house now stands. A disturbing thought as the tidal surge was supposed to be bigger than ’53! However, the sea remained well over a mile away, thankfully.
Thinking of the Wash reminded me of this painting, which was actually the last one to be framed before my Christmas Open Studio. It shows a view of which I am very fond, with Holme-next-the-sea church and the Wash beyond. It has a high point of view, which can be obtained from the eastern end of Green Bank Road, which runs from the top end of Ringstead village east towards Thornham. It’s a green road and overlooks the fields leading to the sea. Maybe 100 feet or so above sea level, it counts as a big hill in this part of the world!
I’m still busy with preparations for the Dersingham Art Trail weekend which is from Friday 29th November through until Sunday 1st December. Five studios will be open, including my own of course, so you can wander round lots of different artists. Two other painters are taking part, Marty Griffin and Mike Smith, plus photographer Jo Halpin Jones and potter June Mullarkey. Do try to visit if you get the chance! You can find out about all the Art Trail artists at DersinghamArtTrail.org by the way.
Meanwhile, at the coal-face of watercolour, here is another “atmospheric” painting that I will be showing. I love to use a really limited palette of colours and this work, Long Shadows in Misty Fields, uses just two, blue and orange. These are strong complementary colours so work quite powerfully in combination. I photographed these trees on a muddy farm lane near Ringstead Downs, Hunstanton and knew that one day they would make a painting. And here it is.
November in Norfolk and the pink-foot geese are in full flight. They roost out on the mudflats and fly inland to feed so there is a constant procession of skeins of geese to be seen, coming in early in the morning and flying out as the sun is setting.
I’ve made quite a few atmospheric paintings of the geese flying over the fields or the marshes and here are two new ones that I’ve just completed. The sunset scene is entitled When the Geese Fly – at the End of a Winter’s Day and I hope I’ve captured the feeling of stillness on the beach at sunset, with just the great empty space and the haunting call of the geese as they fly back to their roost. The other painting, When the Geese Fly – Dawn on the Marsh uses a very cool palette of colours to give a more chilly early morning feel. Prussian Blue and Manganese Blue are the two main pigments used.
Both of these paintings will be on show over my Open Studio weekend from the 29th November until the 1st December 10am – 4pm each day. I hope you can make it along. See my Contact page for the location.
A couple of pen and wash paintings for you here. They are both very recognisable Norfolk scenes, or at least I hope they are – Cley Mill, and Wells Harbour. I painted these pictures in response to an enquiry from a new art gallery soon to open in Sheringham, up on the North Norfolk coast. I went to see the owners, Tony Randall and his wife Isabel, and they have agreed to show six pen and wash paintings of mine.
The gallery will display both original artworks and small antiques, so it should be an interesting browse if you are in the Sheringham area. It is due to open in a few days time and is located at 3 Sheringham High Street, right down the bottom near the sea, a blue shop-front on the right hand side. The gallery is over the top of a nice tea shop too!
I’ve been very busy in the studio lately, as I always am when ever an exhibition is on the horizon! From Friday 29th November through to Sunday 1st December five studios here in Dersingham will be open to the public as part of the Dersingham Christmas Art Trail. One of those studios will be mine, so I hope you can call in and say hello.
I’ll be posting some of those new paintings here in the next few days, but I thought I’d start by showing you this scene, which was featured on the cover of the Dersingham Data magazine. The Data is a little A5 handbook that contains lots of information about the village, including parish council members, groups that meet regularly, doctors surgery details, all that sort of handy information, published twice a year. It is edited by my good friend Tony Bubb, who asked me to provide something for the cover of the autumn edition.
The brief was “it must be Dersingham, but not the church or anything else that’s been done before!” One afternoon I went for a walk round the village, armed with my camera, and pausing at the Tithe Barn in Manor Rd. I had just decided that it was a rather uninteresting looking building when two cyclists came along. A composition immediately occurred to me, and I just managed to catch one cyclist with my camera as they zoomed past. A bit of artist’s license and you see the result here. Painted quite quickly to keep it feeling free, in my “traditional” watercolour palette of ultramarine blue, raw sienna, burnt sienna and light red.
The trees are turning and starting to show some nice autumn colours. Pottering in my studio the other day I was searching for painting inspiration and started flicking through my piles of photographs, when I came across one that I’d taken of Castle Rising church. The photo was snapped in early Spring, when the trees were still completely bare, but I thought that it might be nice to put some leaves on the trees and add a bit of autumn colour.
You can see the result here. I did a sketch using a Faber-Castell Pitt artist pen, with black ink, and then applied some simple watercolour washes. I tried not to go too over-the-top with the autumn colours as, after all, this is Olde England not New England! Some purples made from Light Red and Ultramarine work quite well with the orange of Burnt Sienna. Greens were made from Ultramarine and Cadmium Yellow Pale.
These pen and wash studies are quick to do and I always enjoy them. Ideally, I would love to be sitting there by the church with pen and brush in hand, but that isn’t always possible. Anyway, working from a photo gives you the opportunity to change things around and not just “paint it as it is”. Why not have a go at making an autumn scene yourself, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it!
Both my own two works were “rainbow” themed, using the techniques that I outlined in my previous post. I enjoyed using the Rowney FW inks and I will certainly be employing them again in future paintings. 
However, that’s enough rainbows just for the moment and I’m back in the studio working in traditional watercolour. I’ll post some images of new works here soon!
Well August has come and gone and I don’t seem to have posted anything on this blog for quite a while. Involvement with exhibitions, a few trips away, another (minor) operation on my right eye, they have all taken up time. And time is what we never seem to have enough of – to make artwork and post on blogs, among other things!
Anyway, enough of that. Here’s a tutorial about painting rainbows, which I hope might interest you. I currently have two rainbow paintings in the West Norfolk Artists Association’s Small Works exhibition, which continues until the 15th September in the Shakespeare Barn at King’s Lynn Arts Centre.
Ah yes a rainbow, that most elusive of atmospheric effects but so delightful when you see one glowing over the landscape. But how to paint it, and in watercolour too? In this short tutorial I’ll show you how I achieved what I hope is a convincing effect.
Firstly a few truths about rainbows as they generally appear. Forget all the old stereotypes of seven colours arching over the landscape. We usually only see partial rainbows and even if there is a complete arch it’s so huge that only a small portion of it is likely to appear in most compositions. Also, the red and yellow elements of the rainbow are usually the most prominent, with the other colours only hinted at. You can see all this in my photo which I took a couple of years ago on a walk near Snettisham, Norfolk.
Having established, by careful observation, what we actually need to achieve the next task it so set about rendering it in watercolour.
For a rainbow to appear convincing, it must seem to glow from within the sky and indeed even sometimes the land itself. That means it needs to be painted first and then the sky laid over the top. If you try to paint it in at a later stage in the painting – well it just doesn’t seem to work. Not for me anyway.
It is possible to paint the rainbow first using traditional watercolour, but it requires a good piece of paper and a delicate touch with the brush to avoid disturbing it when you over-paint later. The “trick” is to use acrylic ink for the rainbow, which is vibrant in colour and waterproof when dry.
The first stage of my painting was to take a piece of Saunders Waterford 300lb paper, about 11 inches square. A NOT surface is probably best. I prepared small washes of Daler-Rowney FW Acrylic inks, using the colours Scarlet, Lemon Yellow and Process Cyan. I dampened the whole sheet with clean water and let it soak in. Using a number 4 sable hair brush I carefully painted the rainbow colours, wet into wet. I blended them by using a damp brush and some careful wiping with kitchen roll. It takes a bit of care for the colours not to spread out too much. You can help this by only having the paper just damp, not too wet. By blending the colours on the paper you can achieve red, orange, yellow, green and blue in your rainbow. A touch of Magenta mixed with blue made a violet for the last colour although it’s almost imperceptible.
Eventually I was happy enough with my rainbow glowing there on a white sheet of paper. It takes a bit of practise to control this technique and I had several attempts, each on a fresh sheet, before I was satisfied. Don’t be afraid to use up paint and paper, it’s the only way to learn!
Now it has to be left to dry, preferably overnight, because for the ink to be waterproof the paper must be bone dry.
The next day I dampened the paper again. This time I prepared washes using conventional watercolour pigments. The sky is painted using a bluey-grey mixed from Phthalo Blue Green Shade, Burnt Sienna and a little Quinacridone Red. It sounds an unlikely combination but I like it because you can vary the colour so easily by adjusting the strength of the component pigments. Sometime the pigments separate a little as the wash dries and that makes the appearance more interesting. Also, these pigments are very transparent, which is essential for the rainbow technique.
The sky is painted wet into wet, although I used a bit of blotting with kitchen roll to get some harder edged clouds. When it was dry I added the landscape below, using Raw Sienna and greens mixed from Phthalo Blue GS, Burnt Sienna and Lemon Yellow. The rainbow’s the thing, so keep the landscape simple.
The eagle-eyed will have noticed that the sky in the Stage 2 photo is not the same as the finished work. I had two paintings on the go at the same time and forgot to photograph each stage of both of them, but the technique is exactly as described here. Have a go and make a few rainbows in your art!