AITO Wexford, Day 1

Art In The Open 2024 has begun in Wexford in Ireland. I’m intending to post my daily plein air paintings from here for the next few days.

The people of Ireland are delightful, friendly and very welcoming. Just wanted to say that. And the Guiness is very good!

Today was the Quick Draw competition with all proceeds going to support the RNLI. We had 2 hours to paint something, anything, from a small area around the centre of town, and about 50 artists took part. It was fun, although a little intimidating at first, as I am quite isolated in Spain and so have not met many other plein air enthusiasts before, and here they were en mass. Pochade boxes and easels were everywhere. Most of us ended up paint spattered.

I chose to paint a shop front that is quite iconic in Wexford. It’s a jumble of antiques and second hand stuff and I thought made an interesting scene. You can scroll through the slideshow below to see how I got on.

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My travelling outdoor paint kit

Here’s my plein air painting kit that I’m taking with me to Art in the Open at Wexford, Ireland next week. I’ll be painting outdoors in water mixable oils, and sketching in watercolour/gouache. So my kit has to be light, small, and I need to be able to bring a dozen or so wet panels home with me on the plane. Oh, and I hope there will be room for some clothes!

https://youtu.be/FfFdD79UXxs

#watercoloursketching #paintingoutdoorskit #pochadebox #pleinair #Watermixableoils

What colour is white?

Some say that white is not a true colour. But that depends on how you see it and how you use it in your painting. In reality, pure white rarely exists in nature, and so should only rarely be used in your paintings. Of course there are exceptions to this – snow is a good example of a pure white in nature. However, even when we paint the white of snow it is good to tint this with a tiny bit of yellow to contrast nicely with the bounce of blue light from the sky reflected in the shadows. See my post “What colour are shadows” to find out more about reflected bounced light.

There are a variety of “whites” in my plein air sketch of a mountain ridge near Mont Blanc in France. It’s easy to see the grey and blue shadow areas, but even the sunlit white snow has a little yellow in it, put there by the colour of the sun.

But let’s explore this a bit further.

I snapped this photo as I sailed up the River Douro in Porto in Portugal a few weeks ago.

I took this photo because I was immediately struck by the colours of the white building. Below I’ve intensified them a bit to make my point clearer. Just look at how many strong colours there are in the “white”. Only the sunlit areas are what we would call white. The shadow areas are all coloured for various reasons.

Why are some areas blue and others pink? That’s because the colour depends on what is being reflected into the white walls. The end of the church on the left is blue because it is catching reflected light from the river and from the blue sky. The purple/pink wall is this colour because it is reflecting the sienna colour from the pantiles on the roof below it, and mixing this with some of the blue from the sky.

The thing to note and to remember is to paint what we see, not what our brain tells us. We see a white walled church and our brain says, “this is a white walled church, so paint it white”. But if we look carefully, what we see is entirely different. The white walls are pink, purple, buff, grey and blue. We must paint them that way. That’s where the art begins. Most people would not notice these subtleties.

Our job as artists is to point them out, to reveal the amazing beauty of this planet, and to share this wonder with others.

This “white” walled house certainly isn’t! I just painted what I saw.

Once again I hope you find these posts interesting and helpful. Thanks for reading and being a part of the community here!

#learningtopaint #paintingtips #paintingwhite