Loosen up your brushstrokes

Here’s a handy tip for you if you want to loosen up in your painting. I remember many years ago now when I attended evening art classes at Leith School of Art in Edinburgh, being encouraged to tape a piece of charcoal onto the end of a 6 foot bamboo cane, and draw with that. This was supposed to develop hand to eye co-ordination, at the same time as loosening up our student drawings. It certainly did that!

This exercise below is based on that idea, and it really works. I frequently paint in this way now and a new dynamism has come into my paintings. You can watch me do this here:

I wonder how you hold your brush. Over the years I have seen many of my students (myself included!), hunched over a piece of watercolour paper with noses almost touching the paper, tongue out in concentration, and fingers holding tightly to the tip of the brush to control every brush stroke. Now this approach is fine if you are adding details to the last stages of a painting (which is when they should be added, not before). But if we start off a painting by using this method of controlling our brush strokes and keep doing this all the way through, then the whole painting will end up being tight and possibly lifeless.

Again, there are times when this is the right approach for a detailed painting, but I’m talking here about loosening up. So how do we do that?

Have a go at this to see for yourself how it works: take a medium sized brush loaded with paint and hold it as you would a pen, that is hold it tightly near the business end. Now write ‘my name is …’ on the paper. See how neatly you can write your name (fig 1).

Next, move your fingers to the very tip of the brush handle, furthest from the hairs, and hold it lightly between your finger tips, a bit like a musical conductor holds a baton. Stand up so that the paper is at arms length from you and paint a few test squiggles and lines on the paper, flicking the brush with your fingers, and see how the lines are hard to control and develop a life of their own (fig 2).

Now try and write, ‘my name is …’ once more, holding the brush in the same way (fig 3). Has your writing ended up loose and scruffy? Is the writing more ‘arty’ and are the brush strokes more varied?

Just by holding the brush in a different way, and stepping back a little from the paper, you have been able to loosen up your painting. The challenge now is to paint a picture using this technique. Don’t worry how it might turn out (it’s only a piece of paper and a bit of paint!), but feel the freedom of painting in a slightly uncontrolled and looser way.

And over everything HAVE FUN!!

#brushstrokes #loosepainting #watercolortips #watercolourtips

Why do we stop drawing?

We’ve got our friends with their four young children staying with us at the moment, and when I got up this morning I couldn’t get any breakfast for a while because they were all drawing and colouring on the dining room table. Children love to draw and paint and their creativity is unlimited. But as adults we get scared of putting pencil to paper, and say “I can’t even draw a stick man!”

So why and when does this love of drawing fade out of our lives?

Is it when we are told in school that we are no good at art? Or do we loose our drawing inhibitions during our teenage years when we try to become just like all our friends? Or are we afraid of what other people will say about our pictures?

Whatever the reason is, it often takes a long time for adults to begin to paint again, or even to get the desire to paint in the first place. But with gentle encouragement and a few helpful tips, we can all recover the joy of creating a painting, just like when we were young.

#drawing #illustration

Painting a Commission

I was recently asked to paint the old Spanish farmhouse where a friend of mine used to live with her family. She took me out to see it on a rather dull overcast day, and I have to say that at first glance I was a bit underwhelmed at the prospect of creating an interesting painting out of what was – to me at least – an uninspiring building. It really wasn’t that interesting, and I wondered how I could come up with a painting that she and the family could enjoy. My friend had asked me to paint it in reds, yellows and oranges as those colours would fit into the colour scheme of the living room where it was to be hung.

I began by doing a pencil sketch to get the tones right and to see if it would work as a painting, and to my surprise it began to look quite promising!

So I then used the sketch (rather than the photo) to work from. I was working in oils on a 16″ x 20″ stretched canvas and began by giving the whole canvas a green-blue undercoat, onto which I sketched the outline in burnt sienna.

Then I painted the shadow areas in a pale purple and the sunlit areas in pale yellow, before adding a dryish mix of off-white on top, making sure that the under colours showed through. this created the effect of the old walls. The roof was painted very simply and I didn’t get too involved in the detail. The foreground was just a rough brushwork of different colours.

The wonderful thing was that the family loved it. Even though the colours were not realistic and the shape of the building had changed a bit, and there was so little detail, they still got really excited about it.

“That’s the window we had to break in through when we lost our keys!”, said one of the daughters. “That was my room!”, said the other. “This will remind us of our house forever”, said mum.

My advice to you in situations like this would be to work from a pencil sketch rather than slavishly trying to copy a photo. You are then much more free to create ART rather than a copy of a bad photo.

#commission #oilpainting #paintingtips