Refining the process

Well, hello everyone! I see you have all been very productive over the last few weeks. I haven't had the time to sit down and peruse all your work but I have watched as some of your lovely work has appeared on the feeds to Google Reader on my phone :) I hope to start catching up with you all .... soon !

I have been playing a little over the last month or so with various media:  watercolours (of course), but also Tombow brush pens, graphite (plain and watersoluble) and watercolour pencil. I tend to drift in and out of these easy to use media and although they are fun they do tend to distract me from what I really want to be doing, which is getting out there to sketch :) Hopefully the weather will start to get warmer here in the UK and I can get out there again with my watercolours and oils !

I'm also starting to play a little with oils again and have been using things like wooden sticks and paper towels to create marks and blends. This one was the result of that process. I started by squeezing a generous blob of Burnt Umber onto the palette to use as a mid-tone for a painting. I had nothing in mind at the time, but as I started to brush the paint across the canvas I decided that I would try to turn it into a painting. I suppose you could argue that it's only an underpainting but I like it just as it is, a finished monochrome painting or perhaps an exercise in learning more about values. Hope you like it.

Happy painting!

Out of the woods, Oil on canvas, 30cm/12" x 25cm/10"

Divine geometry

Ok, eveyone take a deep breath, lets do some mathematics :) Before you all start clicking away from here, lets bring it straight back to art ! I'm sure you're all familiar with the rule of thirds in composition and design. The rule is just a very rough approximation of the classical golden section, a proportion based on a mathematical constant (phi). Phi can be calculated accurately from the Fibonacci sequence of numbers, a sequence that occurs regularly in nature, such as in the distances between the petals of some flowers. It also occurs in other examples of artistic beauty, notably music. Many famous works of classical art and architecture as well as things of natural beauty from the Great Creator himself have proportions that are based around the golden section, which approximates to the ratio of 1 to 1.618. The rule of thirds by comparison would give the ratio of 1 to 1.5. Not a massive difference, but is it significant enough to make or break a composition ?


Are you still there LOL. So, I thought I'd put it all to practice. I took out a steel rule and a calculator, measured the height and width of my working area of paper, calculated the divine proportions accordingly, and drew a horizontal and vertical line on the paper at the calculated positions. The base of the tall tree to the right of the painting is at the intersection of those two lines. I could have chosen any of four possible positions for the focal point, but I chose bottom right which gives more sky than land and should also lead the eye from left to right (hopefully). Has it made a difference to my composition, is it more hamonious, is it more pleasing to the eye or would it have been just as good if I'd used the rule of thirds or perhaps simply done it 'by eye' - as I usually do ?  Hmmm ....

Happy painting and a glorious Sunday to you all :)
 

Lake at Dusk, watercolour on Arches 300gsm/140lb Rough, 23cm x 31cm/9" x 12"

Postscript:

And by popular request, and just for comparison, here's a cropped image in which the base of the tree has been moved to lie at the intersection of the lines created by using the rule of thirds. Thanks very much to Keith for coming up with this idea - it saved me having to paint it again ;)

The quiet before the storm

It seems strange that only a couple of posts ago I was talking about Hurricane Irene and hoping for the safety of our cousins in the US and now it seems that we here in the UK, particularly in the northern areas, are about to be visited by Hurricane Katia on Monday. As is the case with all hurricanes, its path and power are quite difficult to predict accurately, but it does look like we are in for some extreme weather conditions over the next couple of days or so, and so I can only say please do stay safe everyone.

I had intended to do a second watercolour, again based on a photo I had of one of the local village churches. However, I often feel that, for me anyway, painting from photographs tends to make me tighten up my work and so instead I decided to paint a similar kind of scene, but this time from imagination. I lost my way in the reflections a little but managed to recover the situation with the aid of a pencil scraping knife! Happy painting to you all :)

Village church, watercolour on Saunders Waterford 300gsm/140lb Not, 145mm x 210mm/5.75" x 8.25"