Beginners class notes 30th Jan 2018

In this week's class we continued to paint dark to light layers on our hills, we learned more about how much pigment and water to use on our brushes to control the pigment flow, fast and far = more water.

slow and not so far = less water.

We wanted each hill in turn to be darker tun the one behind it, this shows tonal perspective, so we need to use more pigment very time we did the next hill down.

We also know, that if we don't like what we've done, we can leave it to dry, and re do the wash over the last one, however, it's best to try to get the 1st wash right, if it runs took far then we wash from the bottom upwards in horizontal strikes till we touch, and overlap the pigment line a little, remembering not to pull the pigment back down again.

Some of you asked how much you need to paint in the first wash, I said not much actually if you don't want to, and you can do many layers, this takes the pressure of your first wash, if you want to see a painting in progress film I made which illustrates the many layers you can apply, and how simple the 1st wash can be, go to video's on my website and look up, 'Summer breeze' you may be able to locate it through this link

 http://www.goodworks.myzen.co.uk/GillyMarklew/Site/video.html

Whilst we were waiting for each hills wash to dry, we practiced what I call % mixing on paper, this was to be used when it came to the line of trees.

I think washes are much more beautiful, when multiple colours are used and when we allow the water to do the mixing for us, alternatively, we can get really interesting neutrals when we we push these paints round the pear 100% creating very interesting neutrals, see the exercise with the 2 trees in orange and blue, that the improvers are doing, the blues have green and orange in them and the orange has blues and greens, but in such small amounts as not to overwhelm the dominant colour, but enough to make the dominate colour more interesting ( harmonious )

In the exercise below we use 3 colour cadmium red, yellow and ultramarine blue.

In the 0% mixed column we put all 3 colours on a clear wash, keeping them separate and cleaning our brush out each time, and if the application was wet enough, the colours should mix them selves to some extent by gravity alone, we didn't dab this, but used a few brush marks with the flat side of the brush, 

We repeated this exercise for column 2 and 3, but pushed the paint round more in 2 and 100% on column 3.

This is a good demonstration of how to create interesting intense, semi neutral, and neutrals, whilst knowing how to avoid pushing the paint around if we don't want it too neutral.

 A % mixing exercise resulting in a ping 100% mixed neutral by using more red than blue, however all 3 colours are present, and we found this bias very different in each of our exercises, the trick for the tree line on the hills exercise, was to keep the bias more green, buy using the red sparsely and using predominant blue and yellow

 Next week we will attempt the boats in mist scene, consolidating what we know about about % mixing on paper, and how much water used on the brush to get finer lines wet in wet.