TEACHING NOTES FOR THE FRIDAY 1ST OF JUNE WORKSHOP

This months workshop is taking the principles of last months workshop, ( scroll down to May 4th wkshop ) and extending it to encompass background colours to compliment the colours in the painting, and in particular, isolating a colour group for a focal point.

I was inspired by the working methods of this artist, note how she has isolated colours and tonal values to create areas of focal point by means of contrast.

Look at the colour groupings on this colour wheel, notice how everything between the violets and yellow green appear cohesive, similarly everything between pink and yellow, we can use this colour wheel to understand colour groups and apply them to the choices we make when selecting and representing a subject.

We also looked at tonal values, and how to use that to draw your attention to a particular part of the composition, look again at these squares, and see which grab your attention most, and try to anayse why, see ( right ) how to apply tonal values to the same scene to create different focal points and abstract shapes.

My painting ws a quick working out, but you can take this idea, and apply it to anything and develop it.

We began by taking this concept of creating focal points with boxes, and applied the colour to these boxes that we would be using in the final painting, this is a very useful exercise to see whether the final colour balance will be effective, i.e is our eye directed to where we want the viewer to look, can you see the correlation between the abstract and the finished painting? Can you see that the intention was for the pink flowers were meant to be the focal point but we still wanted the white flowers to carry some pulling weight, as well as the isolated green square, the overall intuition was to keep the viewers aye moving around the picture plane, but with a definite focal point of the pink flowers, look again at the artist I was inspired by, and despite all her different colour choices and her tonal balance, she has achieved this in every painting

working your colours out with thumbnail sketches really pays dividends, as planning a painting involves a more lengthy process than we have time for during our washes

Here are some student examples of today's practice

The only male student today, preferred boats as a subject, and took the same idea, and applied these principles to this subject, he extended the lines in the subject to cover the background, went beyond my own colour choices and produced this brilliant piece of work, which shows a high degree of creativity and sophistication, quite astonishing considering he is colour blind!here are some photo ref of the flowers we were painting, plus a wet in wet demonstration I gave to show a different approach to washes with flowers