TEACHING NOTES FOR TUESDAY THE 12TH JUNE 2018

This is the painting with 3 or 4 layers of washes applied once the previous wash was completely dry.

For the morning class today, as some us us have missed a few classes, I thought it prudent to re visit pigment flow control, and doing soft edged images is a good subject to practice this, we want some areas of the pigment to flow further ( tail ) than other areas ( face )

We already know that the paper needs to be soaking wet when we put our first clear wash on, to buy us plenty of painting time so that the paper doesn't dry before we have chance to put enough of our pigment done wet in wet, but to control the pigment flow depends on how dry or wet the brush is when applying the pigment, for our first wash for the tail, the brush needed to be slightly less wet than the clear wash brush.

We needed to dry our brush a little more for the body, and more still for the face and claws.

TUESDAY AFTERNOON CLASS.

In this class I had hoped to work outside from direct observation but it was too cold, this is the scene I would like us to work towards. 

But before that we were aiming at something simpler...

We were also further exploring pigment flow control in this class, but through composition, we revisited the exercise of focal points through contrast we worked with last week,Then we copied some and invented others in tone then applied that understanding to abstracting a composition of the flowers in the garden, first wet on dry, then wet in wet

Here is a demonstration of the white garden chair composition at various stages of colour thumbnails, showing the visual pulling power of certain elements when they are added, note where your eye is lead to without the pink carnations or the shadow on the seat, similarly with the colour thumbnail of the allium composition, ( flowers ) Here I have taken elements of the garden and invented my own arrangement

Note the difference in the overall balance when I add a piece of white paper to the picture, play around with shapes in tone and colour as a box exercise like the tonal one above, and judge where your eye is drawn to, this should be the foundation of a composition to apply representational painting to, or, keep as an abstract

Fingers crossed it's warm enough next week to work outside : )