Lake district demo on Saunders Waterford.

Here are a few recent demonstration paintings, done for art groups and in one case during a 1-2-1 tuition session.

The Lake District one was done on Saunders Waterford, mainly for a change.  Being used to Bockingford I was, as ever, slightly tempted to fiddle too much in the foreground owing to the heavier sizing the paper has allowing a longer working time.  In fact I don’t think it ever properly dried during the demo.   The longer working time sometimes feels almost ‘luxurious’ to me as it definitely makes some things easier, but at the same time there is a need to get used to it, and to ensure allowing the paper to dry, when it needs to.  That is, unless you want your ‘style’ to change in some ways.

‘Melting snow’, fictional scene.

A variation on this lane/trees scene is going to appear as a step by step magazine article next year.  I was asked to demonstrate a winter landscape, and wanted to avoid doing just a snow scene. Melting snow gives the opportunity of a bit more colour, and some puddles, which means a bit more interest, and a bit of use of reflections.  Snow can be included on the distant higher ground, with just a patch left on the field at left.

Cley village in the snow.

The windmill scene (based loosely on Cley, again) was a very quick (20 min) second demo during a two hour session.  I used that particular sky to make a point about how just a couple of key soft edges amidst mainly hard ones can be effective (I did say can be).  Wet the paper in those two places first and then paint quickly through them, from a dry part of the paper to another dry part.  
Snow scenes (containing a lot of white) are even more than usual about negative painting.  It is often also useful to make the most of the low sun of winter to bring some warm colour into the sky, which can then be reflected to a degree in the snow.  In reality, other than cool shadows there is often not a lot of colour in a snowy landscape, and anything showing that’s not covered in snow can look almost black dark because of its strong contrast with all the glaring white.

Summer into winter, fictionalised – to be improved!

I visited this Somerset scene in summer 2015 and painted a plein air of the same view.  Here I’ve turned it into a snow scene.   This was for a 1-2-1 tuition session, and an exercise in making summer into winter.  I think with some proper planning and changing the composition a bit I can do this a lot better (incorporating perhaps a reflection of the hill, a more interesting sky, better handled foreground, and so on.  So I plan to take some time over just that soon.

Great energy saver daylight bulb. Walking into the room is a bit like arriving on a film set – I imagine! I wouldn’t look at this photo too long.

As it is getting pretty dark now come evening time I thought I’d mention the ‘daylight’ imitation bulb I’ve just bought, which I can recommend.  It’s the box on the left, and the other is the box of my previous one, also good but not quite as strong.  I haven’t seen a brighter daylight bulb anywhere, and it is a worthwhile investment at about £14.  65 watt, 3500 lumens, (equivalent of 300 watt old-style bulb).  It is pretty huge mind, so will stick out the bottom of most lightshades.  I hope this might be helpful – I’m not getting paid to plug it!

Finally, I’ve set up a Vimeo channel, and put up a time lapse video of a very large painting.  One or two people may have seen it before.  Here:
https://vimeo.com/188813957