Painting watercolour on canvas is really liberating. For all sorts of reasons… From the lack of framing, to the freedom to paint large, to the way the colour flows across the surface, to the way that you can correct mistakes…. But canvases are expensive if it all goes wrong. So is it true that you …
Trees are crucial to our landscape paintings, so I have done a short film about painting them in watercolour. First, here a really useful poster from The Guardian – it just goes to show trees are not green lollipops! Now you can hop over to YouTube to see the film: https://youtu.be/oAOo8PlaOrI If you want more …
If you don’t want to hide your watercolour under glass and a matte, you red to find a way to protect the surface. I like to use this on my Watercolour canvases. While you can use a spray or brush varnish, an interesting alternative is Dorland’s wax. It comes in two sizes (4 or 16 …
I’ve been wanting to paint pigeons for ages. Why? The moment people describe them as rats with wings, I start seeing the beautiful colours and iridescent feathers. The canvas is 30×100 and prepped with watercolour ground. A light sketch, is the first step and then I painted the birds with Indian ink. I used salt …
After months of waiting, it is published! Painting Watercolours on Canvas is live. Now available online, direct from the publisher, or in all good book shops…. …..or even to download onto your Kindle. It all started back in March 2018, when the I approached the lovely folk at Crowood Press with an idea. The idea …
As you may have spotted, I love watercolour. I want to see how far you can push it as a medium, so I like to explore new ways of using it. I run a weekly class, and thought that watercolour and collage would be an excellent topic to shake all my students out of any …
It’s the Reading Guild of Artist’s exhibition at the moment and I was delighted that my little otter got sold before he got hung on the wall. So, I had to paint a replacement promptly. Given I’d done a truly dreadful demonstration of a beautiful Swaledale sheep on Friday, I thought I would try to …
I love working wet-in-wet so much that I tend to forget about the fun of glazing. So I thought it might be worth revisiting it as a technique. Yesterday’s class rose to the challenge and produced some fab and varied work. Here’s a taster: If you think about it, there are three ways of mixing …
Lepus cornutus is the Latin for the horned hare, a creature of mythology. People think that rabbits with a virus causing warty growths, were the foundation for these stories. in the 1930s enterprising taxidermists in America created Jackalopes for sale, founded on lumberjack stories. Jackalope comes from the jack rabbit and antelope…. I’ve been wanting …
Time lapse jackalope / horned hare / lepus cornutus Read More »
Have you seen the work of David Lobenberg? I realised he paints people in a similar way to how I paint animals. So ’tis the season and all that, here’s a rather colourful Papa Noel. It is all about tones – colour/hue is immaterial (apart from his red hat). As long as darks are …