Plants on the Window Sill

I saw this image on the web and It really grabbed me and instantly I knew it would be one of those images that would hold my interest for a while and inspire me to produce multiple paintings of it.

If you've read my posts over the last couple of months you will know I've been practising watercolour painting with a Hake brush. I started off using a 1.5" inch brush on 11 x 9 inch paper and was baffled by it! My reaction was to buy a smaller brush and to use bigger paper. I acquired the 1.25 inch and 1 inch Hake brushes and some 14 x 11 inch paper.

I roughly manage to paint skies, trees and fields with the hake and I very slowly seeing its potential. I felt it would be a good exercise to do a still life of something that looks to have fine detail (i.e. the thin leaves on the Spider plant in the image below) and attack this with the Hake brush.

Ron Ranson is, of course, an advocate of the Hake brush and insists that it prevents fiddling and fine detail which it does for the most part, but there's always the temptation to try!

Here's the original image:

The first version of this painting was a pure exercise in using the brush - I had no intention of 'doing a painting' and it was a great feeling! The idea was to simply make an impression of the spider plant with the hake brush.

I love this first version, it means freedom to me. It's a fascinating thing to me that we can do this - to "Not paint a pitcture" -- to just paint because you want to put the brush to the paper, try it and see the results and to not be bothered if it ends up as a finished painting or not :-)

After that brief practise I set about doing an actual painting of the scene. This version was okay but not really happy with the background. When I got to painting the purple part of the plant on the left, I chickened out of using the hake and used a round brush...

I was now in 'round brush' mode again and decided to do a quick study of the spider plant:

I enjoyed doing this version and was happy with the result. I then set about on the final version using No.6 round for the plants and a No. 10 for the background and table. Really like this painting. I'm really happy with the colours and the sense of light and I love the background! :-)

Thanks for reading... see you next time.

Ian.

Farm Building

My latest paintings are of a farm building taken from a photo found on the web. The website is here: http://www.geograph.org.uk/, the idea behind the website is to catalogue photos of every square mile of the UK. It's quite handy for reference material.

Here's the photo I'm using:

I decided to do a quick sketch to 'just have a go' - to get warmed up and used to the brush:

I decided then to do a thumbnail tonal sketch to get a better idea of tone and composition:

Here's the next version of the painting. I felt happier with this composition, and happy with the feel of the trees.. but as I got to the foreground I already felt that I wanted to do another version, so I kind-of rushed the fence just to finish the painting and get on with the next one!

Here's the final version. A bit muddy and the blue sky is way too bold. It has a certain amount of colour harmony to it I think from the old Steve Cronin technique of wetting the paper all over and slapping a load of raw sienna on first. It has a dusky feel to it.. I think I might call this version "Farm building at dusk with midday sun on the field!!" ha ha.

I used masking fluid for the sheep and water trough, and also for the building itself, so I could paint the background trees wet-in-wet without worrying about the edges of the building. I also masked out the fence on the right. The grasses were scratched out of the wet paint using a piece of plastic card.

I have a few more paintings of still life to upload but I don't have them to hand at the moment - I left them round my folks place..

See you next time and thanks for reading.

Ian.