Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2020 i Artists & Illustrators

Even if you’re a “paint pot is half full” kind of person like me, 11 weeks and counting under lockdown conditions is a tough ask. It’s perfectly normal and understandable to have bad days, to not feel creative, to stand in front of a blank canvas and struggle to know where to begin. It’s been really heartening to read all of your letters and to see the different artworks you’ve created with inspiration from the articles in our last couple of issues. What has been a testing time in the wider world has also seen some truly inspiring moments, creatively speaking. One such endeavour is the Portraits for NHS Heroes project which began in an Oxfordshire bedroom in early April and has soon spread across the globe – not to…

RE-DRAWING THE LINES Coloured pencils are an underappreciated medium – here are four artistic ways to utilise their strengths 1 Exercise a light touch. Pressing down hard on the paper makes it hard to work over and even trickier to erase unwanted colour. 2 Keep a can of compressed air to hand – the stuff sold in office supply shops to dust keyboards and such like. Use it to blast away unwanted pencil dust from your page. Rubbing that same dust away with your hand can cause streaks. 3 For delicate, contrasting lines, such as whiskers and loose strands of hair, lightly score the surface of the paper first with a pin or mechanical pencil with the lead retracted. Adding coloured pencil over the top will collect in the indents…

On 4 April, Tom Croft posted a short, two-minute video on his Instagram account that would change his life. In the clip to camera, the acclaimed Oxford-based portrait artist was offering to paint a free portrait of the first NHS frontline worker to respond. Given Tom often paints rock stars, TV presenters and world-class footballers, this was something of a coup. “In days gone by, portraits were a real status symbol and a sign that you’d really achieved something in your life, and it occurs to me that the real heroes of today are obviously working on the frontline of the NHS at the moment,” he reasoned. He added the #portraitsfornhsheroes hashtag and also tagged a number of leading artists to suggest they offer the same. Tom’s offer was soon…

What motivated you to take part in the Portraits for NHS Heroes project? I don’t have a direct connection to the NHS, but I wanted to do something to say thank you to the staff for their work. Being an artist gifting them a portrait seemed a great idea. I also wanted to raise awareness of the individual stories. Did you talk to your subjects much before making the portraits? Yes. The subjects told me about themselves, what they do, and, in the case of Dr Muhammad Salman, how they manage to protect their families. Why did you choose to depict your subjects in the ways that you did? I depicted the subjects in the bold, impasto style that I have been using for a while, as I feel that…

In this series of articles, I wanted to take a look at the Zorn palette to show you how you can use it in your paintings and how it can benefit your working practice. We will use the Zorn palette to look in detail at colour, colour relationships and the advantages of using it when it comes to portraiture. WHAT IS THE “ZORN PALETTE”? The Zorn palette – also known as the “limited palette” – is a restricted palette of four basic colours: black, white, red and yellow. When mixing with them, I consider these the primary colours and white – with black the substitute for blue. Some also regard the Zorn palette as two colours – yellow and red – with black and white pigments serving to control the…

Manu Saluja Amid the clamour and commotion of 400 volunteers cooking in the communal kitchen at Sikhism’s holiest shrine, the Golden Temple in Punjab, India, Manu Saluja was struck by the serenity of one particular individual. “There was this elderly man doing a very simple act of cutting onions,” says the New York-based artist. “He was just very quiet and peaceful, it stopped me in my tracks.” Manu was visiting as the winner of the BP Travel Award 2019. She had made previous trips to the shrine as a child during family holidays and returned to carry out her proposal to paint portraits of the volunteers who serve free meals to around 50,000 visitors and pilgrims every day. Thankfully the activity, natural light and “bursts of colour” that had been…

What motivated you to take part in the Portraits for NHS Heroes project? I thought it such a wonderful, warm-hearted idea and a lovely way to honour those who have had no choice but to face tremendous personal risk, way over and above any normal expectation of duty. Did you talk to your subjects much before making the portraits? Both doctors I painted, Will and Georgina, were proposed by friends and family. Once they agreed to be part of the project, I asked to meet them via Zoom. What I found were two young doctors, each in isolation alone on their day off, each grappling with and processing what seemed an almost surreal situation. The word “weird” came up again and again. Why did you choose to depict your subjects…

I made a simple painting tray from a sheet of 10mm corrugated plastic. I cut it to 34x25cm, chosen simply so it would fit in my bag. I also cut holes for the legs of my tripod, as well as neat cut-outs for my water pot and brush holder. This did require drilling two small holes in the tripod legs to allow a wire support to be added. Without this, the weight of the full water pot would cause the tray to lean forward. I measured the position of the holes carefully, avoiding drilling into the area directly around the tripod’s leg joints. I then passed a stiff wire through the front corrugation and into the tripod legs.…

Have you ever looked around your garden and enjoyed every plant you have lovingly nurtured, only to realise that you can find nothing that inspires you to paint? It’s easy to tell yourself that this shouldn’t be the case. If William Morris’s famous quote is obeyed, your home and garden should not contain anything “that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful”. And since artists are capable of finding beauty in almost anything, you really should be able to find something that inspires you… Shouldn’t you? Not being able to find something inspirational right under your nose is a more common problem than you might think, so this article is about a couple of things that just might help. Firstly, you need the right light.…

Many of us have to rely on self-critique as we make and finish an artwork. Rarely do we have a reliable person to turn to for objective opinions on a work-in-progress. Combine that with our tendency as artists to be very hard on ourselves, and it can be hard to critique our works in a useful way. Below are a few practical tips and things to think about when self-critiquing your work. 1 INITIAL AIMS Not having a reasonable idea of how you want your next artwork to look and feel can cause a lot of confusion and frustration along the way. That is not to say that the organic evolution of a work should be disregarded, but to point out that a successful and strong work needs thought and…

As an alternative exercise to the one on page 72, try painting two eggs together – this makes things more interesting as you must consider the relationship between the two objects. An extra challenge is placing the eggs on a piece of wood or in front of a hessian background. The colours and values of the background are now closer to those of the eggs, so this encourages you to look more closely at the relationships between colours across the whole painting, rather than simply focusing on local colour.…

• Paints Cadmium Yellow, Cadmium Yellow Deep, Yellow Ochre, Burnt Sienna, Cadmium Red, Alizarin Crimson, Cerulean Blue, French Ultramarine and Sepia, all Winsor & Newton Professional Water Colours; Cadmium Orange Hue, Burnt Umber and Phthalo Blue, all Winsor & Newton Cotman Water Colours; Permanent White, Winsor & Newton Designers Gouache • Paper Saunders Waterford 425gsm hot-pressed watercolour paper • Brushes ProArte Sterling 201 round brushes, sizes 0, 2 and 4; Rosemary & Co. ivory long flat brushes, sizes 4, 8, 10; Rosemary & Co. Series 2055 fan brush, size 2; Rosemary & Co. ivory rigger, size 4; SAA Acrylic Flow Brush, 1.5” •White pastel pencil…

I have always wanted to try my hand at drawing, but I never seemed to find the opportunity. However, with more time on my hands due to the lockdown, I read through the June 2020 issue of your magazine [Issue 417] and found myself inspired by Felicity House’s article on “Beauty in the Everyday”. Her advice on establishing a routine is really helpful and my daily sketching session is something I’ve quickly come to look forward to. I’m planning to add colours with pastels as my experience grows. Thank you very much for getting me started in this absorbing and relaxing hobby. Julian Field, via email…

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What motivated you to take part in the Portraits for NHS Heroes project? I’m currently in my last year of high school, Year 13, and after exams were cancelled, I had a lot of time on my hands. I love drawing and painting, and when I saw what Tom Croft was doing, I knew it was the best way for me to give back to the NHS for all they have done for me and my family. I don’t have any close connections to someone who works in the NHS, but my Nan was hospitalised in December for a few weeks and so seeing the effort and care they took with her really made me appreciate the healthcare service. Did you talk to Patience much before making the portrait? I…

The range of tones visible on a white wall in reality is vastly greater than what we can reproduce with paint on paper. This can mean that, in the case of subjects such as the church, a very light wall has what appears to be an even lighter niche within it. The problem is how can we show this tonal difference without darkening the whole wall. To solve this conundrum, we must remember that our brain is quite easily fooled when it comes to tonal differences. Our eyes are very aware of a definite and abrupt change of adjacent tone, but they are not so good at judging the strength of two areas of tone that are separated. 1 I started by painting the cast shadow in the niche but…

While the Old Masters always finished their paintings with a frame, it has become popular to hang a pre-stretched canvas as it is, in order to create a contemporary, minimalist look. If that feels incomplete to you, a good, inexpensive option could be a tray frame. Tray frames, sometimes referred to as floater frames, are a relatively new style of frame, perfect for framing artworks on canvas or board. The artwork is simply loaded at the front and attached as though it is “floating” within the frame. The big advantage of tray frames is that they do not have glass so the full extent of the artwork can be seen without being obscured by reflections. Tray frames come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. Of course, you can get…

“A portrait is as much a painting of the painter as it is of the sitter” WHAT WAS IT LIKE COMPETING IN PORTRAIT ARTIST OF THE YEAR? It was very intense. Artists are generally quite private people and you’re suddenly thrown into this situation where you have to paint in front of a live audience with loads of cameras. In the same vein, I found it exhilarating. Having that kind of pressure meant I had to produce the work, rather than having time to procrastinate. WHAT DID YOU LEARN FROM THE COMPETITION? I learnt you’ve got to stick to your guns. I’ve actually done the competition twice and the first time I was a lot less confident in my own abilities. I tried to paint something I thought the judges…