Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2021 i Artists & Illustrators

I’ve judged and even entered plenty of art competitions over the years so I’m not about to discourage anyone from doing so. That said, it’s worth remembering that, as I've said before here, art is not a competition. Twice over the past week I’ve heard people refer to themselves as a “failed artist” when that blatantly isn’t true. Surely you can only be a failure if you give up art altogether and never make another picture for the rest of your life? If you persist at painting, drawing, printmaking or whichever artistic discipline best suits you, then that is a real success as far as I'm concerned. And this issue just happens to be full of inspiring artists who have done just that, from Lucy Jones, who won the Ruth…

Why draw? It’s the simplest of questions, yet it deserves some thought. Drawing is an activity that is easy to take for granted, given that many of us have been doing it for longer than we can remember. Chunky felt-tips and reams of old printer paper with perforated edges were a means with which to make our first marks, stick figures emerging before we could even form a sentence on the same page. In the arc of an artistic life, these were our cave paintings at Lascaux, the very first step in a chronology of drawing that would only develop, becoming both more refined and more expressive over time. Drawing is a compulsion for children and something that tends to garner praise at an early age, the recognition being that…

I am writing this in a studio full of teaching kit, ready for me to deliver printmaking classes next week. Over the years I’ve noticed that it doesn’t really make a difference whether you are the student or the teacher; getting the most from an adult learner’s class depends on pretty much the same things. The best ones are those where the teacher and the students are clear about the type of class on offer this means not only knowing the subject matter but also sharing similar expectations. These are things to prepare for before class starts. “A good fit between teacher and student expectations will make a big difference to the outcome” As a teacher, it is important to be as clear about your teaching style as you are…

Hanging on the wall of Harriet de Winton’s studio is a very unusual piece of art with a very personal backstory. Painted over her parents’ wedding invite is a watercolour landscape of Kemsing in Kent, the place where the couple tied the knot back in 1979. The gift originally took pride of place in the hallway of Harriet’s childhood home, but unbeknown to her at the time was just how prophetic the painting would be. It was only in 2015, after launching her successful wedding stationers, de Winton Paper Co., that the artist made the connection between her new venture and the invite-turned-artwork she passed every day while growing up. Since beginning her business, Harriet’s career has taken a few more unforeseen pivots, from being asked to teach watercolours to…

The more distant a subject is from you, the smaller it appears; it is a simple idea but one that is critical to how we create the illusion of three-dimensional depth on a two-dimensional surface. This concept is known as “diminution” and it is one of the three main indicators of depth, governing the complex constructions of linear perspective and the baffling distortions of foreshortening. In this second part of our new series, we’ll be looking at how you can use its principles to support your observational drawing. You don’t need to understand diminution in order to represent it if you could draw what you see in front of you with innocent eyes, then the illusion of depth would resolve itself on the page as a reflection of what you…

The study of anatomy helps us build a kind of mental blueprint of the figure – an imaginary three-dimensional model of muscles, bones and connective tissue, typical structural relationships, symmetries and asymmetries within forms, and even perhaps an idea of scales and proportions. This understanding really helps inform our looking when we come to work with the life model. In a sense we have a bit of a head start (no pun intended) because we already know the structures and forms that people have in common, which gives us things to look out for as well as an understanding of why they might look that way. This structural understanding provides a framework that helps us to organise the immense range of visual information provided by a model’s pose – things…

“Painting myself naked shows me in a raw and vulnerable state, but also a defiant one” I had a large G&T to celebrate winning the Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Prize. It was very exciting – it means that my exploration of what it is to be human in this world has been recognised. My entry [Being 66, Being] gives a nod to old age. In the last 12 months, life has been in suspension for all of us. Such a year of tragedy has left us in a raw and vulnerable place. Painting myself naked shows me in a vulnerable state, but also a defiant one. I used metallic paint as a suggestion of something precious. Originally, I was going to have a black background, but the framework of the door…

LETTER OF THE MONTH WILD FEELINGS When our first copy of Artists & Illustrators arrived – the August 2021 issue – my five-year-old daughter and I instantly fell in love with it. I loved all of the tips on techniques, the ideas and the inspiration. We were particularly awestruck over the insanely realistic wildlife art. We just couldn’t believe they were paintings! My daughter was particularly smitten with Natalie Oberg’s fox, so much so that she wanted to give it a go herself. We often paint together, and she prides herself on copying me, but this was just her. I just wanted to say thank you for inspiring both young and old. I feel like a kid at Christmas when your magazine arrives – not a lot of things make…

STACEY’S TOP TIP “Use a lot of paint, more than you think. Like good cooking, painting requires generosity of spirit.” Stacey Gledhill There’s a lovely dynamism to Stacey Gledhill’s new painting Two Black Cats, as the composition resolves itself nicely and the whole canvas purrs with purpose and life. It is perhaps no surprise to discover that this deceptively simple work actually had a lengthy gestation period as the artist mulled over her potential subject for more than a year. Lockdown had caused the New Zealand-born artist to forsake her Oxford studio and work from home, though this actually proved a “creatively fertile” period as ideas for new paintings seemed to arrive thick and fast. It was another unexpected arrival that prompted this particular painting. “We had a black cat…

“On voit tout autrement un objet dont on connait la structure.” (“When we know the structure, we see a completely different object.”) The word “structure” comes from the Latin verb struere, “to construct”: the way in which the parts of an object come together to form a whole – i.e., the relational arrangement between an object’s composite parts. It is very important for an artist to understand a form, be it organic or man-made, in terms of its structural characteristics. This is achieved by seeing the object stripped of its inessential details, and therefore concentrating on it as an arrangement of simpler geometrical forms: cubes, oblongs, cylinders, and so on. It can also be helpful to supplement this intuitive investigative framework with a kind of X-ray vision, enabling the artist…

“We need to get rid of the critical, imaginary audience in our heads and start enjoying the process” Many of us try not to be too precious in our drawings, but what does that really mean? And why is it worthwhile? To be precious is to be self-consciously looking over our shoulders, inhibited by false ideas of what constitutes good drawing, fussing about insignificant details and crippled by perfectionism. It robs us of our authenticity and can freeze us altogether. I think fear is the root cause. Each time we pick up a pencil, we are so keen to live up to our high expectations that our reasons for drawing become muddled. Mark making can be derivative for fear that risks will backfire. Preciousness can look like a reluctance to…

Port Seton is a small fishing village about half an hour’s drive east of Edinburgh and it is one of my favourite spots in which to paint. It has everything. There’s a sense of space, with the Firth of Forth stretching beyond the harbour wall and the large sky above; there are the beautiful contrasts of tone and texture between the newly painted and more weathered fishing boats; there are the fine details of rigging above, the wild texture of the sandy ground below, and the flashes of brilliantly coloured buoys in the distance. In this series of articles, I wanted to show you the benefits of working in mixed media and I will be focusing on a particular medium each time. This month I’m looking at acrylic and how…

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CHALLENGE 1 NEGATIVE SPACE WHAT? Use crosshatching to indicate the negative spaces between parts of your subject. WHY? A focus on negative space helps to view a real subject in more abstract terms. This in turn can make it easier to think about line, form and colour. HOW? For this challenge you need an intricate, light subject against a dark background: a bunch of white flowers in front of a dark curtain, for example. Look closely at your arrangement and try to think of the darker gaps between the objects as shapes. Find a gap in the centre and focus upon it. Using parallel hatched lines, try to draw an approximation of that gap in the centre of your paper. Now locate another gap nearby and consider its size and…

Vincent van Gogh was a competitive painter, always looking closely at the work of other artists for any scrap of knowledge that he could utilise in his own practice. So when he famously claimed that “Frans Hals must have had 27 blacks”, there was a huge compliment hidden within the vinegary bitterness. Van Gogh’s original comment, an acknowledgement of his countryman’s skill at finding subtle colour shifts in passages where lesser artists would have laid down a blanket of tone, came in a letter sent to his brother Theo on 20 October 1885 in which he also declared Hals as “a colourist among the colourists, a colourist like Veronese, like Rubens, like Delacroix, like Velázquez”. In another letter sent a week earlier, Van Gogh had first written of his joy…

Flowers naturally lend themselves to the creation of luminous, glowing paintings. Light shining through translucent petals or reflecting delicately within the flower creates a magical glow. Dawn light accentuates deep shadow and radiant highlights in the freshly opened flowers. Attention to light and colour allows you to capture this luminosity. 1. ESTABLISH YOUR LIGHT SOURCE A direct and even light looks rather flat and unexciting, so use a strongly angled light source for maximum interest. Look for shadow patterns that enhance the form of the flower. Rotate the flower and tilt it in the light until you see the best view to paint. 2. USE STRONG BACKLIGHTING As an alternative to angled lighting, look at the flower with a light behind it to determine if the backlit effect is what…

1 Divide your image When painting a plant, I normally work in a sequence of washes, keeping the painting balanced as I work my way through the various layers. For this Dahlia, I decided on a different approach. The large number of petals made the drawing complex and working on the whole piece at once potentially confusing, so I divided the flower head into five areas and developed each section a stage further before moving onto another. The first of those five sections was the centre, which anchored the whole painting. I divided the rest into quarters, breaking down the observation of the subject and the painting into manageable pieces. 2 Lay down shadows The first paint layer was a wet-in-wet wash of what I call my Harmonic Shadows mix.…

Autumn is here – full of conkers, jam making, and long nights drawing in. The hedgerows are full of life and the trees are turning gold to drop their leaves, but most of us spend a lot less time in the natural world than we once did, missing the magic of the changing seasons. I always feel that the autumn months are the beginning of a time spent in quiet craft, a form of creative hibernation, but this is interspersed with brisk walks to blow away the cobwebs and remind me of the inspiration of the world outside. So many of us have turned to nature for solace during the pandemic, and this has really brought to light the benefits for our physical and mental wellbeing of time spent walking…