Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2022 i Artists & Illustrators

Dive in… …to the July issue of Artists & Illustrators, packed full of arty inspiration and practical advice. Now the sun is out, Anna Mason encourages you to schedule regular times in your diary to take your sketchbook, pencils and travel paints with you out into the fresh air and into nature. The combination of both nourishes your emotional wellbeing as she found out after going through a difficult period in her life. Ann Witheridge also encourages you to go outside with your art. The beauty of en plein air landscape painting is that you become part of nature, the birds sit with you, the flowers scent the air and the scenery changes as the day progresses. We may sometimes take nature for granted, but it’s one of the greatest free…

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WHEN YOU LOOK AT one of Zoey Frank’s complex figurative scenes, it’s impossible not to feel part of the action. Take Wedding, for example: the bride and groom’s hora dance is in mid-flow as granny watches on vicariously, a pigtailed bridesmaid steals a slice of cake and a drunk uncle passes out across a table nearby. It’s the sort of celebration we’ve all been to before and, with no one person stealing the limelight, it’s easy for an observer to imagine being there, filling in the blanks with their own recollections of special occasions. Evoking a similar sense of nostalgia is the artist’s series of poolside paintings, where all generations of a family gather in bathing suits on a hot summer’s day. Yet despite this wistful affection for the past,…

1 VARY YOUR MARKMAKING The eponymous hardness of the squareprofiled pastels allows them to maintain a consistent edge for longer than soft pastels. They can be shaped with sandpaper, snapped to give sharp edges and are capable of a wide range of different marks. It’s always worth buying the pastels in sets rather than as single crayons so that, as they break or wear down, you can accumulate a range of longer and shorter sticks to use for different marks. SUPPORTS, FIXATIVES Hard pastels like Conté Crayon contain more clay and binders than their soft pastel and pastel pencil counterparts, making them stronger, waxier and a little less powdery than their cousins. Of those media, Conté Crayon is the most versatile, its strength enables it to retain a point like…

As landscape painting developed over the 19th century, many artists simplified their colour palettes. The Barbizon school in France focused on values and mood as exemplified in this painting by Rousseau. The tonalist painters in America, inspired by the Barbizon school and Whistler, continued in this vein; by reducing the variety of colour, their works seem to intensify through colour harmony. In this painting by Twachtman, we can see the harmonious use of colour and the greying down of the landscape. George Inness was a great exponent of this style as shown here in his study of greens. Where Twatchman’s unifying techniques reduce the chroma, Inness’s paintings have the opposite effect of intensifying the colours.…

REBECCA BRADBURY Contributing to both the magazine and its digital platforms, our Assistant Editor gets to combine her passions for publishing and the visual arts. “One of the best things about my job is being able to chat with artists about what inspires their work – and then share it with you.” ANNA MASON Anna has been working as a professional botanical artist for 15 years. Best known for her vivid, realistic watercolour paintings, she is the founder of Anna Mason’s Online School and has taught to over 45,000 artists worldwide. Take her free class at AnnaMasonArt.com SANDRINE MAUGY Sandrine is a botanical artist, author and illustrator, fellow member of the Society of Botanical Artists, the Association of Illustrators, the Society of Authors and the Société Française d’Illustration Botanique. She…

LIKE ANY PROFESSION, not all teachers are A+ at their job which can have devastating effects on a student’s confidence. Christabel Blackburn was one of them. Despite winning an art scholarship at her previous school, when she moved to sixth form, her new art teacher didn’t show her any encouragement and even put her off applying to art school. Demoralised, she followed her brother into a Classics degree. Upon arriving at Newcastle, she saw the art students coming out of their building and, with a sinking heart, knew she’d made a mistake. But she pushed through and attained a 2:1 before jetting off to Florence for a year to a school which taught figurative drawing. After returning to Britain, she enrolled at the London Atelier of Representational Arts and from…

LAYERED DRAWING The short poses that introduce a life class are often used as a warm-up, a series of sacrificial drawings that serve to remind your hand and eye how to cooperate. I often choose to layer my drawings over one another, partially erasing the one that has gone before to provide a coloured ground for the next. Try it yourself in any erasable media, noticing how the collage of overlaid poses becomes more than the sum of its parts. Stage 1: First pose This exercise works best with a series of two- to five-minute-long poses. Make a swift, energetic drawing of the pose from top to toe, leaving room for more drawings on the same page. In this drawing I used the broad edge of a short Conté Crayon…

ONE SUNNY MORNING in November 2008, I stared out of the window in disbelief as I sat in the consultant’s room, taking in the two words no 28-year-old expects to hear. “It’s cancer”. During that eventful year, my connection with nature was a lifesaver in the truest sense of the word. A couple of years earlier I’d started gardening and found myself observing the plants I was growing with a fascination bordering on love. I was inspired to draw and paint these plants, ending a seven-year hiatus from making any art at all, whilst I pursued a ‘sensible’ career in local government. After winning an RHS botanical art competition and having a successful exhibition at Chelsea Flower Show, I made the bold decision to switch careers and turn pro with…

SAMPHIRE HOE is one of my local nature reserves, which stretches below the white cliffs to the sea. On a hot July morning, the air was scented with restharrow and other grassland plants. I set off early, hoping to work on a larger, portrait version of Flowers at Samphire Hoe, done a few summers ago. Apart from the distinctive green and white of the chalkcliffs, the colour palette was quite muted. Bleached grasses dotted the area and fringed the water. Beyond them, at ground level, were large expanses of more colourful grassland flowers that I wanted to use as foreground. For this image, I worked predominantly with Caran D’Ache ‘Pablo’ pencils, using many of their ‘in between’ shades, which were perfect for the late summer grassland. I also added Faber-Castell…

Things we love… Starting out as a butcher at Manchester’s Meat Market, Mark Demsteader hasn’t had the most conventional journey to becoming one of the most popular figurative artists working in Britain today. But this doesn’t stop us admiring his atmospheric and ethereal paintings of the human form rendered with thick, textured marks of raw pigments. You can catch his show-stopping work from 6 to 10 July at the Henley Festival. henley-festival.co.uk Shout out to… THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF ARTS The results are in! For the eighth year in a row, London’s Royal College of Arts has been ranked the number one university in the world for art and design by the QS World University Rankings. This helps cement the UK’s status as a top creative hub, and with the…

Oil paint has been the most popular painting medium for 600 years. No other product gives artists the same intensity of colour and varied range of mark-making possibilities, and paying tribute to the medium’s centuries-long reign is Gamblin, the US-based manufacturer that combines the best historical properties of oil paint with the latest technical innovations. In this month’s issue, we’re celebrating Gamblin’s Artists Oils by offering two lucky readers of Artists & Illustrators magazine the chance to each win an expertly curated gift package worth £350. Not only will the bundle contain hue-packed pigments, but it will also feature mediums and tools to diversify your oil painting. Gamblin is on a mission to lead oil painting into the future. All paints are created with the finest grade pigments. Artists can…

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH WE’RE DELIGHTED TO BE BACK with our annual British Art Prize in partnership with edding, the go to specialists in writing, marking and visual communication. This major national art competition will expose winning artists of all levels to a far-reaching platform to gain valuable publicity and recognition for their work. Open to everyone - whether you’re an amateur, emerging artist or a professional - all styles, media and techniques will be considered. To celebrate our joining up with edding, this year there will also be a one-off extra prize: the edding acrylic prize where the only requirement is that the submitted painting is completed in the medium (for more details, please see overleaf). The British Art Prize offers an unprecedented level of national exposure over three major…

IN THIS PENULTIMATE INSTALMENT of the life drawing in pastel series, I’ll be looking at one of my favourite drawing media, Conté Crayon. Throughout the rest of the series I’ve avoided dwelling on brands so that I can focus on the fundamental properties of each medium, but this month I’ll be making an exception. The Carré (square) Crayons made by Conté a Paris, colloquially known as Conté Crayons, are by far the most ubiquitous hard pastel and the form of hard pastel on which most equivalents are based, so I’ll be focusing on them specifically over the next few pages. Slimer than their soft-pastel equivalents, the firm, squareprofiled sticks come in a range of different colours with black, white and sanguine being the most common. Drawing with these three colours…

THE PLEASURE OF SEEING a painting of flowers never seems to go out of style, and can bring a sense of calm, serenity and joy. On a visit to Paris for business years ago, I took a morning to go see the Impressionist paintings. The museum was not crowded at that hour and, upon entering a room full of glorious canvases, I was absolutely transfixed by a small, glowing still life by Manet, Flowers in a Crystal Vase, directly opposite on the far wall. I loved it for many reasons; the little bunch of modest, mixed flowers looking freshly picked from the garden, the glorious glass and the small size. It was so accessible, appealing and totally relatable. That visit has stayed in the back of my memory, surfacing as…

IMPROVE YOUR LANDSCAPE PAINTING Part two of five IN THE FIRST ARTICLE we worked with a pencil in our sketchbook to focus on composition and values. Our goal is to build up to a full-scale landscape painting in colour. But we can do this sequentially so that each step builds a little information from the previous. When we are landscape painting, our light source is the sky and this has a harmonising and unifying effect on the colours and values in the landscape. Have we not all stopped in front of a sunset or sunrise mesmerised by the colours this gives? I love early mornings – when the mist softens the subject matter – and early evening when there is a unifying golden light. The concept of atmospheric perspective, which…