Australian How To Paint magazine chooses a topic or style of art each issue and gives you a comprehensive guide for you to develop your skills. Over the series we will cover all major painting technques plus popular paint ideas.
James Hough The chatter of eastern Rosellas permeates the solitude of an artist’s studio through an open window on a sunny July day. They’ve settled in the winter seed grass outside – left long on purpose to attract many parrots to the garden. King parrots, grass parrots and James Hough’s favourite – the eastern Rosella. Known locally by his moniker Jim, silently he stops work, reaches for his SLR camera – ever present by his side – and begins to photograph. It’s the beginning of yet another wildlife original masterpiece – an acrylic on clayboard. After the Rosellas move on James puts down the SLR and goes back to his easel to paint. His studio is surrounded by photographs he uses to get exact details of his subjects correct. As…
STEP ONE Carefully draw outline shapes of each duck. Add in areas of reflection and water movements. The ducks were feeding at the time I saw them, so I added several lines in line with their bodies, but left area in front of the ducks. STEP TWO Carefully build the body shape and colour of the birds. For the Mallard male use the Pthalo Green to define outside and the Sap Green inside. Brush in the neck, chest and the areas on the back wing with Raw Sienna. Note the black tail and thin line indicating the wing edge. For the female, for the rear of the head, the neck, and particularly under the bill area and wing area at the rear, use Raw Umber. The female had a Dark…
I began my journey to painting in 1987 at a Council of Adult Education watercolour course. At that stage I had no idea what I wanted to paint, but felt that being able to create a painting would be a great creative outlet. I had this misguided idea that watercolour would be easy. Wrong! While on the course, I also learnt about gouache, or opaque watercolour, as opposed to transparent watercolour. That was a medium that I had never heard of. I tried various subjects, mainly landscapes, but eventually settled on wildlife, as I have always loved birds and animals and felt I could be more passionate about these subjects. Wildlife presented a problem in that you have to seek it out. Unlike a landscape, which sits and waits for…
Before any painting is commenced, a number of decisions have to be made. The first for me is the subject. I have thousands of photographs of wildlife (mostly but not exclusively birds) and a decision needs to be made on what species of animal, insect, or bird will be the subject of my new painting. The second decision will be the support base that I use for the painting. For the purpose of this demonstration I will be using the Fabriano 600gm hot press paper. The thickness of the paper relieves me of the necessity of stretching the paper, which is something that always seems to cause me difficulty. Further decisions need to be made on how closely I’ll follow the photograph, the lighting direction and the size of the…
Coming from a family of artists, as a kid I wanted to be anything but an artist. Even driving an ice cream van had its rewards, I thought, compared to slogging away at a painting. While having this pessimistic perception of painting I drew and painted almost on a daily basis, so naturally this is the direction I took as an adult. Who said we had a free will? My earliest oil painting attempts were done using my father’s house paints. I realised after a protracted struggle that these were best left for their intended purpose and managed to procure my first set of proper artists’ oils. From then on, things rolled along, and after attending art classes, winning prizes occasionally and selling quite well, I felt sufficiently rewarded to…
STEP ONE This is the hardest step; finding a subject. Once that hurdle is overcome, I complete my drawing on tracing paper as it’s much easier to rub out mistakes or even turf out the drawing and start anew. Also, it’s easier to correctly align the drawing onto the canvas. Once I’m happy with the result, I trace over the line work on the wrong side of the tracing paper using soft graphite and then transfer onto the canvas with a stylus. STEP TWO Outlining the subjects helps in not losing the shapes. I use a liner and thin the paint with a little thinning medium. Then the background is painted in using mixed paint left over from previous work. At this stage getting the colours exact isn’t important. The…
