I'm a landscape painter living in the UK. I paint the countryside around my home, which, for me, is a place of beauty and pleasure. I love the look of it year round, in every season.
Paint Landscape features posts about my paintings and drawings, and my thoughts about painting. All my paintings are for sale, and you can find them here.
There are thousands of art books in print. And you could build
a bonfire with most of them and be better off.
I'm talking about the how-to-paint sort of book which
presumably fills the gaping void left by a standard art college
education.
(On the foundation course I went to, we had a visit from some
scrofulous midget who showed us home made porn videos
and seriously suggested making them was a good way to fund
an art career. Hey, it was the 70s.)
Unfortunately, the people who write most of these books
evidently haven't a clue. Their horrid paintings give you fair
warning on the front cover, but if, despite this, you venture
inside, you'll soon discover the truth: most art instruction
books are written by people who can't paint or draw.
So which art instruction books are worth a look, or better still,
worth adding to your permanent collection? Here's a handful of
the ones I've read over the years that pass muster, and won't
steer you wrong.
Lessons in
Classical Drawing
by Juliette Aristides. This includes a companion DVD, and
has over 200 pages of excellent tuition for anyone who wants
to learn how to draw properly.
Albinus on
Anatomy (Dover Anatomy for Artists)
by Robert Beverly Hale and Terence Coyle. I picked up a
hardback copy of this 18th century classic in The Works for
next to nothing. 200 pages of beautifully detailed etchings of
the bones and musculature of the human body, taken from the
originals by Jan Wandelaar, working for Bernard Siegfried
Albinus. It comes with an essay by Robert Beverly Hale, a
renowned art tutor whose anatomy lectures can still be seen
on YouTube here:
How To Make A
£Iving A$ An Arti$T
, by Colin Ruffell. This offers 12 'Golden Rules' for making a living from your
work, something that never cropped up in the course of my art
education.
Anyone out there got any further recommendations?
There are two temptations you can succumb to when you're drawing or painting. One is that you don't do enough. The other is that you do too much. Both are bad. And the safe place between them can be tiny and hard to find.
I was working on a drawing that wouldn't come together. Even though I'd been careful to work all over the drawing to keep it of a piece, it still looked bitty and the composition tried to fly apart.
I finally got it to look right after three sessions on site. 'One more day and it'll look great,' I told myself. And ruined the whole drawing after twenty minute's work on it the next day.
The moral of this story? Quit while you're ahead. Or be prepared to spend a lot of time putting your mistakes right. 'Maybe if I tried this now...' is a line of thought that can lead to hours of work you didn't plan on doing.
And yet I'm reluctant to offer a one size fits all solution to this particular problem. Sometimes - but only sometimes - it's a good thing to push a drawing or painting past the point where you're guaranteed success. The safe solution can be pretty dull, and exceeding your limits is the only way to grow. At least that's the feel good nonsense I tell myself when I'm wrestling with yet another nosediver.
A wiser head offers this solution: put it away for a while, and do something else. And a while means long enough to forget what the problem was in the first place, before you even look at the painting in question again. Then, analyze what the problem is. When a painting doesn't work, the reason is often this:
When you painted it, you didn't know what you were doing.
Time and distance help you see the flaws more easily, and offer fresh solutions that help you to mend them.
While small, these studies are a bit labour intensive. They also fulfil their intended function of making the skies in my full sized paintings altogether more convincing. I won't be starting any major works without a sky study to fall back on.
I just noticed my A5 drawing book of cloud studies, done from my landing window since 2010, is crammed full.
It's come in handy this past few months, particularly in dealing with a major problem in any landscape painting, to whit, painting a convincing sky. Those generic fluffy white cotton wool balls just don't hack it when it comes to making your sky look right.
Leaving a book open on the landing window sill with some art materials next to it turned out to be a good move. Every time I went upstairs and happened to see some particularly fine cloud formation, I could spend the next ten minutes getting it down on paper without having to hunt for paper and paints.
I used a watercolour from it as the basis for the cloud study featured here:
The drawback is that since my landing faces south, all I have is back or side-lit clouds. Time to start a new book facing north.
I hadn't done a still life painting for a while, so I thought I'd take a break from landscapes and try a small still life.
Took an apple and a piece of cloth. Found a small primed board. Set up easel and palette and painted. And filmed it.
Painting still life is like the easy, laid back version of painting landscape. The light stays the same, nothing moves, and you're never bothered by livestock. Plus it's probably not raining and you can make tea whenever you want. And paint sitting down.
There are some plein air purists who only paint in the open air, starting and finishing their paintings on site.
The best part of what I paint always happens in the studio.
But it always depends on what I bring back from my painting expeditions. I work on small studies outdoors, usually a primed 10" x 12" MDF panel.
In this case I ended up with three studies from the same scene, done over a few days, at the same time of day, in similar weather and lighting conditions. Laying them out together, I saw they could be the basis of a larger painting.
I took a 24" x 36" canvas, tinted it with Light Red, and gridded it up with drawing pins and cotton thread to match the grid on a printout of a photograph of the studies.
I copied the drawing from the printout to the canvas, removed the thread, and was left with a canvas ready to be painted.
Painting from the studies worked well, but the sky was still not decided on.
I made several colour studies of the kind of sky that would suit the painting. I looked at Constable's paintings, and took ideas from him: the dark grey cloud cut by the top edge of the picture, to give scale and dramatic impact; cumulus clouds in perspective to give depth and movement; different textures and lighting effects, to give convincing scale and realism.
The sky had to complement the land below it and match and reinforce the mood of the painting. I was after the cool, windy, damp atmosphere of an early autumn day, with the threat of rain in the air, but the sunshine still coming through the clouds.
I blocked in a thin scumble of pale blue to cover the light red underpainting, and decided to leave the painting alone for a while. After a week's break I resumed painting, first on the shrub on the left, working into a thin layer of oil and turpentine. This made the paint application sticky and draggy, which allowed some fancy pants painting, stippling and dragged lines which helped to create the illusion of foliage and twigs.
The next day I began to lay in the sky. I stole some dark clouds from Constable's 'The Lock'. The grey, the darkest in the sky, was a surprisingly light number 3 on a 10 step scale between black and white. I mixed it with French Ultramarine and Raw Umber and Titanium White, and started painting the clouds...
And after a while I took a rag and wiped off all I'd done. It wasn't good enough to work as well as I wanted. I also worked on the foreground, using the photographic reference shots I'd had printed. Note, at no time did I use any brush smaller than a quarter inch flat. Always work from big to small, and stop well before you end up fiddling with a one hair brush. If it looks good at viewing distance, it's good enough.
I was particularly happy with the painting of the bare hawthorn bush on the far right. To paint this, I laid a patch of sky blue, and while it was still wet worked in some wet brush strokes of a dark grey mixed from French Ultramarine and Burnt Umber, fanning them with a large flat brush to make a grey bush shape. When this was dry, I worked back into the grey with more of the sky blue, to carve out masses of twigs. It worked well, much better than trying to paint tiny individual twigs and branches. The second attempt at the sky went well. I oiled out the whole area using liquin thinned with turpentine, then worked into this with transparent washes of the same #3 grey, applied with a rag in big shapes, then brushed out to make clouds.
Keeping the sky transparent, using what is essentially a watercolour wash technique, only in oil paint, is a technique that worked. As did using a rag and big brushes to avoid getting fiddly. Later, I took a long look at the unfinished painting and made a list of the parts that needed work. I tackled these one at a time until I was satisfied with all of them.
Except a large painting never is really done. You can always find something you want to change, but at some point it's best to let go and put it aside. I ordered a frame online and started to think about the next painting.
When this painting is thoroughly dry, it'll have to be varnished. That's a topic for another day. Support:
Winsor & Newton Linen Canvas, 36" x 24"
Paints used:
Titanium White Cadmium Red Spectrum Orange Cadmium Lemon Yellow Ochre Opaque Oxide of Chromium French Ultramarine Raw Sienna Burnt Umber
Mediums:
Turpentine Linseed Oil Liquin
Brushes:
2" Household Gloss Brush 1" Hog Bristle Nylon Flats, half, quarter, and eighth inch Various fan brushes and riggers Rags Fingers
So I'm carrying on with this larger canvas based on three small painted studies, and I took a look at 'Constable: The Great Landscapes' to see how he would tackle something like this.
Like many painters, he used squaring up to copy drawings and smaller studies to canvas. Some of his larger works apparently show evidence of tacks spaced regularly around the edges of the canvas, to which threads could be tied in a grid. This is instead of using pencil lines, which can be a pain to get rid of. It's a method I've used before, and saves a lot of time and dented canvas from rubbing out. So I spent a sweary fifteen minutes hunting down the drawing pins and carefully measuring out the edges of the canvas before sticking the pins in at regularly spaced intervals and threading a length of cotton around them all to make a grid.
I'd also previously applied a thin wash of Light Red to cover the scary white of the canvas and provide a contrast to the greens that are going on top of it. I've seen videos of American landscape painters like Scott Christensen starting a large canvas in the studio freehand, working from studies but with no preparatory drawing or underpainting. Great if you can do it, but that's a little too nerve wracking for me. I like a tight underpainting I can work into, with all the drawing and compositional problems worked out beforehand. Also, I think some effects are only to be had with overpainting and layering, and that calls for a more planned approach.
The sky is going to present problems. I have several choices as to what's going into it, and good records of the light and cloud conditions from the time I made studies on site, but I want to make sure it gets the full Constable treatment - the sky as 'chief organ of sentiment' in a painting. To that end, I'm doing small sky studies to try out different things. Dishonest? Yes. This is art. It's a bunch of lies that tell a truth. To get back to the title of this post - why is Constable's work the paradigm of English landscape painting that resonates so deeply with most of us? If you want to paint English landscape, you can't help but acknowledge him, despite the fact that there are other, equally well known English painters whose work is no worse, and who arguably should have just as great a claim on the national consciousness. In part, it's because his paintings are so well known, from hundreds of reproductions hanging on parlour walls all over the country. It's also because of what they represent; a rural idyll that many long for, but most will never live in. Mostly, though, it's the simple fact of recognition. When you look at a Constable, you sense the sheer simple pleasure he obviously took in being there, wherever he was painting.
by Juliette Aristides. This includes a companion DVD, and
has over 200 pages of excellent tuition for anyone who wants
to learn how to draw properly. 
by Robert Beverly Hale and Terence Coyle. I picked up a
hardback copy of this 18th century classic in The Works for
next to nothing. 200 pages of beautifully detailed etchings of
the bones and musculature of the human body, taken from the
originals by Jan Wandelaar, working for Bernard Siegfried
Albinus. It comes with an essay by Robert Beverly Hale, a
renowned art tutor whose anatomy lectures can still be seen
on YouTube here: 
Again, a great find in The Works, in which the great horse
painter does for the horse what Albinus did for humans. 
, by Colin Ruffell. This offers 12 'Golden Rules' for making a living from your
work, something that never cropped up in the course of my art
education.
Anyone out there got any further recommendations? 
