There's Constable. And then there's me.

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. 

What not to paint

Just as the British army has an unofficial list of things its junior officers should never do, lessons learned from long study of military history - don't march on Moscow in the winter, never invade China by land, don't attack Afghanistan* - so there's probably a similar list for painters. Here are just a few of those hard won lessons regarding painting that I know.

- Don't try to paint something through something. I could put this better, so I will. If you chance upon a subject that is coyly hiding behind, say, a tree, but you can just about see the subject behind it... paint something else.

Why? Because painting a simple thing well is hard enough on painter and viewer alike, without adding the possibility of confusion. A chain link fence with a shop window full of glassware and reflections behind it could provide a real challenge for a photorealist, but the rest of us are better off sidestepping subjects like this.

- Don't paint any pictures too big to fit in the back of a London taxi.

Why not? Many of your potential gallery partners are located in London. Have you ever tried to take a large painting through central London on an average day?

- Don't paint anything your mother wouldn't like.

Why not? Because she has better taste than you think. Scary or difficult paintings won't get past her mum radar, which means they won't get to frighten off buyers.

- Don't paint fast. It's not a race. Get it right.

If you try to do everything in haste, you'll end up with a painting that looks like it was done in a hurry.

- On the other hand, don't faff about. Get it done.

If you take too long, your impetus and enthusiasm will dry up long before you finish. And your painting will look like you second guessed every brush stroke you made.

- Don't paint Spring landscapes.

Why not? The greens are vile, and blossom is impossible. And even if you get everything right, it'll look too pretty.

- Don't be too honest with the greens you see in the landscape.

Why not? Green is a difficult colour, and a little goes a very long way. What looks admirable out there in the landscape has a way of looking bilious on canvas. Solution? Tone down those greens with red, or mix them using pigments from the grubby underside of the colour solid, like Yellow Ochre and Raw Sienna.

- Don't make your paintings deliberately eccentric to get attention.

Why not? You can get a lot of attention by wearing a clown outfit, but it's not the sort of attention you want. Similarly, any attempt to stand out on a gallery wall that doesn't involve painting really well is best avoided. Some artists have made a career out of their quirks, but forced oddity gets old pretty quickly - probably more so for the painter than for their audience. I can't imagine a worse fate than having to top the last odd idea with something even weirder.

Am I teaching my granny to suck eggs here? Any words of wisdom from the audience? Extra tips would be appreciated, and stolen for the follow up.

* The wily Pathan, then as now, has always been a tricky customer.

Landscape painting: building a composition.

So my most recent small paintings began to sprout and join up, and before I knew it they'd turned into a study for a larger work.

Three 10" x 12"s laid out in a row became the centre of a larger planned painting. I took this photograph of the three together and used it as the basis for further studies with GIMP.

On the one hand, GIMP is a great way to quickly get a notion of what a planned painting could look like. On the other, there are drawbacks: one is that you can choke on choice.

The problem is the ease with which GIMP enables you to try out different compositions: you can be seduced into spending all your time and energy discovering different solutions instead of sticking with one. Too much choice can be disabling.

But that's just me chickening out of the process of coming up with a pictorial solution. Composing a picture needs a toolkit I was fortunate enough to pick up in school art class, thanks to a great teacher. A small painting is pretty easy to compose. Things begin to get out of hand when you're dealing with a larger work which has several parts, which is where you can learn from the lessons of the past. In a previous post, I mentioned drawing a copy of Constable's 'Flatford Mill', and discovering how every component played a role in the composition, guiding the eye around the picture.

So what are some rules of composition?

- Look for big shapes. You should be able to read your painting from across a room.

- Frame studies with two right angled L shapes to help you find the right size and shape rectangle for your support.

- Echo shapes in different places. That bouncy treeline? Turn it upside down and use it in the clouds, or in the foreground.

- Contrast significant elements. Bush with leaves turning orange? Put against blue sky for maximum impact. Foliage mass in full light? Place against darkest shadows.

- Design matters more than reportage. Make each element work as part of the painting, rather than slaving to make it look 'real'.

Sketchbook? Drawing book. Potato, potato...

I just dug out my old drawing books and scanned the best pages, having found enough material for several new paintings. It was a pleasant surprise to discover how well past me could draw, at least when he was on his game and trying hard.

Incidentally, can we settle one thing now? It's a drawing book, not a sketchbook. A sketch is something done in a hurry. The very word sketch implies something unfinished, hurried, unimportant.

Drawing, on the other hand, is done slowly, in a measured way, calling on the full powers and concentration of the draughtsman. It's a task involving hand and eye and mind, memory and perception, the juggling of rules and craft and the inspiration of the moment.

A sketch is something you throw away. A drawing is a treasure. And drawing - whatever the current orthodoxy declares - is the centre of art.

I read a line in Martin Gayford's book about David Hockney, in which the author and painter spoke of a contemporary artist who said he didn't draw, just as people 'no longer rode a horse to work'.

My opinion? If you can't draw, you're not really an artist.

It's like someone illiterate declaring themselves a writer, or a tone deaf mute insisting they can sing. It would be like me claiming to have a full head of lovely hair. It's simply not the case. Some careers have a minimum entry requirement, and to me, calling yourself an artist demands that you have some competence with a pencil and a sheet of paper, to the extent that you can make a recognizable effort at drawing whatever's in front of you.

Drawing is the central competence of art. That's just the way it is. It's not really negotiable.

Drawing teaches you to see, in a way that photography or video never will - these mechanical means are a way of not looking at the world, a delegation of the task of sight, a way to avoid the responsibility of seeing. And seeing is the only important thing an artist does. Artists show the rest of us what the world looks like.

If you want to learn how to draw, join a life class at your local college. Then do a Google image search on drawings by Renaissance artists, download a few to your desktop, print out the best and copy them freehand. Google Harold Speed and John Ruskin to find free PDF downloads of their books.

I don't recommend the arts section of your local library. Most of the books about drawing in mine have the words 'Fast!' or 'Easy!' in the title, and were written by people who not only can't draw, but also don't realize the fact. Sadly, the same applies to many of the hundreds of YouTube videos on drawing and painting.

The good news is that a Google image search will turn up many examples of good drawing for you to ponder over and copy. The whole of art history is there online, at your disposal. 

pochade box

I bought a pochade box recently, thinking it might prove an easy alternative to lugging my portable easel around.

It's certainly lighter. A cleverly designed, two piece folding box with a carry handle and strap, it has enough space to stash all the paint and brushes you need in the base, plus two 10" x 12" boards and a palette in the lid. That's a day's work right there for your average landscape painter.

The one on the right requires a fork lift truck.

Pro tip: if you cut your own boards to size, make sure they fit into the slots in the lid without being forced. Failure to ensure this will result in a tug of war when you try to remove them, which is only funny to onlookers. Run the end of a candle up and down the edges of the boards to make sure they slide in and out easily.

The palette is part of the lid, and folds neatly into it when the box is closed. This effectively seals it from the outside air and seems to slow down the drying time of the paint quite effectively.

Pro tip #2: Seal the palette with a couple of coats of linseed oil rubbed on with a rag and allowed to dry before you use it for the first time.

Is a pochade box a workable alternative to an easel? Well... no. Half an hour into using it for the first time, I rested it on top of a nearby fence and swung my left arm about to get the feeling back into it, and admitted that what this baby really needs is some legs to stand it on. So that's the next part of my plan: get a tripod bush fitting and attach it to the underside of the pochade box so I can put it on my camera tripod. Which I'll have to bring with me, along with the pochade box... which is tantamount to hauling along the full sized portable easel.

I haven't really thought this through, have I?

There's room for a small bottle of medicinal whisky.

So what is it good for? Well, it really is a lightweight alternative for those days when the full kit is just too much trouble. If you can find somewhere to sit, a pochade box is perfect. If you can't, you're stuck with a sore arm or hauling a tripod around. If you can work from your car, the pochade box is exactly what you need.

Working in that 10" x 12" limit is perfect for outdoor painting, when you're not going to be working on any painting for more than ninety minutes because the light changes. Studies for larger works you'll do in the studio can be finished in that time, or at least brought to a stage where you can finish them at home.

I've been using it for three studies for a planned larger painting to be done in studio, and it's worked fine. The subject is a grass bank and a small wood which I noticed a couple of years ago looking particularly fine in the autumn. On a related note, if you attempt an autumn landscape yourself, look sharp about it, as those pretty leaves don't hang around for long. One day everywhere is all golden and lovely, the next day some lummox coughs and every single leaf plummets to the ground. I started drawing a stand of trees in full leaf and overnight they went and turned into bare branches, which is awkward. I've got drawings and photographs of the pre-naked trees, so it's not a lost cause.

painting trees

It's easy when you're five. Big green blob for the leaves, brown stripe below for the trunk, and little red blobs for the apples. Not an apple tree? Doesn't matter, get them in there. 

Now that's how you paint a tree. It gets a lot harder when you're older. Especially when they're all bunched up and you're trying to paint them in changing light. You can't see where one ends and the next begins, or where the branches start and finish. The trunk is in there somewhere, and you could see it yesterday when the light was different. But you can also see the outline of the tree behind through the tree you're trying to paint, and that's not helping at all... 

So you have to get organized when you're drawing or painting something that insists on being undrawable. Painting trees en masse is a little like painting clouds, in that both move about and are made up of deceptive forms which change appearance with the light. 

'But trees just stand there,' you say. Well, yeah, but their forms are hard to read, in that while a mass of foliage looks like a solid some of the time, it's really a collection of twigs and leaves. And because of this, as the sun moves, or clouds cover it, different aspects of various trees appear and disappear like stage flats lit by madmen. Branches pop in and out of sight. Foliage is light, then dark. And it moves with the wind. So you have to simplify, and make what is ambiguous, plain. Painting demands that we pick and choose from what we can see, and make all our selections work together in one convincing whole.

  

I often start with the trunk, then try to lay in the branches and the outline all at the same time. If you get the outline, that's half the job of making your tree look convincing done. The outline can usually identify the species, which at least tells the viewer you actually looked at a real tree. Incidentally, learning a little about the species of tree you're likely to encounter can help you draw and paint them well. 

Judicious placement of sky holes comes last - probably fewer than there are in real life, unless you want your tree to resemble a lace doilie. Remember that verisimilitude matters, but making a good painting matters more. There comes a point when a painting has enough facts in it, and you have to start thinking of it as a performer thinks of a music score. Getting the notes right counts, but not as much as making music. 

the horsey test

Having opened my big mouth a while ago about real artists being able to draw horses, I thought I should probably attempt to prove myself capable. Since there are horses conveniently parked in the field over the road, that was where I began. I took a small drawing book and a biro and set out to draw me some horsey. 

They obliged me by standing around, quietly wondering what the scrawny human was up to. Some went so far as to actually pose nicely, which was handy. Others took the mickey something fierce, and stood in front of the ones posing. Eventually, they all lost interest and moved on, having heard there was some great grass at the far end of the field.

There are pitfalls lying in wait for the horse draughtsman. Their ears come out looking like Doberman ears if you're too emphatic with the curve and point. The legs leave the body at unexpected angles, giving them the appearance of being perpetually poised, ready to spring forward at the gallop, even when standing still. And don't get me started on hooves. What kind of design is that for a foot? That's why God made tufty grass, so painters wouldn't have to deal with hooves.

I took photographs too, but something weird happens when you take pictures of horses. Even though they were standing still, they all came out looking as if they were caught in the middle of a peculiar dance, with legs inexplicably in the air, tails flapping about, and gormless expressions. Anyway, here's the end result. A drawing I'm not totally ashamed of. 

It had to be patched and redrawn a couple of times. Obviously, it's time to take a look at how other, better artists tackled the same subject. Leonardo's drawings for the Sforza equestrian statue spring to mind, along with Degas at the races. Degas is a great choice because you can often see his mind working with different versions and over-drawing in his studies. 

Horses in a Meadow, by Degas. Photo by cliff1066 on Flickr.

The trick, I've found, is to avoid making your horse look like a freakishly stick-legged rodent - more easily done than you might suspect - and to take care over the aforementioned Doberman ears. Remember, horses come in different shapes and sizes, and that experts will look long and hard to make sure you've captured the characteristics of a particular breed, quite possibly with that same obsessive attention to detail that makes painting steam trains a no go.

The good news is that information is just a Google away. I already have George Stubbs' 'Anatomy of the Horse', which will show you more than you wish to know about the insides and outside of that quadruped, along with Muybridge's 'Animals in Motion', which demonstrates how a horse runs. YouTube has this video, 'Equine Anatomy on a Live Painted Horse'. 

Am I going to explore the horse as subject? No. There are equestrian artists online who will capture the likeness of your favourite hunter for a fee. Paint what you love, should be the guiding principle for any painter, and I confess I don't feel much more than wary admiration for horses in general. And now I know what a fetlock is, and where the withers are, I feel I know as much as I needed to. It's just that, as a landscape painter, I think I should have some ability to convincingly render any of the staffage that might appear in my paintings. So, cows next. People I can do already.