Up coming workshops

Art in Action

Under the umbrella of the Nature In Art Museum and Art Gallery, I shall be doing two batik workshops at this event on Friday 18th July.
I have never been to this event before, but have known of it for a few years, so it is an exciting prospect for me to be there. And I am looking forward to it very much.



Gloucester Arts and Crafts Summer School

This is organized by the Gloucester Arts and Crafts Group and will be from 21 – 25 July. There are 2,3 and 5 day workshops available in many aspects of art and craft such as calligraphy, drawing, pastels, watercolours, ceramics, glass engraving, chair making, mosaics and much more.
Last year’s event had to be cancelled due to the awful flooding and problems created by it that the area suffered. Hopefully this year will be far more encouraging weather-wise. Also last year would have been my first time at this event, so I was bitterly disappointed that circumstances prevented me from teaching there.
As I was to have done last time, this year I shall be tutoring a five-day workshop on batik. If you are interested in booking a place, please leave a message in my guestbook and I will send you the contact details for the organizer.



Drawing Workshop – Heron gallery

I have been asked back to do another workshop at the Heron gallery in Bath, only this time it will be drawing. The two-day workshop on 2 & 3 August will be aimed at the beginner, unconfident and nervous artist’s that have trouble getting a drawing going or knowing a easy way to start. I will show the various techniques I use for drawing with much emphasis on the practical. If you are interested in booking onto this workshop please contact the gallery via the link to their website at www.westartpromotions.co.uk or emailing info@ westartpromotions.com



Workshop with BAS

If you have not heard of BAS, you must visit his website, please look in the Links listings to the right of this page. He is an artist of worldwide reknown; a very inspirational artist with an incredible sense and use of colour. I was very pleased and honoured that he asked me to tutor an art course alongside him that will be held October 10 - 12 at the Nature In Art Museum and Art Gallery in Gloucestershire.
The course will be 3 days and is limited to twelve people. It will be a very creative few days and we very much look forward to your company at this wonderful location.
For details and to enroll please contact Nature In Art at www.nature-in-art.org.uk or telephone 01452 731422 or click on this link http://www.nature-in-art.org.uk/courses.html



Autumnal Silk Painting with the Avon Gorge and Downs Wildlife Project

On Saturday 25th October I shall once again be holding a silk painting workshop in conjunction with The Avon Gorge & Downs Wildlife Project. I really enjoy the workshops I do for this project, as it involves a foray onto the Downs where Mandy Leivers, the Biodiversity Educational Officer for this project, takes us on a walk of discoveries. Her well trained and observant eyes find the tiniest of treasures and her enthusiast imparting of knowledge about all that we see is inspirational.
After meeting at the zoo, there's a quick walk up to the Downs to have a look around and gain inspiration with shapes and colours of the Autumnal season before returning to the zoo to do our silk paintings.
This workshop is suitable for everyone, including the artistically challenged. If you are interested in booking a place on this workshop please visit the Avon Gorge and Down Wildlife Project website (See Links list on right) and click on 'Contact Us' for Mandy's contact details.

National Exhibition of Wildlife Art

I have sent off my work to NEWA and await the verdict on the judging to see if any of them has got in. This year I have submitted these three pieces…

Tutuila - American Samoa - oil

Great expectations - oil

Hare and Hedgerow - Gouache

Bristol Festival of Nature

7 -8 June

Once again this year I held a workshop at this wonderful event in Bristol. This time I was in a tent/marquee down in the Millenium Square amongst the others; in past years the workshops and talks were held in a building close to the square, which felt quite seperate from the main body of the event.

The two days of the event were perfect weather-wise… lovely and hot, clear cloudless skies and a good feeling of summer with kids splashing about in the water features of the Harbourside area, people walking around in suntops and shorts, ice-creams and music.

My drawing workshop was on the Sunday morning, so had the best part of the day, when it was coolest, to teach in, with the rest of the day to explore and wander myself. There were about a dozen people who came along to the workshop and their ages ranged from children to adults.
I took them stage by stage through the drawing of a red squirrel using the method I have described before in earlier posts; starting with basic shapes to get the sizing and proportions right and then building up on that.

It was only an hour long, so I had to move them along at a good pace in their drawing. Everyone kept up and they all turned out some good drawings. It can be difficult to produce something you can be happy with when you are not only being shown, perhaps, a new way to approach your drawing, but then have less than an hour to actually do it in. So they all did very well. I had some good feedback directly from some of the participants and from the organizers since the event, and have been invited back next year.

For the workshop I had three volunteers who were a great help in getting me set up before the workshop and clearing up after. My thanks go to them and also to the Education Dept at the zoo for assisting me; as ever a great help by storing and providing clipboards, pencils, paper etc and a flipchart stand.

After the workshop I wandered around the rest of the event and was really pleased I didn’t clash with Dr. Kate Evans, who was doing a talk on her research on young bull elephants in the Okavango Delta in Botswana that I particularly wanted to hear. It was a very interesting talk and I could easily have sat there for a longer talk by her on this subject. I urge you to visit the website for her research…… www.elephantresearch.co.uk

The Festival is a great event, with lots of interesting things to see and do… if you live in the area and have never been… don’t miss it next year!

The Wildlife Art Society Exhibition

This exhibition was held on 23 May - 1 June in a marquee in the grounds of the Nature In Art Museum and Art Gallery. These are the three pieces of work I had showing in it.





It is not a juried exhibition, so I didn't have to wait to hear what had or had not got accepted; the society aims to give equal exhibition space to amateurs and professional wildlife artists alike.

I had intended to submit work so that I could ‘go for’ the top award of excellence in the show, which needs four very specific pieces meeting the criteria of the categories given.
So I changed the Hedgerow painting to fit into one of the categories by adding a couple of hares and the title of the hyenas piece was altered also. However my fourth and final piece, a batik of an Asiatic lion head, went horribly wrong at the 11th hour and I had to withdraw it and myself from that particular award. I was very annoyed with myself as I feel that I should be aiming for this award if I am going to enter this exhibition now. However I was very pleased to find that two of my other three paintings received awards. The hyenas won a silver citation and the heron won the Founders Award, which is for the best piece of work depicting British Wildlife. So not a bad result at all in the end.

I did a stint of demo-ing for two days…. Which consisted on sitting in the marquee painting; the idea being that the viewing public could watch artists work and talk to them. It all helps add an approachable aspect to the show and hopefully encourages people to learn more about art and get painting themselves. I enjoyed those couple of days, meeting other artists and those just interested in looking rather than doing; I got to chat to some lovely folks. Most particularly I enjoyed it as life at the present seems to be such that I get little or no painting done at home. So to sit for two days and do more painting than I have done in the last 6 months …. Was sheer pleasure.

The downer on the whole event for me, was discovering at the end, as I was helping to pack up the exhibition, that one of my prints has gone missing, with no record of a sale!

Greek cove

This gouache painting was done as a demo piece in one of my art classes on P&O’s MV Oriana. I have posted it here with the same purpose as the lion piece… for the people who started it in my classes to continue to work on their own version, should they wish still to do so.


The photo was taken out of the window of the coach on a trip to Cape Sounion to see the Temple of Posiedon. The advice I gave the class was to look at the photo and not try to copy it slavishly, but to simplify it. The knack is to look at your subject, try and understand what’s going on with colours, form, textures and structure and then create an impression of that on the paper. This takes a bit of practise as you need to learn to look and study what you see, rather than think ‘oh, yeah – a rock.. I know what that looks like.’
For features such as the bushes and cliff face, here are a few things to remember.

When you see vegetation, don’t assume it’s just green. Remember the asset of the artist lies in the ability to see what is there, not what is assumed to be there. I mixed colours such as a touch of white, burnt sienna and alizarin crimson into a soft green to knock it back into softer muted tones; as the bushes in this piece are to the back, I didn’t want the colour to be bright – which would bring them forward. Also the vegetation here was dry and dusty, so the colours need to reflect that. I added touches of pale warm browns and browny-pinks to imply this. Observe how the bushes fall over the land; get the general gist of the pattern they create and blob in shapes with a mid tone of your green mix first. Be aware of not making the placements of your blobs (bushes) too regimented or set... keep them random, which will look more natural. Then add the lighter and darker tones to create some form and then warmer browny and pinkish colours to emphasise the dry vegetation look.

For the cliff face and rocks… look at the shapes and colours of the shadows… on the cliff face they’re not the same across the front. To the left they are darker and more pinky-purple. To the right they are cooler and so look slightly bluer. Let your brush strokes be applied in the same direction as the strata/structure of the rock itself. Look at the formation… the shadows emphasise this, so it is important you don’t just block in colour without considering the structure of the cliff face. Don’t get bogged down in details… observe and simplify it with brush strokes and colour. The same with the rocks in the foreground. See how the line of the shadows fall over the surface, where the light hits the top and the shape of the deepest shadows. You don't have to do them exactly how they are, just get the idea of their formation and shape and imply it with tone and colour.. the eyes and mind of the viewer will fill in the rest.

Chandra

As promised to the attendees of my art class on Oriana, here’s the Asiatic lion (called Chandra) piece we worked on in gouache. This was an exercise in building up layers of colour to create fur and the depth within it. The inspiration for this piece was the way Chandra’s fur waved, curled and fell over his neck; so spend time to take note of the different directions of the fur, how it falls and the colours and tone of light and dark that are there too.

The original was on an A3 board, so don’t limit your movement of brush strokes by painting this too small. Work to a size that you are comfortable with and adjust your approach to the piece accordingly. Don’t work to a large scale and expect to create a detailed careful piece in an hour or so. And remember that a painting can look pretty rubbish and scrappy for 80% of the time it takes to paint it… very often it’s the last 20% of time and application that brings the whole piece together and makes it look like something you set out to achieve.

Block in the dark, mid-tone and light areas with a good layer of colour, so that it covers the paper. Think more emulsion paint coverage rather than watercolour thinness. Using an old brush apply the colour, splaying the bristles drawing the paint thinly over your blocked in areas, working up from dark tones to lighter tones in successive ‘layers’. Use a thinner paint mix for this stage; experiment with how thick or thin you need the paint to make it work for you. You need the paint to flow easily off the bristle tips. Hold your brush at a high angle so that you are just letting the bristle tips touch the surface very lightly. As you are laying the colour down, remember to think not only of the colours but the light and darkness of the fur. If you need help determining these areas, try squinting at the subject to get an image without details; by doing this, what you see should just be more about colour and tone.


If you are having problems… please send me a message via my guestbook and I’ll reply as soon as I can.

Exhibition at The Heron Gallery

Goodness me! Has it been a month since I last posted! Time to rectify that....

I have at present three framed originals and four unframed originals in the World Wildlife exhibition at the Heron Gallery in Weston-Super-Mare, UK. Proceeds from this exhibition will go to the David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation.

These are the three framed originals...

'Claus - Up Close' - Batik; this piece was inspired by Claus, the silverback at Bristol Zoo Gardens. He was a very handsome male gorilla and had a lovely face. Sadly he died some years ago and now an equally magnificent male called Jock rules the roost on Gorilla Island at the zoo.


'Zebra Foal study' - Pastel; this little fella was one of the foals we saw in Amboseli in 1999. The reference I used for this was based on some video footage I took at the time and backed up by numerous other zeb foal reference I have gathered over the years. The video gave me the idea and basic form, but was hopeless for anything else as the quality was poor. Hence all the other reference material to help me with colour, details and textures. The foal was sat on dusty ground and grass.... I decided to leave out the grass and go for muted colours and a simple backdrop and foreground to emphasise this restful moment in this little chap's early life.


'Beneath the fever trees' - Oil; again, inspired by the 1999 trip to Kenya, only this white rhino was in Nakuru National Park - a beautiful park with some fabulous scenery. It was one of my favourite places on the trip.



These are three of the four unframed mounted originals....

'White faced whistling duck'

'Magpie goose #1'
'Chinese water dragon'