Now that I have got over the initial flurry of work at the zoo, I can now start up my 'training' sessions again. The zoo is keen on staff developement, but it is quite tricky for me to train at art specific to my job at the zoo... I can think of quite a few workshops etc that I could do to improve my art, but that is not related strictly with my zoo job... alas! So my boss and I came up with the notion of my training being free sketching mornings once a fortnight. This is so that I can go sketch what ever I want, rather than what I need to do for an upcoming job. The freedom of this is wonderful.
This week I decided.. as my primate drawing skills have always been a little rough.. that I'd go sit in the Lemur Walk-through enclosure and try and get something done in there.. it helped that it was a lovely warm day. So I sat for just under 3 hours in the delightful setting of the enclosure watching mongoose lemurs and ring-tailed lemurs... and, of course, sketching. I was pleased that despite a long gap on my sketching mornings, I did a lot better than I had expected.
When I know I have a few hours for sketching.. I pick on one animal subject and concentrate my focus there. Flitting between several species rarely makes me feel like I've achieved what I want from the process of a sketch. I want to try and learn/understand how they move, sit etc and it takes a good few hours of observation and sketching for me to feel as though I've given myself that chance to achieve my goal.
Once I've got myself settled in front of my subject I start with some time spent purely observing.. taking in mental notes of their form, behaviour and where they like to be doing certain activities. Then I usually start with quick thumbnails of just a few lines to get the feel of body shape and how limbs, head and tail relate to it. Then I start adding more - I rarely go into great detail 'til much later in the session, if at all. Then I might pick on a feature (such as hands and feet) and concentrate on trying to understand the form of that. Here's a couple of pages from that morning's session with the lemurs.
Thought I'd do a couple of updates about what I've been up to at the zoo since April, when I started back after my 3 months off.
As usual there was the checking and replacing of faded and damaged ID signs as my first priority and then it was to set about the rather large pile of ID requests waiting for me on the desk!First one to be done was a painted colour image of an orange headed thrush, then a detailed pencil drawing of a yellow mongoose head which was particularly enjoyable to do. 
And then a series of fish were painted... Flier cichlid, white striped catfish, tinfoil barb and I'm almost finished on a kissing gourami.
This is the white striped catfish.. I'm really pleased with this one as it started out quite badly but I dug my heels in and persevered. The difficulty of this fish was to make it look shiny.... I'm told I have achieved this but I'll leave you to make your mind up. 
This is a closer view of the fish, many times bigger than the original... look closely at the body and you'll see the range of colours that I have used on this shiny silvery grey/white fish to try an achieve the glistening shine.
I paint a heavyweight watercolour paper with a black... a black that does not come staright out of the tube. I find tube blacks tend to look a little 'dead' so I liven a lamp black up with Alizarin Crimson and Ultramarine. I then transfer the outline of the finished fish drawing onto the black and use a series of thin base coats to start building up the body of the fish. I leave all the fins including the tail til after I have finished the body.In the case of this fish I used a bluish grey overlaying with thin coats of greenish grey, yellowish white, and washes of darker blues and greens. The patterning is a dark purple/mauve intermixed with a more 'foggy' dark blue.With dry brush strokes I brush pinks, yellows, pale greens, mauves, light blues across the body.. this is to try and replicate fractions of light hitting the smooth body of this particular fish. As a finish to the body I use a small amount of white, knocked back a bit with yellow, to apply in dry brush strokes to create the highlights and with a thin bluey white wash I paint over the fish to 'round' the body, in particular its head and underside.Once I'm satisfied I have the body as good as I can get it, I put on the fins. This is generally done with a thin wash of a pale blue and stroked in in the direction of the rays and structure of the fin. I add lighter colours to accentuate the rays and more 'fleshy' areas of the leading edge and base.The copyright on these images belongs to Bristol Zoo Gardens.
I was recently asked if I would like to do the Master Class article for the June issue (out now) of the Artists & Illustrators magazine. This particular issue is a Wildlife Art Special with contributions from a number of prominent and famous wildlife artists, so I am particularly pleased and proud that the editor asked me to do the "main" feature for this section of the magazine. My painting even made it to the front cover, albeit in the small circle under Wildlife Art Special... but tis there all the same.
When I got the email from the editor I was just starting a new elephant painting, a commission, and I had already been taking step by step photo's of the progress with the idea of doing a stage by stage piece on this blog. So it seemed the natural thing was to carry on, but have the magazine in mind also when taking the photo's. The only thing was.. could I finish the painting, sort the 70 plus photo's I took AND write the article in time! I had only a couple of weeks and to my surprise and delight, I managed it.... just!
The magazine version looks at how to paint an animal in a landscape and being a little "typing happy" I found it hard to keep my words down to the maximum they required.
Despite, or because, of the challenge I thoroughly enjoyed doing it and am very pleased with how the magazine has presented the article. So, now that the magazine is out I can now post another version of a step by step of the painting - this time looking at how I created depth in the piece and I shall probably whitter away to my hearts content. So hopefully I will be posting that very soon.
At long last my very good friend, Julie Askew, has now got a blog page. If you've not seen Julie's work before, please follow the link and discover her amazing talent... I highly recommend a look.Apart from being one of my closest friends; it was Julie that introduced me to teaching art on ships, something for which I shall always be grateful to her for. In 2002 and 2003 she took me along as her assistant whilst she worked as art tutor/presenter on two 3 week and two 5 week 'sections' of the world cruises with P&O. As a result of those trips (and the two I did as a tutor myself in 2008 and 2009), I have seen much more of this planet than I ever dreamed I would get to see. Such fantastic experiences and memories that I shall treasure always.
It's been a while since my last post and so I thought as it's the first day of the new year and indeed, the new decade, I thought I ought to get typing. To all my regular visitors, those that pop in occasionally and the 'one-timers', thank you for stopping by over the past year. I must strive to try and post more over the coming months, a new year's resolution perhaps; I got a little lax towards the end of 2009. I have no cruise trip, working or otherwise, to look forward to this year but with fingers crossed and wind in the right direction along with a little organisation from me, I have at least one exciting project I'd really like to get off the ground on. So I will keep you posted on whether or not that is likely to happen and then if it does, the progress of it all.Anyway, I hope you all had a lovely Christmas, if you celebrate it, and that your New Year celebrations haven't resulted in too much need for recovery or have dampened your spirits too much today. Here's to a happy, healthy and prosperous 2010 for us all.Many thanksSu
In October I took the elephant painting to a digital printer in Clevedon, SkyBlue Digital, to get limited edition gicleés done of it. Because of the painting’s dimensions I didn’t want to reduce the image too much from its 36”x11” size as I fear it would lose it’s impact; so the first proof will be at a slightly reduced size. Once I see that, I can decide whether I would prefer it to be full size or not. The process has started and I have now seen two different proofs over the last few weeks and have decided the slightly smaller size is fine, but some colour changes needed to be made and some shadowing from paint ridges ‘knocked back’. My fourth visit to the printer’s has resulted in another wait for another colour proof. Whilst the other anomalies have been corrected, the one of the colour of light on the elephants remains. I’m hoping the printer can get it from the whitish colour, at present, closer to the warm yellow of the original oil painting. I am being a bit pedantic about this as it’s an important aspect of the painting in that it sets the time of day and the lighter colour makes the painting look too light and changes the mood of the piece.
Hopefully my next visit will be the last, except for when I return to collect the finished batch of prints.
20 – 24 July 2009This was my second time as one of the tutors at the ‘Arts & Crafts Summer School’ held at Beaufort Community School in Gloucester, England by the Gloucester Arts & Crafts Group. Over the week a mix of 2, 3 and 5 day workshops are held covering all sorts of art and craft skills such as calligraphy, botanical art, pastels, oils, chair making, mosaics, glass engraving, beadwork and willow weaving to name but a few.
Once again I had a 5-day batik workshop to run and although I only had 4 students booked for my workshop it worked well as each student therefore had plenty of room to work in and around the waxpots. Three of the ladies, Del, Hazel and Jenny, were with me last year; it was lovely to see them again and as we now know each other that bit better it was great having them feel that they knew me well enough for a bit of fun and banter. Carol was new, so whilst I could pretty much leave the other ladies to forge ahead with their exploration of batik, this meant I was on hand to help her as much as she needed as well as do a couple of projects myself in between.
We started the week on Day One with basic skills of using the wax, brushes, tjantings (batik pens) and the silk paints. Those who had previously done batik with me had the option of cracking straight on with their own projects or refreshing themselves with the step-by-step basic exercises.
They opted for the latter and said they found it very useful as there were some important or useful tips/techniques that they had forgotten.
On Day Two I took Carol step-by-step through a pansy head design, whilst the others started their own projects. Carol was finding it tricky getting her head around the technique (as do most who are new to the medium); throughout the week she battled on bravely and produced some lovely pieces to take home. She did very well and I hope she enjoyed her first foray into batik, her last piece in particular showed great promise should she wish to do more.It’s not unusual to find the medium hard to understand and think your way around at first; I have found that the ratio is about half and half between those that seem to pick it up straight away and those that need time (like a few days) to work it out. It can be difficult to understand the technique and process, particularly when approaching a piece of work more involved than a couple of colour and wax applications. An understanding of colour mixing helps enormously and being able to think of a picture in reverse and in ‘layers’ when ‘painting’ helps too. I find a 5-day workshop is great for those new to batik as it gives them time to get to grips with the medium and learn to understand the process and then when the penny drops they are ‘away’ and can have real fun with it. Doing shorter workshops of one day or even two days is pretty full on and there’s far too much to take in and get your head around if you are finding it tricky. Once the penny does drop it’s like an ‘Eureka!’ moment, and I love to see that happen and then see what the student produces after that.Day Three, Four and Five the ladies concentrated on their own projects taking inspiration from images they found in books or their own photographs. Here's some of their work from the week.
Del, Hazel and Jenny were very productive, as I expected them to be having done batik before and it was great to see them getting more adventurous and experimental with their batiks. Salt was used quite a bit this year as they played with the differing effects you can get with both fine and coarse grain salt crystals.
Whilst everyone was busy and not requiring my immediate attention I did a couple of little projects to show them the sort of things you can do with batik to make them into something more than a picture to frame. I pinned two pansy head batiks to a cushion (perhaps I should sew them into a proper cushion cover!), did a chameleon batik on a cotton bag and made a ‘wrap round’ for a lampshade. I wanted to give them ideas and think beyond the square of cotton they were working on. Hazel took up the challenge of a bag with a lily head and I hope seeds of ideas have been planted for possible future use into all of their minds.
