Christmas card design

This five week block of Mags Bradley’s painting class has whizzed by. I really don’t know where November went, I only realised I hadn’t turned the calendar on from October on the 19th November!

We painted apples, early on. I used some russets from the garden, this year the best (and biggest) they have ever been. I pruned the tree a bit harder than I usually dare, and it paid off, but not so with the other eater, nor the cooker, both smaller and less fruit on them this year. They flower slightly earlier and I think a frost caught them both.

I chose these three for their variation in colour and texture.

We did quick sketches on cartridge paper to start with, and then added some colour. The room has lights that give multiple shadows, so I played around with them a little, just as Mags had said only to put one shadow in! I quite liked the idea of using the shadows to abstract the fruit. Lots of corrections, but we don’t use a rubber as we go along.

I didn’t finish my “proper” painting on watercolour paper, intending to get back to it at home, but the apples had changed too much before I managed it.

The following week we had to take flowers to paint, and these were all I could find in the garden.

I more or less finished this in the class. It just needs a little tightening up in places, in good light, which doesn’t last long even when we do get some at this time of year.

I was a week ahead of myself on this one. We were meant to be doing a little group of three, which it sort of was: one tree, one tin and one felt bird (if you don’t count the handmade decorations in the tin, see the top picture). There were lots of good memories of making or receiving them. I thought if I could paint it OK, it would reduce down (it’s more or less A3 at the moment) to make our Christmas cards.

I thoroughly enjoyed drawing them, and was quite pleased with the drawing. There were a few tweaks from Mags on perspective of the tin, and the suggestion of making the bird bigger. I started painting it in class, and went away with the instruction to keep it simple.

A rare morning of good light the next day so I continued painting, expecting to ruin it at any moment, but enjoying the process. The candles are copper foiled stained glass; the fairy, the one that was topless for many years; calico tree with different stitches and beads and bells; the babousha, Christmas Pudding and bauble and bird are all felt with simple stitching. I’d quite surprised myself by the time I’d finished painting, a completely different style from anything I’d done before.

I didn’t get as far as taking it to the library to have it scanned before this week’s class. I couln’t decide whether to put a cloth or table to ground it all, nor where to put it if so. Mags suggested that I strenghen the colours and add some baubles to the tree, add some shadows under the tree and put some shadow under the calico tree (too heavy – they got softened out).

Right at the end of the class Mags helped with adding a cloth, which I quickly painted in so that I could go and have it scanned on the way home. I need to tweak it down in size and print off the cards, then hopefully get Colin to write them all. The handmade Christmas card with his illegible writing has been our trademark greeting to family and friends for 25 years now!

Painting and drawing

Back of orchid

The last of Mags Bradley’s zoom painting classes have been this week. They have been running since the autumn, but numbers have been dropping the last few weeks, as people have been allowed out more. About now, the real classes normally stop until September, when we are ready to get back after (normally) holidays and days out during the summer. We do sometimes have a few ‘en plein aire’ sessions at the coast or class members’ gardens, and Mags allotment (I’ve not managed that one yet), and we may have a few of those if / when the weather gets better / more predictable than it has been of late.

They have been good, in many ways, but they have involved a lot of preparation for Mags on a weekly basis, as well as learning to navigate Zoom herself, and helping the rest of us to use it too. It certainly hasn’t been as easy to correct our mistakes as we go along, or to yell ‘stop’ before I (and a few others, apparently) overwork our piece. But it has made us all have to be more self reliant on decision making, as we go along.

We have painted a large variety of things, including landscapes, seascapes, woodland, flowers, plants, still lifes of a range of objects, and unusually our own hands.

In the real classes we often had an arrangement of objects, or real flowers or plants in the middle of the room, all of us having a different view of the set-up. Mags would demonstrate, and talk about what we were going to do. We mainly used watercolours, but occasionally acrylic inks, coffee, watercolour pencils or Neo colours.

For the Zoom classes we had to work much more from photographs, Mags sending out ones for us to print out at the beginning of each week. She would then demonstrate, and we would more or less follow along. We would share our work (if we wanted to) with the group at the end of the session. In real classes we always went and looked at everybody else’s work, too. It’s a good way to learn more, and see different ways of working.

Often we are all quietly absorbed in what we were doing, but it was good to chat at coffee-time, and at the beginning and end of the sessions. This was more difficult to do on Zoom, but it was good to see one another, and get to know a little bit about folk from the other classes. There were three real classes, each week, but two zoom ones. I usually did both.

As always, my results were better in some sessions than in others; sometimes it was the subject matter, other times getting or not getting in the zone. Also for me, I like to work from life, or at least from my own photos. When. you take a photo you are already deciding which aspects interest you, and you have a mental image of more than just the photo in front of you (or I often do).

When I went to Howard Boyd’s (O.H Boyd) pencil-drawing class nearly twenty years ago to learn to draw, he insisted that we drew from life. He could always tell who had done their homework from a photo, where the image is already flattened to 2D, rather than your own interpretation of making something 2D (your piece) from 3D (reality). Yes, you really can learn to draw. I wasn’t convinced at the time, but having told him I couldn’t draw, he asked if I could write my own name. Yes, well, in that case, he told me, you have the manual dexterity to draw, all you need is to practise, to learn to look / observe, and to draw what you see, not what you think you see.

Especially in last few weeks I have worked from my own photos, with one notable exception: a canal scene with some cottages. I was quite pleased with my cottages, because usually I struggle with buildings, and even their reflections in the water. Then Colin came into the kitchen to make a coffee about half way through the session. “I wouldn’t want to live there, it’s getting flooded” he remarked. I’d got the perspective all wrong.

Section of canal paining with a rainbow over it
from a crystal hanging in the window.

Mags learned something from my mistake too. When I held it up for help, she found she could mark a line where I needed to change the bank.

It’s still a work in progress, but at least the cottages are not getting flooded now.

Improved, but room for more.

Sometimes, in the second session of the week, I have continued with a painting from the first session, or more often gone back to it, while waiting for paint to dry on the current painting. This orchid was tricky to apply Howard’s “draw what you see, not what you think you see” as the blooms are normally symmetrical. This one isn’t, so I made it more so (with artistic licence) or it would have just looked wrong. I ended up doing three sketches which just didn’t look right, and ended up drawing the back, not from the photo above but from the orchid in front of me, where I was able to draw just the flower and not the dishwasher behind. The disadvantage of photos is that you can’t change the background, where the eye focuses on what you want to see, sometimes not even being aware of what’s behind until you look at the photo.

Sketch of the back and guidelines on the watercolour paper

Detail of the back of the orchid

Also, with artistic licence you can change the orientation.

A sideways-on orchid looked wrong, but I drew it as I saw it, then turned my paper round. It is floating in mid air, but I just wanted to capture it, as it is, rather than thinking about composition.

Front of the orchid

In this close-up version, I had thought about the composition and wanted to focus on the details of the centre of the flower.

Composition decision

I’ve enjoyed the classes, and they have made me draw and paint at least twice a week. I need to continue on my own, and often the second (plus) attempts have had better outcomes. Practice, practice, practice leads to improvements.