Prabal and Brighton

Busy Brighton

A couple of weeks back, my wife and I went on a coach trip to Brighton on the south coast of England. The journey would normally have taken us around three hours, allowing for a break on the way, but the sun decided to do its best for us and it turned out to be a gorgeous sunny day – perfect. Maybe not so perfect though, as it was a Sunday, and anyone in England will tell you that if it is a warm, sunny day on a Sunday, chances are that half of London will decide to descend on Brighton, and this day they certainly did! This meant that the traffic jams while trying to enter the town added another hour to our journey. Never mind though, we still had around four hours to explore this seaside town.

I had never been to Brighton before, and I was little bit worried that it might turn out to be one of those tacky coastal towns with shops full of cheap, oriental tat aimed at the mass tourist fraternity, and a beach washed up with muddy looking seawater. Well, I have to tell you that I was pleasantly surprised. OK, there was a fair amount of tat about, and the beach was mostly pebbles making walking difficult, but the sea was at least clean and the atmosphere was fantastic. The pier, disputed to be the longest in the world, was full of interest, with shops and little seafood places along its length, and a fun fair at the end.

Sketch

The seafood looked so inviting that we purchased a tray of freshly caught prawns, and boy did they taste good! I did however have a bit of a shock while eating them. We had little cocktail sticks to eat them with, and as I was lifting one into my mouth, a huge common gull appeared from nowhere, and grabbed the prawn as quick as a flash before the prawn even touched my lips! I’ve seen these birds do this before on TV, but you don’t realise how big they are, and how strong and agile too. There were hundreds of them, all soaring, weaving in and out of people, looking for some poor unsuspecting soul to grab food from.

At lunchtime, we decided to eat inside! It was at this little beachside café that we had the most gorgeous line-caught cod with chips that I have ever tasted in my life. Fish so fresh, and batter so light; mouth-watering.

There were rows of scooters on the sea front

Brighton, on Bank holidays in the 1960’s was a favourite target for mods and rockers. Rockers would wear leather gear and ride motorcycles, while the mods wore fashionable clothing and parkas, riding scooters adorned with lots of mirrors and spotlights. I must confess, that I fell into the latter, but never made it to Brighton, and just as well, as whenever the two sides met, fighting and chasing would inevitably break out between the two rival factors, causing headlines in the papers and riotous scenes on the TV next day.

Brighton Pavillion

The thing about Brighton is that it’s not just about the sea front. For those who would venture more into the town, there are some lovely parks, and the jewel in the crown is that famous pavilion. We caught a glimpse of it on the way in, but you have to be up close to appreciate the scale of this building, with its oriental architecture. My only regret is that we just didn’t have enough time to see inside – that will be an excuse to visit this lovely town again sometime.

Well, it’s about time I talked about the painting. Here I’ve done a sketch of a little part of the town that caught my eye. This is a pre-painting. It was Prabal who convinced me that a pre-painting was a good idea to practice before doing a painting for real. I have never thought of doing this, but it looks like a good idea, because now I know what works in this painting and what is not so good. The abnormality in this work is the fact that a pre-painting is normally smaller than the proper painting will be. This is the largest painting I have ever done, being A2, and is done on smooth, white cartridge paper. The work proper will be A3 simply because I don’t possess any watercolour paper in size A2! Being cartridge paper, it doesn’t hold the paint as well as knot 300gsm, and of course, the paper buckles.

Brighton Beach (before the crowds descended!)

It was my intention to keep the background buildings light so that the foreground figures will stand out well, and I think it’s worked pretty well here, and I like this part of the painting best of all. The sky isn’t at all correct though. It should be darker above and much lighter down towards the horizon. I’ve used French ultramarine here, blending in yellow ochre lower down, but too strongly.  The figures are a little out of scale, as a couple of their heads on the right are too large. I love the guy in yellow in the centre though, and the lady on the left. I think that I will need to do some squaring up when I do the painting for real, and improve the perspective a bit on the road.

This is also the first time I’ve used a ruler to guide me with those tall lamps and building columns. If you look at the sketch, you can see that I have not put too much detail in the buildings either, especially the windows. I’ve read that putting the detail in with the brush speeds up the drawing stage, and keeps the work looking loose. The time taken to do this work is 90 minutes sketching, followed by two more 90 minutes sessions adding the paint. So overall, around five hours, which for a painting this large and this detailed is pretty good.

Nasir

Nasir. Pen and oil pastels on cartridge paper.

OK, just one more of these pen and oil pastel works, before I get serious again with watercolour. I nearly didn't buy these pastels thinking that I wouldn't use them. Now I'm glad I did, because it allowed me a brief foray into another media and I've loved it!

Again here, I've done an extremely fast outline of the character in ink before applying the oil pastels, and again not worrying too much about keeping within the lines - after all, we never stick rigidly to road markings when we are driving do we? This medium is fantastically fast, a little over half an hour to do this. I smudged the colours in places to blend more subtle light changes and two or several colours together, but for texture (as in the sweater), I've used the pastel sideways on lightly.

For Father's day, my daughter bought me a couple of watercolour painting technique books to study, so I am itching to get back to this medium, and try out some new methods in what is my very favourite method of painting.

Bath, England

Bath, Somerset
Oil Pastel and ink pen on Bristol Board A3

It's been a while since I posted here I know, but I have been busy on a large project, which I'll tell you about some other time.


On a trip to Bath in Somerset recently, I was just in awe of the abundance of Romanesque architecture on every street. Our trip was fleeting, but we have promised ourselves to go back again and spend some more time there, just to try to take everything in.

This is my first foray into oil pastels, and I have to say that it is a very exciting medium. I've tried to keep my work quick and spontaneous, starting first with an ink sketch. Some of the scale is a little adrift, but I just wanted to get the general shapes of the figures and buildings rather than being too accurate.

There are 36 colours in this box, and they are a joy to use, even more so, as I picked the box up second hand at our local car boot sale last weekend for £2 - what a bargain. I think that £2 is going to give me a lot of pleasure!

The last Painting?

Gloucester Docks

This is my last painting - well, the last one I will be doing in the art class because I quit!

The thing is, I don't think I am gaining any extra knowledge there. It's time I think to look for new horizons and maybe try another tutor to see if I can progress any more. At the moment, I feel that the work I am doing at class, could just as well be done at home, so this is the end of another chapter in my painting life.

The painting is of one of the warehouses at Gloucester Docks. The old docks have taken on a transformation over recent years, many of the huge warehouses have now been turned into art and craft studios and coffee houses etc.
The painting took quite some time to complete, more hours than I am comfortable with really. Even now, I am not that happy with it, and think I took on too much with all those windows - there are 60 of them. The next work of art is going to be something quick and simple I think, to give me a break and preserve my sanity!

Luligirl for JKPP

Luligirl for JKPP a photo by Frank B10 on Flickr.

Much as I love watercolour painting, sometimes a desire comes over me to just get a pencil and draw. In this case, it's portraiture again. For some reason, I've always had trouble getting long hair to look realistic, maybe it's because of the long continual strokes needed - I don't know. This time, I think I am getting somewhere near.

Self Portrait

It's been a while since I did a self portrait, 12 months in fact.

Self Portrait
Watercolour and 6B pencil on Bockingford paper.

I sat down this evening wondereing if I could just roll off a quick painting, when a self portrait came to mind. The only stipulation that I gave myself, was that it must be a realatively quick study. I grabbed hold of a smallish watercolour pad and a thick 6B pencil and started work straight away. Very quick measurements were used in the drawing stage, and I thought that I would use the pencil to embellish the dark areas, so that I could keep the paintwork light. In fact, some of my work has looked very restrained of late, so now came another stipulation - it has to be loose and fresh as possible.

I used quite a bit of water on the paper, and dropped slightly darker colours into the fleshtones as I went along on this one. As the pencilwork was so dark, I didn't use much dark coloured paint at all.


Overall, I am really pleased with this - the likeness is not too bad, and it has opened up my work a lot - my tight work has been broken I think. The only downside of using the heavy lead pencil, was that the paint wouldn't cover the pencil lines at all much, just rolling off on globules, but hey, it doesn't matter does it? All good experience.

Time taken; 75 minutes.

Art Class 2: Pointless

Watercolour: Pig's Puzzle

It's been a while since I blogged about the art class projects. There have already been four meetings, I missed one because of a family mini drama, and the other three have been taken up on one project. In this first assignment, we were simply told to cut images from magazines and stick them on an A3 piece of paper to form a collage. Then, using a 4x6 inch frame, move it around the collage to find the best segment, then square up the framed section onto A3 size watercolour paper, effectively enlarging the image by around five times.

My initial reaction was why bother? I know I have said in the past that it was good to see the tutor give us all the same project, because it gave us all the advantage of seeing how everyone else goes about the same task, and see their different interpretations of the same subject. But this time I think our tutor has lost the plot. Firstly, it was extremely long winded to find enough cuttings to fill an A3 piece of paper. In fact I gave up after covering about two thirds of it, in any case I just could not see the point. Why not just cover the 4x6 then enlarge it and save ourselves all that trouble?

Collage of magazine clips

Anyway, I have gone along with the project to give it a chance to grow on me, even though I thought the whole thing was pointless. On the collage photo you can see the red rectangle, which although there were numerous permutations that I could have chosen, was the section I decided to paint. Our tutor did say that we could do endless paintings from the one collage, simply by moving the rectangle around, but just doing this one had me pretty fed up by the end, so there was no chance of me ever doing another!

The finished painting looks like something, well not exactly abstract, more like something of a riddle for the viewer I guess. The pig was everybodies favourite - he does have a nice smiling face, and I like the sundial and probably the gargoyle, but to me, this whole thing is a bit of mish-mash. I haven't really enjoyed the project, but I suppose I've gained a little more knowledge in the art of watercolour painting in doing it. Maybe you the reader will see something in this that escapes my way of thinking, but  if something comes up like this next time though, I think I'll give it a miss!