Practice makes Perfect

 “Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets, for it and knowledge can raise men to the divine.” Ludwig van Beethoven

For a long time now, I have wanted to learn how to paint on vellum. For those that don’t know, vellum is a type of parchment prepared from animal skin (usually calf). It is prized for it’s smoothness, it’s durability and above all, that magical translucent luminosity that it brings to watercolour paintings.

Cherry leaf on vellum, Dianne Sutherland Ball

However, it’s not that easy- painting on vellum is not like painting on paper. It doesn’t like a lot of water, so requires a special dry brush technique and an awful lot of patience. It’s also eye-wateringly expensive!

Fortunately my friend, the very talented Dianne Sutherland Ball, recently set up an online course in vellum painting, and as I am a huge fan of her work, I signed up. I’ll be writing more about vellum as the course progresses.

So this week found me going right back to the basics once more, drawing out little squares and circles onto paper and practicing over and over again- flat washes, graded washes and dry brush techniques. I experimented with different brushes, trying ones that have been long neglected and forgotten, some that have never ever been used! Some worked beautifully whilst others were a total disaster! It’s the perfect excuse to order some lovely new brushes… well, I’ll need them for the vellum!

Back to basic- the top was my first attempt with dodgy washes and odd shaped balls. The second attempt was better. The egg was my first dry brush attempt..

I played with the paint, trying out new ways of putting pigment onto paper and pushing it around the page, lifting and blending and occasionally cursing!  As I worked, I found myself contemplating how beneficial these kind of exercises are, and how they can open the door to new discoveries about ourselves as artists.

A previous practice page of fresh dates (Phoenix dactylifera) with some real ones thrown in

So often in life, we rush into things headfirst, impatient to start and too eager to finish. However, there is a lot to be gained in taking things slowly and going back to the basics. Often the path to mastering a technique requires endless repetition.

Page of olive leaves (Olea europaea)

There is something quite satisfying about filling a page with leaves, repeating it over and over again. I’ve often spent an afternoon, chasing something across a page, each time tweaking it to get the right colour, the right tone.

Struggling to capture the soft fuzzy grey of the Dusty miller plant (Senecio cineraria)

It’s that relentless pursuit of perfection, or as Vincent Van Gogh said “I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart.”

Oleander leaves (Nerium oleander) and a strange looking Aloe succotrina leaf 

Cinnamon quills

Shells make great practice pieces

A small dry leaf can keep me busy for a few hours... yes, I'm easily amused!

There's never an excuse not to practice... I once whiled away an afternoon in a busy waiting room .

Next week I hope to start on the vellum and will let you all know how I get on. For now I will leave you with a few useful links and another quote. I'm off to practice some more!

"As practice makes perfect, I cannot but make progress; each drawing one makes, each study one paints, is a step forward."  Vincent van Gogh

http://makingamark.squidoo.com/artpaper

http://botanicalonline.wix.com/botanicalonline 

http://diannesutherland.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/new-website-for-online-botanical-courses.html

http://www.williamcowley.co.uk/ethical/

Back to Black

Last week, I went to visit an artist friend who has a small but exquisite garden, lovingly tended and filled with all manner of botanical treasures. She gave me some seed heads for my next painting project, and then almost as an afterthought, gave me some of the lovely black leaves and berries of Ophiopogom planiscapus 'Nigrescens’ or black lilyturf. I took them home, popped them into jam jars, planning to begin work on the seed heads once the weekend was over.

But all weekend long, my thoughts kept slipping back to black.

Jacaranda seedpod

It’s such a powerful and evocative colour, but one that most watercolour artists tend to avoid. In fact, it’s one of the few colours that I just don’t have in my box of paints. To be honest, I haven’t really had much use for black. I searched through my sketchbooks to see if I had used it in the past, but found just a page of olives, a jacaranda seedpod and a tiny scarab beetle.

Plein air study of an olive tree and olives, Cairo

Black paint can either be bought readymade, or created using mixtures of the three primaries. Of the commercial blacks, Lamp black is made from the soot of oil lamps (a rich velvety opaque black), whilst ivory black is made from crushed roasted ivory or bone (a warmer less intense black). There are also neutral tints (first developed by 18^thcentury English watercolourists as an alternative to sepia) which are used to “neutralise” the intensity of the hue. Winsor and Newton’s neutral tint is actually a mix of lamp black, dark blue and violet. Payne's grey, another popular neutral tint, is a mixture of iron blue, yellow ochre and crimson lake.

Little scarab beetle painted using mainly Payne's grey, and a pectoral in the form of a scarab from Tutankhamun's tomb

It is generally agreed that the best blacks of all are the chromatic blacks, created by the artist by carefully mixing primaries. Ask a dozen artists their favourite chromatic black, and each will give you a different recipe of pigments.

A word to the wise... this is best done on a day when it's too dark to paint and too wet and cold to go out!

So, with all thoughts of the work that I should be doing cast aside, I found myself on Monday morning making the “mother of all black charts”. Not a quest for the fainthearted, but by the time that I had finished, I had made some very interesting discoveries.

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•  Hookers green, a pigment that I have really disliked up until now, made the most gorgeous range of dark earthy greens
•   Viridian and Perylene green both made a delicious range of blacks, especially when combined with Winsor dioxide.
•  Perylene maroon also came up trumps, better even than alizarin crimson, creating some beautifully rich colours. 

You can read more about pigments and their qualities here

So having satisfied my curiosity somewhat, I started to paint the Ophiopogom.  As it was only a study, I decided to throw caution to the wind and just dive in without a lot of preliminary sketches. I loosely arranged the leaves and berries onto a sheet of paper (using blu-tack to hold them in place), took a photograph to remind me of the composition and popped the leaves and berries back into the water to keep them fresh.

The berries are a beautiful blueish black. I mixed cerulean, cobalt violet and paynes grey to get the lightest colour, adding indigo and winsor violet to get the richer tones. 

I draw the berries out carefully in pencil and then paint the lines in a paler version of the finished colour

The leaves go from a gorgeous pale yellow to green to a rich inky black … a fantastic combination of colours!   I started with naples, blending it into lemon and first adding cerulean to the lemon and then indigo, before blending that into perylene green. The upper parts of the leaf were first given a wash of the cerulean/cobalt violet/paynes grey mix, and then finished off with a mix of perylene green with winsor dioxide and a teeny bit of perylene maroon. The veins on the underside were painted with perylene green.

 Ophiopogon planiscapus ‘Nigrescens’ (lilyturf). Although it looks like black grass, lilyturf is actually a member of the asparagus family (Asparagaceae). Planiscapus means ‘flattened scape’ and refers to the flattened flower-stalk of this species, as seen on the stalk on the left.

Regardless of the mixes used, black flowers and plants make visually striking and dramatic paintings. I really love Rosie Sanders paintings of black flowers (see here), and Coral Guest's black tulips. Billy Showell’s gorgeous painting of Tacca chantrieri (batflower) has both elegance and intrigue.

Yes, I will definitely be going back to black.

"There's something about black. You feel hidden away in it." ~ Georgia O'Keeffe

A quiet beauty, Hedera hibernica

Hedera hibernica, Irish ivy

It’s always a great feeling to finish up a project and to finally clear away all the scraps of paper, paint and plants that accumulate whilst the painting is being done. This latest project has taken even longer than usual, as I needed to paint the whole lifecycle of the plant, so my colour studies began in April this year with the berries, and finished this month with the flowers.

The plant is the Irish ivy, or Hedera hibernica, or Eidhneán.  It is not a plant that I would have really given much thought to before, but the more that I got to know it, the more I began to like it.

Ivy has captured our imaginations throughout history from the Acient Greeks to the Celts. It symbolised eternity and fertility, friendship and fidelity. During the Samhain festivities (Hallowe’en) in Ireland, young girls would place nine ivy leaves beneath her pillow to dream of the man she will marry.

Nine Ivy leaves I place under my head

To dream of the living and not of the dead

To dream of the man I am going to wed

To see him tonight at the foot of my bed.

Ivy is everywhere…it’s tenacious, it’s resilient, it’s adaptable. It has an elegant beauty with glossy leaves, delicate flowers and dark berries. It’s hugely important to wildlife too, with the flowers and fruit providing nourishment throughout the winter months, and it’s evergreen canopy giving welcome shelter to birds, insects and small mammals. True, it is invasive, but that is part of it’s charm… it doesn’t give up.

Early studies ivy berries. They start off as green and slowly darken to a purply black.

This unfinished study helped me remember just how to paint these berries. As with many fruits and berries, I started with cerulean and cobalt violet to capture the highlights and reflected lights. Perylene green, indigo, winsor violet, perylene maroon were also used. 

Ivy has two different types of leaves, palmately lobed juvenile leaves on creeping and climbing stems and unlobed cordate adult leaves on fertile flowering stems,usually found at the top of the plant. However when studying the plant I realised that there can be huge differences in the shape and size of leaves from plant to plant.

Non-flowering leaves

Hedera flower and leaves

The flowers grow in umbels and are surprisingly delicate. I had to use a magnifying glass and my teeniest brushes to paint the tiny pale green petals and stamens. Each flower that I saw had insects buzzing nearby, large bumble bees, dainty butterflies, wasps, hoverflies...all excitedly feasting on the abundant nectar.

I did a wasp study (rescued from a windowsill) but never painted it onto the final piece. Another studio find was a ladybird which gave a much needed pop of colour to the green leaves.

In the course of my studies, I stumbled across another "must-have" paint...  Winsor and Newton Transparent yellow. What a useful colour! It made painting those greens so much easier. I must have tried a dozen different mixes before settling on cerulean, indigo, perylene green and transparent yellow.

The berries were the most fun to paint... they were surprisingly colourful and made great botanical subjects. I loved the unfertilised flowers too... they remain for a long time on the plant and look like tiny fireworks.

Unfortunately I can't show the finished piece yet, but hope that these studies will help others notice and appreciate the unassuming beauty of this plant. I'll leave you with this lovely quote from Vincent Van Gogh~ 

"Painters understand nature, and love her, and teach us to see her"

Cucurbits and other monsters

I suppose there never is the perfect time to start a blog. So, with no reason other than it’s a sunny Hallowe’en here in Dublin and I have a few pumpkin sketches ready to upload, I’m going to start!

In 2010 I was accepted onto the Society of Botanical ArtistsDistant Learning Diploma Course, and as part of the course, had to keep a botanical sketchbook. I am a bit of a sketchbook junkie and loved this part of the course. I finished the course in 2012 with distinction and had the honour of having my sketchbook work included in the SBA’s recent publication, “The Handbook of Plant Form” by Margaret Stevens and Ernest E Clarke.

This blog is a way for me to revisit some of these old sketches, and link them with sketches and studies from more recent work. The gourd studies were done in preparation for one of my final diploma pieces which had to be a fruit or vegetable painting.

The Gruesome Gourds

I started off by doing some charcoal studies to get a sense of form. I love using charcoal- it's quicker than graphite and can be very effective.

Then the fun begins- colour studies in my sketchbook. This sketchbook is the one given to us for the purpose of the course, and although I loved the size (A4), the paper wasn't great with washes and tended to buckle.

I played with frisket to see if I could get the patchy colour whilst retaining the smoothness of the skin. I especially loved this Turk's Cap squash (Cucurbita maxima), and felt that it would be lovely as an illustration for a fairy tale. One day perhaps! I didn't finish this, probably because I was under pressure for time to get the diploma piece started!

It was around this time that I also discovered the wonderful mixes that you can get from Perylene maroon, thanks to my fellow artist and friend Jarnie, at Sketchbook Squirrel. I just love that colour...it's so useful!

Finally a few scribbled thumbnails to get the composition right- you see, not every page is perfect! 

 I thought I'd also include a page of these weird and wonderful hazelnuts (Corylus colurna) that can probably be found in a park near you... that's if the squirrels haven't got to them first!