Painting with Pallet Knives

 Painting with Pallet Knives. Painting with pallet knives can give an interesting textural effect to your painting.The knives come in different shapes and sizes. There are short square ones which tend to be good for using on roofs and shingles shapes as well as various flowers and grasses. The smaller diamond shaped ones have the … Read more

The Use of Brushes in Art

BRUSHES used in ART  Caroline gave us an excellent education on various types of brushes used for art. She divided them into oil/acrylic/encaustic which use syththetic or hog brushes (encaustic) and the softer synthetic or synthetic/squirrel or Sable brushes for watercolour. Prior to starting she had a number of tips for us. Generally, watercolour brushes … Read more

Lost Edges in Painting

Lost edges

Lost Edges in Paintings  Using photographs from paintings by John Singer Sargent, Caroline showed the edges which melded into surrounding background colours. These lost edges create moods of mystery and  creating distances. It makes images meld into the surrounding area. The surrounding hard edges will pop out bringing your attention to them. In Carolines demo … Read more

Mono Printing and Jelly Painting

 Mono Printing and Jelly Painting Steph Howard gave us a demonstration on mono printing during our Thursday Dupont class. She used Essdee water soluble block printing ink but said that the Speedball printing ink was just as good. A piece of acetate was given to each person and instructed to put a small amount of … Read more

How Watercolour Behaves Painting Flowers

Caroline started off this demonstration by instructing us to soak our watercolour paper for 5 to 10 minutes. She also stated that she used a size 12 watercolour brush and a rigger. She recommended 300 g watercolour paper taped down in order to stop the wrinkling of the paper. You could use it at an … Read more

The Language of Shadows and How they Behave.

Caroline Marsland instructed us that perspective, shape, tonal values and contrast are what we need to look at in mastering how to draw or paint in the shadows.There are dark shadows blending into half shadows as well as reflected light. Often light will come up from the bottom.With some shapes such as a tree, the … Read more

Drawing With Inks

Drawing with inks

Caroline was unavailable to demonstrate for us this week, but fortunately Amanda Davies came along to show us how to draw with ‘drawing’ ink as opposed to writing ink, the latter used more for calligraphy. It’s was am extremely informative demonstration. Pens, different drawing pens for drawing ink, these have a split in the nib … Read more

Drawing upside Down

Caroline said nothing is too difficult to draw! If you look at the picture upside down.By turning the picture you make your brain think in a different way. To start look for shapes, major shapes, in Caroline’s picture this was the rectangle in the middle, easiest point. Check if the vertical or horizontal lines are … Read more