Small oils

Very quick blog entry; I've been painting small oils on canvas, 7" by 5" - and I had a lot of trouble photographing them.  I'm told the issue is camera shake.  However - a fellow contributor to the Painters Online website, Mick Saunders, has tidied up one of my rather poor photographs, and I'll display it here - even now it doesn't have quite the density of colour that the original painting has, but it's the best photographic version available so far....

Others in this "series" - it isn't really a series at all, although they're all landscapes - can be found on POL: www.painters-online.co.uk

This one is called Fresh Day in July.  Because - it was!

Forthcoming (one day) e-book

I'm in the process of writing an e-book on oil painting for beginners - and also thinking about doing one on acrylics, but first things first: I've only got the Introduction and outline for the oil one yet.  Thing is, there's a dearth of material in any one place which really takes the beginner by the hand - a lot of stuff for the intermediate painter; and again, precious little for the beyond intermediate.  All the things I wanted to know when I started out, for instance, are extremely hard to find in any article or book I've seen in the last few years: they all seem to assume a basis of knowledge (about surfaces, brushes, colours) that the real beginner just hasn't got.  
When it's available, I'll post the news here and elsewhere - there will be a charge, because a lot of work needs to go into it; but even so, it'll be a lot cheaper than buying the half-dozen books you'd otherwise need, or signing up to a course of instruction (not that there's anything wrong with those, if you can afford it; trouble is, few of us can).

In the meantime, I have a short article on water-colour disasters - mine, to be specific - in the current electronic newsletter of The Artists Publishing Company, aka Painters Online - www.painters-online.co.uk.

And here is a sample of my latest watercolours, photographed as well as I can given there's rotten light in my hovel, and I can't take the blessed things outside to photograph them because of the foul weather.....  Working on an oil at the moment - hoping, as always, that it works out.......

This is the one that featured in my e-newsletter piece - of Niton Down, Isle of Wight, with the Hoy Monument.

And this is a reworking of an older acrylic, in watercolour, of Perreton, near Arreton, IW.  Both of these available for sale, offers of £40 or so happily considered!  Usual address, robertjones@ratville.freeserve.co.uk.

Lonesome George

Rest in Peace Lonesome George - the last of the Pinta Island giant tortoises, who died this week aged around 100.  This is my tribute, drawn in carbon pencil.  There is apparently a small chance that there may be one more Pinta Island tortoise still living - I found the story confusing but hopeful; we shall have to wait and see.  Species do die out, but it's a shame poor old George couldn't have been persuaded to perpetuate his genes - perhaps he was even older than they thought he was, and just couldn't face the effort....
Well, I'm sure that resonates with many of us .......

Nearly time for a Change

Most of my recent paintings have been watercolours; it's a medium I find fascinating, not least because it's the one in which I'm least proficient - so there's always the pleasure of discovery.  I've shown most of the recent ones on the Painters Online gallery, www.painters-online.co.uk, but here's one I haven't put on POL (yet, at least).  I'm not great at painting yachts - as you'll have noticed - but that's what these are supposed to be, from last year's Round the Island race off the coast at Niton Undercliff.

I feel it's time for a change of medium - so I'll be getting back into acrylic and oil shortly; there should be one more watercolour to come for the moment, always assuming that the one I'm currently working on doesn't go horribly wrong (always a strong likelihood with watercolour).  In the meantime - this one, like all of my paintings, is for sale - around £60 for this one; email me at robertjones@ratville,freeserve.co.uk; you can pay by Paypal on my website (www.isleofwightlandscapes.net) which is LONG overdue for an overhaul.  I'm supposed to be running it myself these days, but would really like someone to hold my hand while I do it....

Well, they never taught us about computers when I was at school...........

Using Black paint

Long time since the last post - it requires a certain amount of self-discipline to keep blog posts going, especially when so few comment on them.  Yes, that's a hint.

Anyway - there's an interesting discussion on the Painters Online forum pages, (www.painters-online.co.uk) started by Alan Owen, a watercolourist friend of all of us.  Alan points out that using black - especially, though not exclusively, in watercolour - has been discouraged and generally frowned upon.  There are good reasons for this - using black as a routine means of suggesting shadows, for instance, can quickly turn a picture into mud.  Black can be mixed - eg from Winsor/Pthalo green and Permanent Rose, or from Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna or Burnt Umber, and in any number of other ways: black is basically the result of a mix between red, yellow and blue; you've got the yellow in Pthalo Green, red and yellow in Burnt Sienna and Burnt Umber.  Blacks mixed this way will have far more life, and run much less risk of muddying your colours.

However, adding a small amount of black to other colours can produce very interesting results - take a look at the POL forum for some examples of Alan's colour mixes, especially the results he gets with a little Old Holland Intense Black mixed into Cobalt Blue.

The painting below (I hope it appears below anyway: I've been caught out with files appearing in the wrong place before!) contains a very small amount of black in the blue of the sky; this one was painted with Chromacolour (www.chromacolour.co.uk), a form of acrylic.  Without the little bit of black, I couldn't have achieved the colour I wanted from those available to me at the time.    So black has its place on the painter's palette - you don't HAVE to use it: but it's not the crime it's sometimes held to be.

Getting back to normal...

Recovered, more or less; and have painted a few watercolours.  Will try to attach one - of the walk along the River Medina, Newport, Isle of Wight, Autumn/Winter.  From a photograph by Bob Blake.

A Temporary Lull.....

For those who don't already know - I've had a major health problem this month; haemorrhage into the bowel, necessitating blood transfusions and various tests; take this as a warning if you are prescribed NSAIDs, non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, like Naproxen, Ibuprofen, Diclofenac Sodium (Voltarol), or even Aspirin. When they say these things can cause bleeding in the stomach, you don't imagine - or I didn't - that this can be a bleed of 4 pints or more. Well, it can, and it was. I have a bleeding disorder to start with, so should never have been prescribed drugs like these - just make sure that you get your blood checked before you take them; and DON'T buy over-the-counter pain-killers, other than paracetamol.

This health warning comes to you free ... I wouldn't normally put such a thing on here, but frankly it was touch and go that I'd come through this; I've always trusted doctors before, but not any more. Having said which - thanks to St Mary's Hospital, Isle of Wight, and my new friend Dr Gandy: without them, I wouldn't be here today.

There'll be a bit of a break in normal service while I regain my strength, but I'll always try to answer any emails sent to robertjones@ratville.freeserve.co.uk if you need to contact me.

Incidentally, if there's anyone out there who's really good at managing websites, do get in touch: I could do with a bit of advice and guidance.

Try again

That didn't work at all; no picture. Try again, fail better....

Christmas Greetings

Festive bunting and frolics to all. This is my Christmas card for 2011. I know it's not reverent or spiritual in any way, but then - other than the worship of rats - I have no religion. This is a watercolour, incidentally - not the loveliest and most limpid specimen of its kind, but I do enjoy painting rats' tails in watercolour; the colours can be allowed to bleed into each other, in a remarkably accurate way.... I offer this tip to the many thousands who really, really wanted to know how to paint rats' tails.

Many thanks to those who have sent me cards and prezzies (including myself: I always feel that giving is so important, and where better to start than with oneself?) and I hope that, although many of you comment on my blog and galleries on Painters Online, more of you will comment here too: it encourages me to keep the blog going.

Towards Sunset

My latest, the first painting I've done for a long time that I completed in just one session. This is an acrylic on a canvas covered board: I've found these not very sympathetic to paint on up to now, but for this one I laid down a base coat of cadmium red plus a little white, allowed that to dry, then painted on top: it seemed to respond much better to the rather thicker base paint than previous pictures have to my usual coloured stain on the board. 30 x 30cm, and because I rather like it the asking price is £100 - Christmas is coming, don't forget! Goose getting fat! But I'm not .....

Re-sprayed

Well for better or for worse - here's the repainted picture. It's less bland; it's also less immediately attractive: the first version had the virtue and simultaneous vice of being relatively inoffensive, except to me - whom it offended because it was as exciting as a dish of cold porridge. You could take my mind off it entirely by buying it, of course ..... A snip at £150: acrylic on canvas.... I don't, to be honest, quite know what I think of it yet, but - well, here it is.

Fallow period!

I've been doing bits and pieces for the last couple of months, interspersed with a good many meetings on the NHS, and a fair amount of dithering. I'm good at dithering. However, I have been doing some work as well, and am currently engaged on illustrating a book - the details of which are under wraps for the moment. Not the first book I've done - but the last one (like this one, unfortunately) is a bit of a speculative effort: and it hasn't yet been published. I hope it will be, but the recession is unfortunately still very much with us, and just to really cheer myself up, I fear it's going to get worse.

Anyway: one of the things I've been up to is what I call a re-spray job; taking a painting I really didn't like very much, and working over it to (with any luck) rejuvenate it. This is a bit of a risk with oil paintings - you run the risk of cracking the paint film - but it's possible to overpaint almost anything, even watercolour. Acrylics are "easier", technically if in no other sense, and the one I'm painting again is a beach scene near Fort Victoria, at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. I'll show it here, as it was, and in a day or two I'll post the new (and improved?) version. The trouble with the first one was really that it was taken from a photograph, and someone else's at that: worked fairly well as a photo, but its lack of focal point and the blandness of the colour, which I unwisely tried to copy, made a very boring painting.

I've also updated my profile photograph: this one is courtesy of Barry Fitzgerald, a professional photographer from Tralee in Ireland, who has been a friend of mine for more years than he cares to remember. Not only did the old photograph make me look as though I were munching on a wasp, but honesty compels me to admit that I've aged a bit since it was taken. Well, don't we all....?

Resurrection

I hadn't realized it was quite so long since my last post - I haven't died, well, no more than usual, I've just been taken up with so many different things that I've not really been able to concentrate on any one of them. Anyone interested in my heroic efforts to sort out Mail Merge and address labels for an organization whose newsletter I edit? No? Thought not.

So instead of boring myself even sillier with all that, I shall post, in what I hope will be a sequence of three stages, one of my recent oils - the finished piece has appeared on the Painters Online wesbite (www.painters-online.co.uk) but I thought the three stages of its completion might be of some interest.

I could have broken this down into more stages than three, but these should give some idea - I just went in with the brush to establish the first shapes, with paint thinned with spirit on a base of burnt sienna with just a very small touch of blue, to grey it a bit. The canvas size is 7" by 9" - fairly small, but that reflects my present financial state, unfortunately...

Incidentally, the Fawley chimney painting posted earlier is no more: I've painted over it. On reflection, I felt it was just pretty awful; we all have ideas which seemed good at the time, and this was one of them. Never mind: as someone said, try again, fail better. Beckett, I think: cheery soul, but one takes his point....

After the Re-Think

Well, I got a bit of painter's block for a week or two there; so troubled was I by my most recent painting at the time that I felt I needed to think about what I was doing. However: having to do a birthday card for one person, and a small painting for another, seems to have cleared through my mental confusion, and thus - we're off once more!

I therefore display a couple of my latest; in the case of the oil (on the right), it was an oil sketch that I fully intended to work up into something more detailed and "finished", but in the event I realized I'd said all I really wanted or needed to say about the subject, and I'm quite pleased I left it at that stage: it's a good deal fresher than it would have been as a result, I think. A limited palette of Indian Red, Raw Sienna, Indian Yellow, Permanent Sap Green, Cerulean Blue, and Prussian Blue, (plus white), on a ground of Burnt Sienna and Flake White. I used a medium this time - which, for those who might not know, does not mean I engaged the services of Madame Arcati; rather, it's a mixture of oil plus something else that helps the paint to flow. In this case, the ingredients were Linseed Oil; Low Odour Thinners (mineral spirits); and Dammar Varnish. An unusual approach for me - normally I don't use medium at all, or just a touch of Liquin - but I think I'll be doing so again. The painting on the left is an acrylic - a path along the River Medina, nr Newport, Isle of Wight; the oil is of a country path leading through those trees to the Blackgang Road, at Niton, Isle of Wight.

I've stopped worrying about what will or won't sell - you just can't tell anyway. So - although all the research suggests that oil-painted landscapes outsell anything else, I'm just painting what I want. And if the occasional oil-painted landscape crops up, it's because I wanted to paint it; but - nearly everything here is for sale, so contact me if interested. These two are not yet on my website, at www.isleofwightlandscapes.net.

A major re-think

Every now and then, a plateau is reached, in whatever field of activity in which one is engaged; looking back on the last posting here, I felt - that's just not very good. It's boring; the earlier stages were better than the later ones. It's been fiddled with, and zhooshed up with colour, but actually, let's be honest: that hasn't improved it.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've tried to add to it, but the basic problem is that it's a dull subject, dully executed. I do not seek contradiction - spare me the "oh no, really, it's LOVELY!" - oh; you were going to spare me... Well, you were right. A few days ago, I added a yacht to the foreground; now, they say don't paint boats unless you really know how they work (which I don't). Others disagree, but I must say - I think they were right. So I feel a great big brush of white gesso coming on, to obliterate this image, and the creation of something different (and, one hopes, better!) on the liberated canvas-board.

I can make several excuses: I haven't really got on with this MDF covered with a rather fine weave of canvas; I prefer a lot more texture - and preferably, stretched canvas. Actually, that isn't several excuses; that's only one... maybe the best I can do. I just think the idea behind the painting wasn't up to snuff, basically - Fawley oil refinery could, I think, be translated into a decent painting in oil, and on a much larger scale than this - but in acrylic, on a painting 30cm by 30cm, it was maybe never going to work. In any event, I don't think it has.

Is this a bad thing? Well, no - we all produce the odd dog's breakfast; some of us show them, some of us don't; you learn from all of them, the successes and the failures, and maybe more from the latter than from the former.

In this case, it's stopped me for a while, and made me think about where I'm going - so await the next thrilling instalment while I ponder the next step.