The Fritillaria have bloomed outside my studio in the last couple of weeks and how pretty they are. I got my husband to photograph them so that I can use them as reference material for paintings. He photographed them as they were, against the green background of the rest of the garden and against a piece of white card so that they would stand out.

The lovely purple checkerboard patterns will be very challenging to paint but during this week I intend to give it a go.

The advantage of photographing them against the card is that the flowers cast very interesting shadow patterns and again these will be intriguing to paint.

Aileen

Watercolour Texture Medium(TM) is very useful and can be used to create a variety of (illusions) textures. For example, this week I have been painting what I call one of my ‘ composite’ paintings. These are paintings I create from bits and pieces of references I have collected and this week I been working on an African theme. I used texture medium on the body of the leopardand and in the top right corner of the picture where I have tried to give the impression of a cave and cave paintings. The texture medium is used for the rock walls.

African Faces 39h X 29h cms.

The texture medium can be used in various ways and you can use it before, during and after painting. You can spread the TM with a brush, a lining pen, an old credit card edge, a stick or an old broken comb, to give many different effects. It can also be spattered using an old toothbrush.

It is easy to get ‘carried away’ with excessive use of TM so I am careful to be very selective in its use but I hope you will try using it if you have not already done so.

Aileen

I have always found personal paint colour charts very useful in my painting and recently decided to update my charts.

Over the years I have gathered an extensive collection of paints, many of which I have used but not really determined their overall effects. Redoing my colour chart was an excellent way of reminding me of what these colours can do.

As a start I drew squares of about the size of half a pan on a large piece of the watercolour paper I usually use. I then painted in each pair of squares, a colour at full strength and next to it a square of the colour very diluted. I also labelled each pair of squares with the paint name and paint manufacturer. Various manufactures’ paint names can be very different. For example each will have a range of blues and these blues can be very similar but will have a different name, which can be confusing when they produce the same or a very similar effect.

When looking for a particular colour for a painting, the paint chart is a quick reference and it then easy to find what I want. Strong Cadmium Red when diluted gives a very delicate pink; Sepia which is a strong dark brown gives a fawn creamy colour; Brown madder is a beautiful strong dark brown, which when diluted moves towards a peachy/pink. Using the paint chart I found a lot of oranges were dull and disappointing and that the most vibrant orange was Translucent Orange by Schmincke which is my most favourite orange.

I found re-doing my chart a very useful exercise and others may benefit from updating their own personal charts, especially if they have added to their paint collection over the years.

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