When you show up for my workshop prepare to get messy. There aren’t many rules, and it’s fast and furious. You won’t get time to hum and haw over choices, no time for self criticism or judgements, just into it. Chose three colours: I set out all the bright paint tubes and participants grab three they like and squeeze a teaspoonful onto their pallet.
Red, orange and yellow are great together. Purple, pink and sky blue. Any combo works. Cover your page: A3 is a good size for this exercise and the heavier the better, like 300gsm, and taped onto a board is best. The idea is to use a large brush, or a sponge, or crumpled paper towel, dipped into your paint and smear brush rub dab smudge daub until the page is completely covered. Don’t mix the colours too much on the page, create splodges that overlap a little but don’t put one colour on top of another. Three lines: You are going to need some white paint and a dark, like burnt umber or Payne’s grey. Using a large brush draw a line roughly right across the page about a quarter to a third of the way up from the bottom. Do it quickly, one swift movement. It doesn’t matter if it’s wobbly or not horizontal. That’s your bench that your vase will sit on.
Now two lines to describe the vase: on one side use white paint and on the other the dark. We do this so that our painting will seem to have light coming from one side and shadow on the other. Vases come in a thousand shapes, straight sides or curved, so long as both sides are roughly similar, and they start above the bench line and finish below. Paint the bench: mix a little of your darkest flower colour with some of the dark vase colour. Just mix it on the pallet with the brush in your hand and when it’s looking blended paint over all your lovely flower colours below the bench line but excluding the bit that’s going to be the vase. Paint the vase: you should chose a fairly neutral colour so that it doesn’t steal all the attention from your flowers, burnt sienna or yellow ochre, or grey, perhaps.
Blend the vase colour with the white paint on one side and the dark on the other to give your vase a little shape and contour. Find your flowers: now the really exciting bit, using negative-space. Use your brush to mix white with a couple of others from your flower colours until you have a good quantity of paint and load the brush well. Study the area above the bench line and see if there are places that already look like flowers, or have interesting shapes or nice colour.
With slow deliberate strokes paint around the edge of the page leaving the ‘good bits’ and covering all the rest. It might be a lot or a little, so long as what is left behind is starting to resemble flowers in our vase. It’s ok if flowers disappear out of the frame of your picture. Stand back and admire: but we aren’t done yet. Stems and leaves: they don’t have to be green but it’s a good idea to have a light and a dark of the same colour like brown or blue. Draw just a few suggestions of stems that connect your flowers to your vase, and describe a leaf of two for each. Define those flowers: try a dab of a darker colour in the centre, use a little brighter or lighter colour to highlight a petal here or there, remembering which side of your painting the light is coming from. Fiddle about a bit to make your picture pop. You are done. Remove the tape slowly and carefully and the nice crisp border that emerges frames your new work of art. When it’s dry you could frame it and hang it in your home to enjoy and remember the fun you had playing with paint and imagination.
Ros Barnett
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