A year or three ago John Saxon, a chum from the Thorn cycling forum, published a photo of the backyard of his friends from just over the mountain where I was born, the mountain separating the two towns strikingly prominent in his photo. I promised to paint the scene but, when eventually I finished the painting, it was wretched, not fit for consumption by man or beast. If you think I'm joking, even my cat sneered at it. I've earned my living in the arts for too long to be sensitive to the vagaries of critics and, having been a critic myself, am only too familiar with the constant struggle to keep criticism pure from contamination by external considerations. But my cat keeps my knees warm in the winter, which no critic has yet offered to do, so I pay close attention to her opinion. Between my cat and I we buried that painting.
All the same, not wanting to offer John an explanation that starts, "My cat and I..." in the tones of Her Majesty's Yule tidings from herself and her Corgis, I was glad when he published another inspiring photograph, albeit from another hemisphere and a different continent.
John's first photo and my discarded painting are of the Karroo at Prince Albert in South Africa, the Karroo being a semi-desert area though John's friends live in a charming green spot on a river. John's second photograph is of the Bay of Quinte in Ontario, Canada, an entirely different milieu. Not that either painting is representational, because I can't be bothered with those when a superior camera fits in your shirt pocket and adds only a few grammes to your cycling paraphernalia.
As you can see, it's the inspiration that counts, with the two images serendipitously influencing the final outcome.
Andre Jute: Early morning mist over Bay of Quinte, watercolour and gouache on grey Ingres paper, A4, 2017
[b]A few technical notes:[/b]
The paper is Fabriano's Tiziano, which has a substantial cotton content but is all the same intended for pastel work. I don't work in pastels often but I like this 160gsm paper for binding sketchbooks because you get in quite a few pages without making the book too clumsily thick and heavy, and it lends itself to watercolor work by flattening well after moderate buckling. Water media in some form or another accounts for possibly three-quarters of what I do in my custom sketchbooks so paper which buckles permanently under water is papyrus non grata.
Though I generally don't do a pencil sketch before I start work with the brush, in this instance the division of the area into large blocks was so critical to the outcome that I made a rough pencil division. The 5.6mm clutch pencil I used belongs to a small pen and pencil kit carried with A6 (say 6x4in) sketchbooks; it is a Koh-i-Noor 5311, a recreation of a vintage clutch pencil. It's a favorite of mine though my brush cases each includes a perfectly good 2mm clutch pencil.
The palette chosen consisted of the watercolors Cerulean Blue PB35, Ultramarine Finest PB29, Perylene Green PBk31, Dioxazine Violet PV23, the latter two for the mixes to a greenish near-black since I don't normally have a "real" black in most of my go-to paint boxes, plus the gouache Permanent White PW6, all from Winsor & Newton except the Ultramarine which is from Schmincke. You can see the sort of palette that I choose from in the photo of the box of paints after I'd already taken out the gouache white, as that one was obvious.
Here the gouache white lies on the brush case for this size of watercolor with the first obvious brush already taken out of the elastic. Generally speaking, I usually manage to complete any A4/Imperial Octavo (11x7.5in) painting or smaller with one to infrequently as many as five brushes selected only from this case.
The brushes selected consisted of a cheap supermarket synthetic for mixing paints and scrubbing on the surface if required (not required, in this instance done by local blotting with a folded sheet of kitchen roll, included on far right of photo, and overpainting by gouache, but you never know when you need a scrubber), a 5/8" Handover Kolinsky Sable Oval Wash brush with a keen edge with which I did the main work, including some dry brushing that may appear to have been done by the specialty brushes mentioned next, a Red Sable Fan branded by Jackson's, my London art materials pushers, and*for painting the grasses and leaves a Taklon Filbert Comb from Royal's Soft Grip line, from which line of several series I have quite a few brushes in various sizes and shapes.
All the same, not wanting to offer John an explanation that starts, "My cat and I..." in the tones of Her Majesty's Yule tidings from herself and her Corgis, I was glad when he published another inspiring photograph, albeit from another hemisphere and a different continent.
John's first photo and my discarded painting are of the Karroo at Prince Albert in South Africa, the Karroo being a semi-desert area though John's friends live in a charming green spot on a river. John's second photograph is of the Bay of Quinte in Ontario, Canada, an entirely different milieu. Not that either painting is representational, because I can't be bothered with those when a superior camera fits in your shirt pocket and adds only a few grammes to your cycling paraphernalia.
As you can see, it's the inspiration that counts, with the two images serendipitously influencing the final outcome.
Andre Jute: Early morning mist over Bay of Quinte, watercolour and gouache on grey Ingres paper, A4, 2017
[b]A few technical notes:[/b]
The paper is Fabriano's Tiziano, which has a substantial cotton content but is all the same intended for pastel work. I don't work in pastels often but I like this 160gsm paper for binding sketchbooks because you get in quite a few pages without making the book too clumsily thick and heavy, and it lends itself to watercolor work by flattening well after moderate buckling. Water media in some form or another accounts for possibly three-quarters of what I do in my custom sketchbooks so paper which buckles permanently under water is papyrus non grata.
Though I generally don't do a pencil sketch before I start work with the brush, in this instance the division of the area into large blocks was so critical to the outcome that I made a rough pencil division. The 5.6mm clutch pencil I used belongs to a small pen and pencil kit carried with A6 (say 6x4in) sketchbooks; it is a Koh-i-Noor 5311, a recreation of a vintage clutch pencil. It's a favorite of mine though my brush cases each includes a perfectly good 2mm clutch pencil.
The palette chosen consisted of the watercolors Cerulean Blue PB35, Ultramarine Finest PB29, Perylene Green PBk31, Dioxazine Violet PV23, the latter two for the mixes to a greenish near-black since I don't normally have a "real" black in most of my go-to paint boxes, plus the gouache Permanent White PW6, all from Winsor & Newton except the Ultramarine which is from Schmincke. You can see the sort of palette that I choose from in the photo of the box of paints after I'd already taken out the gouache white, as that one was obvious.
Here the gouache white lies on the brush case for this size of watercolor with the first obvious brush already taken out of the elastic. Generally speaking, I usually manage to complete any A4/Imperial Octavo (11x7.5in) painting or smaller with one to infrequently as many as five brushes selected only from this case.
The brushes selected consisted of a cheap supermarket synthetic for mixing paints and scrubbing on the surface if required (not required, in this instance done by local blotting with a folded sheet of kitchen roll, included on far right of photo, and overpainting by gouache, but you never know when you need a scrubber), a 5/8" Handover Kolinsky Sable Oval Wash brush with a keen edge with which I did the main work, including some dry brushing that may appear to have been done by the specialty brushes mentioned next, a Red Sable Fan branded by Jackson's, my London art materials pushers, and*for painting the grasses and leaves a Taklon Filbert Comb from Royal's Soft Grip line, from which line of several series I have quite a few brushes in various sizes and shapes.