Blog

If you ever want to recreate the marks you can make with pencils or pastels onto a painting then carbon papers are a great way to do that. You can buy ready made carbon papers from art shops but the colours are limited and I am not complete sure how light fast they are.

Here I show you how you can make your own carbon papers cheaply and quickly with an unlimited range of colours.

In this blog I will take you through step by step how I created the painting New Lands II. I explore the use of pigment sticks and solvents to create a base layer and then build up the painting using a brayer. See how I apply white paint with a brayer to create some lovely muted colours and how I use the brayer for blending along with palette knives and fan brushes.

I generally talk about using cold wax as a process of adding and taking away. The taking away is all about applying reduction techniques which is basically removing oil and cold wax with the intention of creating interesting effects and textures and to also reveal earlier layers of colour and texture. Here I will illustrate how you can use tissue paper to create some interesting effects.

There are all sorts of things that influence me when I'm choosing the colours I am going to work with. The influence behind this painting was the planning for one of my workshops where I was wanting to use some contrasting / warm / cold colours for people to experiment with. I was drawn to a number of already mixed greys which is quite unusual for me as I do tend to want to mix my own greys generally but these lilac / blue / greys in this painting really got my attention and have worked so well with the Senellier Chinese Orange.

This piece was created recently whilst I was out in Ireland. It started off as a bit of a disaster as the place where I was staying had this gorgeous view out to sea but by mid afternoon the sun would be shining in so much that it was blinding me and making my cold wax go all a bit weird.

So I am working on a new collection of work as I have a very busy schedule ahead of me this year and this painting just came out of my head the other day and I am really in love with it.  The palette is very different to what I've used before but I think this image has come about from a trip to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park to see the Norman Ackroyd prints.