Watercolour in progress
I‘m having a ” never again” moment at the moment. I’m sure that you’ve had them too, for one reason or another you wake up and think, I’ll never EVER do that again as long as I live and you make all kinds of promises to all kinds of people and Gods, that if only…
One of the Falkland Island series ...
Well, a few years ago I was invited to The Falkland Islands where I was given a commission by a Marine Company to produce fifteen board room paintings. I was really pleased and I did many drawings, took hundreds of photos and sailed almost four thousand miles around the Islands before coming back to my studio in the warmth of France to decide which images to put onto canvass. Several months later as I got towards the end of the commission I thought that if I ever had to paint another wave or ripple, or even see one that it would be too soon. I thought that I would ” never again “ do a series of so many of the same sort of paintings.
How the years make us forget !
Last year in a moment of absolute insanity I decided to repeat the process and produce a series of paintings of the Garde Republicaine who are the cavalry regiment who escort the President and various visiting dignitaries. Insanity because they are the last word in smartness and every painting would have to be perfect, colours would have to be ‘uniform and every aspect of their horses and tack correct enough to be recognised by both their riders and the Colonel.
I wanted to find a way to lessen the problem that so many of these paintings would seem the same. So variety ! Well, one way was to vary the media so I looked at all the preparitory work and decided which image would work best in oil, watercolour, pastel and pencil.
What I hope to do with this episode of the blog is to let you look at how I’m going to work on a watercolour of some members of the Regiment. These guys are dressed as Napoleonic Guards and are carrying muskets and I want to make the picture a little different, not just soldiers marching…boring, so I thought that I would only use the middle portion of the figure and musket and an odd number of people. It’s strange but odd numbers and triangles really work in paintings.
So the drawing was done using my wonderful projector linked to a digital disc, they had to be exact… the colonal was waiting. Once the first drawing was done, I took it down off the easel and with the help of an illuminated magnifying glass I went over the whole drawing correcting, refining and getting to know EVERYTHING about the subject. I think that this is the most important part of the picture, if you know the subject, if you start with a correct drawing then you have more than a head start towards a painting which will work.
I use Daler-Rowney Artist Quality watercolour paints, there’s a simple reason, I think that they are the Best in the World. Most of the pigments are transparent colours and I use glazes so each coat shows through and I build up colours little by little. So working from left to right, top to bottom I get the first layer on. Here it is, next time we’ll get to detail.
