Hazel's versions of Day Two!

My versions on Day Two are in the post below this!

These photographs of Hazel's work-in-progress giraffe were taken sitting in front of her demonstration table, which had a mirror angled above it so that we could see exactly what she was doing, brushstroke by brushstroke, as well as her palette and how she mixed her colours - quite sparingly, I was surprised to see.

Step one: Laid down a blue wash for the sky - she used French ultramarine here - pulling it into the shadowed areas on the giraffe's neck and face. Aureolin yellow splattered into the damp wash to indicate trees in the background.

Step Two: A pale yellow ochre wash into the face and down the neck, burnt sienna touched into the ochre to build up the tone and the hue in the face, and sepia touched in on the horns, using the side or the edge of the brush to create the texture of the hairy tips - not painted hairs!

Step Three: Adding the details to the face - shadows from a mix of Burnt sienna and ultramarine in the ears and darks of the eye, with a bit of sepia I think - just one light brushstroke for the eyelash of the far eye! Deepening and softening the shadow down the neck.

Step Four: Adding the pattern onto the neck in burnt sienna, with more ultramarine on the dark shadow side.

She produces her vivid, rich colours knowing exactly how much water and pigment is on her brush. I have always mixed up huge pools of watercolours, sloshing more water in with every brushload and consequently throwing buckets of expensive paint down the plughole - another good lesson learnt!

Hazel Soan Workshop Day Two

Nope, sorry - I didn't keep up with my intention of posting every day about the workshop! After trying to absorb all the tons of information - what a generous and totally giving teacher she is - all the concentration and painting, painting, painting for 6 hours a day (plus an hour for lunch) I got home completely exhausted and unable to string two words together.

But now, after a little rest, to continue with...

Phew! Day Two - sketching wildlife - didn't start off well, as I hadn't heard (concentrating too hard on my sunflowers) that it would start half an hour early, and was late. I missed the first demonstration of painting ostriches and didn't have the references printed out, so spent most of the morning flustered, rushing and catching up. In spite of all that, I loved painting these big goofy birds with their shaggy feathers - I think it's a subject I'll go back to when I want to have fun!... I think the lesson was to make the shape of the bird, as with the leaves, using the right size brush to create the neck and legs, and the side of the brush to make the body - dark against light, so just onto the white paper, with colour dropped into the washes.
The next demo was a background wash of ultramarine with a silhouetted shape - in this case, a back lit cormorant - on top of the dry wash using ultramarine and burnt sienna, both non-staining so can be lifted, scraped or touched up with chinese white paint to get back highlights. Again, they were to be "brushstrokes, not birds" - Hazel's were exquisite examples of this - just a flick of the brush across the surface of the paper, and there, perfectly formed, a cormorant poised to dart into flight or to fish....

I'm discovering my washes need lots of work! I haven't been mixing enough paint to cover the whole area, so add water and pigment halfway and cause cauliflowers or cabbages to form... nor have I been mixing it thoroughly, and get streaks and blobs. Too impatient and not enough care!

Then we did a half lit cormorant on a background wash of aureolin and prussian blue(mine far too garish). My second wash was even more blotchy and streaky (though I partly blame - bad workman! - my paper which was old and dry and sucked in all the water). We were to leave a white shape of the highlight on the bird's back, covering all the rest with the wash, then painted the darks of the cormorant over the wash so the shadowed side wasn't separate from the background, then softening into the highlighted area.

Next came painting antelope using a soft yellow ochre wash to identify the overall shape, then laying on burnt sienna, leaving shapes of highlighted areas and dropping in touches of ultramarine in the dark areas. Being these two pigments, again they could be lifted off with a damp brush to reveal more highlights, or the stripes on the kudu - still felt rushed and agitated at this stage and did a rather shoddy job, but here they are anyway! These are all things Hazel paints from life in the bush, in minutes and instinctively, knowing exactly where her colours are and how to render the creature she has in her sights!

Finally for the day, a close up head of a giraffe. You'll see above the stages that Hazel used - I've put it in a separate post so as not to make it look as if I'm trying to pass off her paintings as my own! By this stage I was so tired, willing my giraffe to please, please, not go wrong. I think if it were the only painting I was doing that day, I would have put more into the darks, been more careful with the spots and softened some hard edges, but as it was, I was quite pleased with painting into such a big shape without stuffing it up, and keeping it fairly loose and not overworking anything.

At this point, I think I must remark that, although this may seem like a slavish following of Hazel's methods, they are all techniques that she instinctively uses after her years of experimenting, and her gift to us (I did ask her permission to blog this workshop!) is to take the time and thought to put her natural - though she plans ahead - actions into a sequence that we can use, to paint freely and in our own style once we know a few sound principles and logical steps to produce - as was her aim in this workshop - vibrant, lively watercolours.

Also, some of this I, and I'm sure many of you, do know from our own experiments or reading or lessons, but to have the sequence so clearly laid out when say, presented with a beautiful silhouetted subject on a coloured background, will make painting it much simpler. If you're anything like me you'll be scratching your head thinking, " now, how did I do that last time..?" by which time the bird, or kudu, or whatever, has flown!

Hazel Soan Workshop Day One

I'm halfway through the Hazel Soan's workshop already, and apologise once again for being AWOL for so long. Yesterday I got home too worn out (in a good way) to sit at the computer and record the whole experience, but today I realise if I don't write it up as it finishes, I might never do it, or at least not be able to recall with any clarity each day's activities.

So here, in a nutshell, is what we did on Wonderful Day One:

For this we had to bring an array of various leaves and flowers, as well as some reference photographs that Hazel had specified - reeds back lit against the sky - dark against light, and sunflowers with light coming from the side, so some lost and found edges, background and foreground. Starting with the leaves, she did a demonstration using different sized brushes according to the size and shape of the leaf.

Where Hazel gets her energy I don't know - she had just got off a plane from teaching a workshop in Kenya the night before, and was as fresh and eager to pass on some of her vast knowledge of watercolour as if we were her only students this year. I'm going to be rather disjointed, and just write down little sound bytes of what Hazel said as she demonstrated and walked around the students helping and giving advice, as I am just too tired to organise it all into a comprehensive summary just now.

•Watercolour is perfect, the less you do, the better it is.

•The subject is the excuse to use watercolours - not the watercolours in order to paint the subject.

•Leaves are brushstrokes - we're not painting leaves, we're painting brushstrokes.

•Vary your colours and strokes - entertain the eye.

•Become a slave to TONE - relative tone is the secret of painting - forget matching colour exactly - colour changes according to light and surroundings.

•Paint beautiful patches of watercolour, not 'flowers'

•Order your palette and keep it simple - a warm and a cool - red, yellow, blue. *A note from me - I'm amazed at how spartan her equipment is. We students came with case-loads of tubes and pans, huge water containers and mixing receptacles - she had a paintbox and a tiny bag of tubes to refill it, her brushes, three little water pots and a small bottle of water to replace dirty with clean, and that's it! For all the leaves we used just Aureolin and Prussian blue. For the flower page we added touches of Permanent Rose and Dioxazine Violet. The sunflowers were Indian Yellow and Ultramarine, with Burnt Sienna and Sepia, and a bit of aureolin to vary the greens.

I finally pulled out my stash of beautiful watercolour paper that I've been collecting and hoarding for years, waiting for the time that I could paint well enough to warrant using it, for this workshop and Lo!.. it actually helps one to paint better! Watercolour does what one is hoping it will do a lot more often on lovely paper. My reed painting though, was a total failure - partly because my reference photo was front, not back lit, but my wet-in-wet didn't work, my dry brush didn't scumble, not even the Arches could save it. Ah well.

I'm so pleased to find a fellow Johannesburg blogger, talented Debbie Schiff of Debbie Does Art (love that name!) at the workshop, which reminds me that she and Maree of Art & Creativity passed on the Sunshine Award to me some time ago, and I haven't even acknowledged it here yet, let alone passed it on. Thank you both so much - life has been overtaking me lately - I hope to catch up soon!

Make your own scraperboard

I've been very busy!! Some nice visitors and company, and necessary cleaning up operations beforehand - and I was asked, last year in fact, to make some images for The Stations of the Cross for our church, but I had too much other work on. I thought I'd have plenty of time this year, but once again, it's a rush. I've pondered for weeks on what to do, and how to do it in an economical way, as well as fast and effective. One wee-hours-of-the-morning rumination brought forth the memory of this method of making homemade scraperboard that I learnt years ago in an art class, and which I used to make the above sketch of my daughter - still in a school uniform at the time, so it's a good ten years ago. This is too big for the scanner and in a frame, so not the best reproduction. It's not the sort of scraperboard you can make those perfect, highly detailed illustrations on, but it's great for loose marks and ready-made textures, which are quite a surprise as you pass over various brushstrokes and layers of polish. Here's how you do it, for anyone who's interested...

I did it on fairly heavy paper the first time, but this time I've used Masonite, as it needs to be sturdy and hung easily with string or wire.

1. Lightly sand the board so paint will stick - this step not necessary on paper support.
2. Freely paint with white PVA. Don't worry about getting the brushstrokes too smooth if you want texture. Let it dry well and give it another coat if needed. Dry well again.
3. Apply wax clear floor polish with a soft cloth, let dry, polish lightly and apply another coat. Allow to dry and harden.
4. Paint on Indian ink with a large soft brush. The wax will resist the ink at first, but keep at it...
5. After three or four passes and cross-brushing, the ink will stick and cover the white paint
6. I varied the edges of the boards, leaving some rough and some covered right to the edge.
7. Allow to dry thoroughly.
8. Start scratching!

I use a small craft knife to scrape with, which gives me various line widths from very fine to broad depending on how its held, but you can use whatever works best for you. Brush off loose ink that's been scraped off with a soft dry brush.

* A Warning! I got some raindrops splashed on one of my boards, and the ink just lifted straight off. I'm going to have to work out how to seal them to make them less fragile.

I'm not sure if I'll use this hand in the series - it is my hand and although I tried to make it look more masculine (I have pretty workman-like hands anyway), it still looks like mine. Though this was very quick to draw, I need to get scraping, as Easter rushes up - in between my workshop next week and preparations for that, and 100 other things going on right now. I am hoping it will sometimes be a peaceful, meditative Lenten process in spite of the time pressures.

Sunshine and light

First of all, I want to thank each one of you who left comments on my previous post, and on Urban Sketchers - I was bowled over by the warmth, empathy and defensive outrage that supportively flooded my inbox, as well as from friends who phoned and emailed. It really made a bitter pill easier to glug down and reminds me again that most people are good, very good - kind and loving. Thank you, thank you! After a period of adrenaline over-supply, in which I cleaned and scrubbed and sorted, came a few days of exhaustion and resignation, and then a pull towards colour, light, innocence and freedom from care and worry. I found an old black and white photo of myself taken on Grotto Beach, Hermanus in the Cape - one of very few photos of me as a child - that perfectly encapsulated those qualities for me, and tried to paint it in colour... well anxiety and watercolour didn't mix too well - my flat washes were anything but, my figure was murky (left), but I quite liked the way the umbrellas and loose figures came out on the beach. I tried the girl figure again (right), and started a new painting with all together on a clean sheet of paper, which must be old and heat damaged (my studio bakes in summer), as it just sucked up the paint and allowed nothing to flow at all. So I resorted to Photopaint and put the cleaner figure on the beach (below), and then flattened and intensified my sky and darkened the figure in the shadow - in the top painting. If only one could manipulate life (and watercolour) so easily!

After this exercise I'm looking forward more than ever to Hazel Soan's workshop next month, in which the aim will be to maintain fresh vibrant watercolour, with immediacy, boldness, liveliness - with strong depth of colour and light and shade - I know I've had moments in watercolour where I've achieved some of that, but it all seems to have escaped me right now - roll on March 15th!

Stealing time

I took a friend to the dentist on Monday morning, and sketched in this very nice little coffee shop while I waited. Back home, while so happily engaged - burglars were busy rifling through our house. I'm glad I wasn't there, but this sketch joins the artwork in the file 'While we were being robbed'. Whingeing about Joburg and its crime is boring and futile, but honestly, sometimes one just despairs. There are far more friendly, generous, nice people here than there are thieves and vagabonds, but that small proportion certainly makes life uncertain and unpleasant for the rest.

When my son and I got home, the sliding gate was a little open and we couldn't move it any further - we walked in and Kenzo our cat was wailing to beat the band. I thought she was hurt or stuck, but she was just trying to tell us something... then we saw the dog inside the house, when I'd left him out... a bit sheepish looking, but relaxed... then we saw the mayhem.

Poor old Gucci has been an outstanding watchdog all his life, but is now a bit deaf and creaky, and sleeps like a log. He may have woken up and given them a fright, as they had been disturbed while removing the computer - I am relieved that he's OK, as dogs also fall victim to the thugs.

They were after money and firearms, which unfortunately we had in a safe, hidden, but found and removed lock stock and barrel. And our son's precious playstation, and we may still be discovering what else for a while to come.

It's hard to imagine what sort of person looks at your family photos - of children laughing on the walls, at their collections of treasures and books on their shelves, at all the evidence of ordinary daily living around a home, and then trashes it and steals not only the goods, but the trust and peace of mind, body and heart. He can only have had an awful life full of hatred and violence... well that's how I deal with it - I'm afraid some of my family are feeling rather bitter and vindictive...

<--While my car was being stolen from outside the figure drawing class.

In a journal after all the computers at my husband's business had been removed one night...

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San Francisco Bay

After much cruising around the streets of San Francisco Bay, thanks to the Virtual Paintout challenge, I finally made a decision to paint this view of Beach Rd, Belvedere - a place I think I'd be happy to holiday in, if I was magicked away to S.F. by a sleight of some travel wizard's hand. There's some coastline and a lovely yacht basin just below this shady, winding road. I'm embarrassed now, to think I thought I'd 'seen' this city on an overnight trip there about 17 years ago. What we saw was Fisherman's Wharf, and a steep road which we descended in one of the famous trams, and the Golden Gate bridge - a tiny fragment of this enormous sprawling place.

The painting didn't turn out the way I had hoped - I can tell I haven't done much watercolouring lately. It's green and brown, which was not my intention, and the big strong shapes of dark and light got splintered into a jigsaw of details and fussery. I might try it again, with boldness.