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Th Artist December edition
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Posted
Enjoyed the artworks in "A sense of place"- Robert Parker.
However I do think that for a magazine intended for practising artists he could have given more details .For example, I see that he has painted on textured boards - how was the texture acheived ? I guess it is a technique I have used myself, ie gluing tissue paper onto the board. It would have been nice to have had this detail. And the description "mixed media" may be ok for an exhibition catalogue but we artsits want to know what media. Please!
Posted
I don't think I will be tempted to buy any of these paints .some of them sound so sombre. W&N willbe bringing back Mummy and bister next. they have a large range already and I think this is a come on for beginners who don't want to be too colourful in their paintings. Dessert now. .....How about chocolate pudding brown for beginners tree trunk colour?........Cheers ,....Syd :-)
Posted
They are tempting, Syd, though! I still hope that one day I'll find a colour which will transform my painting, in whatever medium I'm using! Sometimes, one comes along - New Gamboge in Chromacolour acrylic; Rowney Golden Yellow, in oil, which has rescued several of my paintings at the last minute when all else failed, and Michael Harding's Burnt Umber in oil - a completely incredible colour, hot, strong, intense.... And it retains its strength, whereas so many oil colours just turn into mud on the canvas, however strong they seem to be on the palette. <div>
</div><div>I absolutely accept your point, by the way: if you can't do what you want to do with your usual palette, it's probably your own fault if your paintings lack contrast and are dull and insipid. On the other hand ..... every now and then, a new colour will awaken ideas in your head you might never have had otherwise: this has happened to me much more often in oil and acrylic, ie in opaque colours, than it ever has in watercolour ... I assume that's because while you can add richness in opaque media, all you're likely to do by adding more colour in watercolour is to contribute to ever more opaque mud... </div><div>
</div><div>So - I don't think I've ever been especially startled by new colours in watercolour (although Turner's Yellow was interesting) whereas in acrylic, there's been the remarkable Sap Green in Winsor and Newton's acrylics, Gamboge in Chromacolour, Scarlet Lake and Yellow Lake in Michael Harding oils: I think new colours CAN inspire us to try new techniques and mixes - the thing is, probably, not to get fixated on the new when you can do so much with the old.</div><div>
</div><div>I wonder what others think: perhaps especially those who never did become too faithful to the older pigments?</div>
Posted
You may mock! Ah, cruel, cruel mockers! And frankly, you're right to - some of these colour ranges suggest people are more interested at playing with their chemistry sets than painting (I wonder what will happen if we mix this to this .... BOOM!).<div>
</div><div>But I used to be the Labour Party Agent on the Isle of Wight, so I'm used to defending the indefensible and proclaiming the unwinnable, and I'll have a quick go here....</div><div>
</div><div>This huge range could be about colour brilliance, on the grounds that the more colours you mix together, the darker and more degraded the colours become (of which we take advantage, of course, to produce naturalistic hues: while there have been painters who painted landscapes and figures in primary colours, their work does tend to leave one with a sick headache).</div><div>
</div><div>Nonetheless, we all know from colour mixing that ideally you mix two, you often have to mix three; but any more than that and you're headed for a colour that achieves painters' mud - something so greyed, murky, and strangely sinister that the more sensitive (such as Syd and myself) recoil from it with little moues of distaste.</div><div>
</div><div>Indeed, the more colours you mix together, the nearer you get to black.</div><div>
</div><div>So the Daniel Smith range, for example - Old Holland is also extraordinarily extensive - offers these single pigment colours which could not be achieved by mixing. Where else would you find Genuine Old Turn-up Lint, or authentic Cabbage Mildew Pale? </div><div>
</div><div>The quite extraordinary ranges are equalled, unfortunately, by their quite extraordinary prices, and I shall not soon be taking advantage of these generous invitations to bankrupt myself - but the argument behind them is about making un-mixable colours of a purity as complete as can be achieved. </div><div>
</div><div>(Just for the record: I invented those two colours referenced above; I was thinking of marketing them, though, if demand is sufficiently pressing.)</div>