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Derek Snowdon

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Posted
I started a painting in my usual style last week and want to get on, but limits due the my credit card technique have stymied my progress. I am trying to achieve very good (20mm 'ish diameter) circles for the two eyes of the owl subject. My shaky and inept undexterous hands will not manage it, even with a brush, yes I tried that. I now await the delivery of a circle stencil, which doesn't exist in my technical set of draughtsman curves. It will be a couple of days I expect. Might start something else. Cheating? No - as Ken Howard said on Monday night, he uses a ruler to get straight lines.
With Sarah, Phil, Ellen, Rose the dentist, and the granddaughter whose name I forget.

Robert Jones, Napa

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Ken Howard has a form of essential tremor, I believe - so he needs the ruler. So far, I don't: and I can still draw a circle - but if the day comes when I can't I shall have no hesitation in making use of all the aids I can lay my trembling hands on. It's what makes an effect, and the effect you get, not the way you make it, that matters. Never worry about "cheating" - I'm not keen on light-boxes, or tracing (unless you have to, and some do); but all the fuss over the suggestion that artists of the past used the camera lucida as if that somehow insulted the old masters..... I ask you! There's at least one woodcut showing a Tudor period artist using a mechanical device to gauge perspective, but you'd think it was heresy to suggest that every single mark achieved by Rembrandt was not done entirely freehand. It might have been, of course - but what on earth would it matter if he "cheated"?

Edited
by Robert Jones

Derek Snowdon

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Yes thanks Robert Ken Howard said he has an RSI and that prevents him from working in his fave medium of watercolour. Now in oils he can make his marks without detail and that's exactly my case. I gave a recent work of mine to a couple some weeks back and he was amazed I could achieve such detail using cards, but it was his eye that told him what the marks were. It was a caravan jockey wheel and other bits he saw.

Sylvia Evans

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You men ...are you all completley thick ? Whats wrong with bottle tops, saucers , coins. cups, all sorts of round stuff from around the home. Just select right size and draw around it ..... Just "do" it.

Derek Snowdon

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Thanks Syd, I have ordered one. I want to paint inside the circle not round it.