Category Archives: David Bellamy

Blog Posts by the artist David Bellamy

Painting foliage in summer

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I recently ran a course in the Welsh lake district – the Elan Valley reservoirs, where there are many marvellous subjects to paint, including glorious river scenery. With this rather cold spring weather it was important to find locations where students could work out of doors in reasonable comfort, and as there are many sheltered spots in the Elan Valley area we were able to work quite happily.

River Elan sm

River Elan

The picture shows a part of a watercolour of the River Elan which I did a few years ago on site. It’s a fairly rough watercolour, as I painted it while standing the middle of the river, using an easel. This was the optimum spot, and as it was painted to support the John Muir Trust, the Scottish-based charity that fights for the wild land of Britain, a photographer came along to record the event. Alas, after taking a few shots he fell into the river, but his camera was OK and all he got was a bit of a wetting.

Although it was mid-summer, I haven’t used many greens in the painting, much of the foliage achieved with a deliberately dull blue-grey, created by mixing French ultramarine and yellow ochre, a rather opaque colour. This dullness helps to accentuate the bright yellow tree. With foliage, edges get lost easily, as they run into one another, and you can see how I’ve introduced light edges of foliage by painting the darker washes around the edge. It pays to look at the scene through half-closed eyes as this will eliminate much detail and allow you to pick out the more important aspects of the scene, both in terms of tone and detail. Please don’t try jumping into rivers to get your paintings done – not only can it be costly in lost equipment, but it can also be rather dangerous in the wrong place!

Reserving your whites, 19th-Century style

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I’ve been somewhat distracted over the last week or so, with members of the family sick, hence the lack of posts. We’re experiencing marvellous walking and sketching weather in Wales at the moment, and it’s a lovely time of year for getting out with your sketchbook, flask and sandwiches. Being out amidst nature is one of the most therapeutic ways of casting off the stresses of life.

In a recent comment Mark has enquired about the manner in which 19th-century artists preserved the whites in their watercolours. They did not have any masking fluid available in those days, but they did employ a number of the alternatives that we currently use, although I don’t know many artists these days that rub out areas of watercolour with stale bread, which was a method much used by JMW Turner.

Barn & trees

Barn & Trees

The most obvious alternative is that of negative painting, ie,painting the dark spaces around a light object as in the tree-trunks and fence in this watercolour detail. With practice this is an extremely useful technique. You will see that some blue-grey shadows have been painted over the light trunks directly under the foliage where it casts a shadow, yet the trunk still stands out, though less stark. John Cotman, in the early 19th Century exhibited marvellous control of this method, and is a water-colour master well worth studying.

Well before the 19th Century artists used white bodycolour to create highlights, or to render small features such as seagulls, and Turner certainly used it in many of his works. Writers of that period would often refer to this as ‘chalk’, so that the medium used might be referred to as ‘watercolour heightened with chalk’. Turner used numerous techniques to achieve whites, scratching through the darks with a knife, thumbnail or the wrong end of a brush; removing colour with blotting paper; and even stopping out areas with glue size to prevent washes being laid there. The glue size was washed off afterwards, but this technique obviously required great care and expertise, as it would be easy to mess things up at the washing-off stage, but expertise was something which Turner, of course, was not short of!

Adding another colour to a monochrome painting

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Grassholm Island

Grassholm Island

I’ve not been at home much lately, which makes it difficult to maintain a regular blog, and this week we’re running a painting course in Mid Wales. The beautiful sunshine on the last two days made excellent light for sketching outdoors, although it has been a little on the cold side. The weather forecast told us that it was going to be quite different from this, which makes us rather sceptical about their forecasts of doom for our planet.

Now and then I rather like to put a little ‘doom’ into a painting, often a sense of impending horribleness as in this watercolour of Grassholm Island off the Pembrokeshire coast. Its northern cliffs are mainly black and dire, with the great contrast of white gannets and gannet guano in spring, so to achieve a dramatic effect I have painted it mainly as a monchrome using indigo, but injecting some colour in the form of cadmium orange in the sky. Because I’ve painted this on a biscuit-coloured tinted paper I had to add the highlights with white gouache. There are many gannets in the sky and on the crags.

As I’ve mentioned before, carrying out a monochrome is an excellent way of learning to apply watercolour without the problem of colour mixing, but when you add a further colour like this it will take you one stage further and possibly increase the drama. Dark, moody paintings like this can convey a striking sense of mystery, so don’t be afraid to apply some really strong darks in your watercolours.

Our exhibition at Art Matters in Tenby is now running and continues until the 28th April see details here

Injecting Dramatic Lighting into your Paintings

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In a painting in any medium, treatment of light is a vital consideration. While the landscape photographer has to work with available light, artists can manipulate it to their advantage, changing it, intensifying it, rendering a much softer, atmospheric light or create a dramatic sense of light and dark, and so much more. It pays to study how the top artists have treated the light in their compositions when you visit an important exhibition or collection.

Brancaster Staithe

Brancaster Staithe

This scene on the Norfolk coast shows part of the composition bathed in late afternoon sunlight, as it throws the emphasis on the central building, the two figures and the boats. I achieved hard edges on the buildings set against a dark sky by using masking fluid, rubbing it off once the background washes had dried, and then painting in the details on the buildings and the rest of the scene, completing everything apart from the shadows in the foreground. At that point I often trundle off for a coffee, or if it’s late I’ll finish for the day. This allows the washes to dry completely – in fact I’ll often get on with another painting at that point.

With the whole painting completely dry I wash clean water right across the foreground, taking it up into the lower sky area. Make sure that you take the water some distance beyond where you intend to create the soft edge, as water has a habit of creeping further than you might think. I then apply a mixture of French ultramarine and cadmium red over the shadow area, including the darkened left-hand buildings and the far right-hand hedgerow. This wash blends nicely into the wet paper, creating soft-edged shadows, with the area I wished to highlight being left untouched. If you are a little wary of this technique try it out firstly on old paintings that have not worked well, so that if things really do go wrong it won’t matter.

Painting sparkling water and shafts of sunlight

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Our new exhibition starts at Art Matters in the White Lion Street Gallery in Tenby on Saturday 30th March, and continues until the 28th April. You can view the paintings on their website Jenny’s work is in pastel and mine in watercolour, and we will be there from 11 am to 4 pm on 30th March. The painting below is one of the watercolours I am exhibiting, although it does not show the whole picture.

Dinas Fach, Pembrokeshire

The scene shows sunbeams falling over Dinas Fach on the Pembrokeshire coast. To create the ragged edges to the clouds I stroked the blue-grey sky colour on with the side of a large round brush, rather than using the point. The shafts of sunlight were left until the very end of the painting, when everything was dry: I simply put two pieces of thin card together, slightly apart with the lower sections splayed out slightly more than the top parts, and then with a soft sponge soaked in clean water I stroked downwards over the lower sky and the craggy headland. I then did the same with the second shaft. It’s important to ensure that all the shafts of light come from the exact same spot, even if as in this case, the sun itself is hidden behind cloud.

Sparkling water can give a lovely inviting appeal to a scene, and this was achieved by spattering masking fluid over the area with a toothbrush, masking out those parts that I wanted to avoid spraying. I did add a few more little spots of masking fluid with a fine brush afterwards, where these were needed. When the masking fluid was dry I then painted over it with the sea colour, eventually removing the grey-coloured masking fluid to reveal the sparkling area. Shafts of sunlight work well with sparkling water, and you can add this to your sea, lake or river scenes when you wish to beef them up a bit.

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