Frolicking in the Desert

     Most of this year I've been painting subjects from the Middle East, a part of the world I've been fascinated by since I first visited in 1963, and these works will illustrate my forthcoming book, Arabian Light, due to be published by Search Press in May 2022. The subjects cover a wide variety of scenery, buildings, figures, interiors and many others, and for a taster I show below a painting of our expedition guides dancing in the desert hundreds of miles from the nearest village. For the intense darkness I've used the Daniel Smith Lunar black slightly mixed with French ultramarine. The granulation strength of this colour is truly mindblowing! There'll be more on this in future blogs.

    Another book I'm pleased to be associated with is Green Parrots in my Garden, a book of poems from the Arab Middle East by Jane Ross, a Canadian poet who has lived in the Middle East amidst threats of war, but concerns herself more with the warmth of human relationships, the wisdom of ancient desert values and the beauties of artefact and design that bring her into the hearts of the people and the essence of the region. She writes of the oasis of Wadi Bani Khalid where 'the winds are gentle zephyrs in the thick warm air,'

      'But ontop of Jebel Shyams the winds are sharp and piercing,

         like needles thrusting their way through the blanket;

        fiendish, dervish, absolute and wild.'

Yes, that mountain presented so many exciting images that I forgot myself in a fiery sunset, when the light vanished so suddenly that without a torch I found myself trying to pick up all my scattered brushes and pencils in the dark then navigate across a rock-strewn plateau on the edge of a canyon. 

   The books features two of my paintings in monochrome, and  Jane's website is www.janeross.ca

It is available on Amazon via the link above.

    I wish you all a very and peaceful Happy Christmas. May you have many lovely artful arty presents, and thanks for your patience in my extremely slow production rate in 2021

Painting limestone scenery in watercolour

     I've managed a pretty wild and wonderful autumn this year, though it has left me breathlessly out of kilter on the blog-writing front, I'm afraid. How I wish there was more time for writing, which I love, but sadly in this robotic world there are so many threats to writers and their writing-time. For eample, in New Zealand their libraries archive has intended to put thousands of books' contents onto the internet, but it seems that after world-wide protests they've just realised there's a thing called copyright involved!

    We've been blessed with a gorgeous little grand-daughter by the name of Beatrix, and look forward to meeting her on the run-up to Christmas. Her Dad's going to be performing in pantomime at Margate, so it's going to be a bit riotous, Covid-permitting, of course.

    This is a watercolour sketch of Gordale Scar in Yorkshire, carried out on a beautiful calm, sunny afternoon in October while sitting in a most uncomfortable position on extremely steep ground high above the valley. The light falling on the limestone really made the rock stand out, particularly against the shadowy parts. It is deliberately overworked so that I have all the details to produce a large studio watercolour, and my awkward position didn't help. This is actually only the right-hand half of the composition and the cartridge paper has been left unpainted where the sunlight is hitting the limestone. 

    There is too much green for my liking, but grass growing on limestone has that intense colour, and I wanted to record a faithful rendering. In a studio painting I will doubtless take more liberties, lose a lot of hard edges and make other adjustments, but my point here really is to show how working out of doors like this is to me not just a means of acquiring the information for a finished painting, but also of observing how the traditional approach will appear, so that I can see where I need to be more creative in the later attempt.

    The Covid-induced layoff has been a real nuisance, but we are now organising courses for 2022 as you will find on my website   There is one in Mid-Wales in April, and another in Cornwall in September, both popular locations with lots of interesting subjects. I may well be adding more in due course. Also on the website you will find information on my books, the last one published being the Landscapes Through the Seasons in Watercolour, and they are all available via the website

    I hope you are managing to get out and about with your sketching and painting gear - even in December we can get some lovely days, and the low light can create some fabulous cast shadows.

 

Creating Autumn Still Lifes

     Wandering through the woodlands at this time is a real pleasure for the artist, with the great variety of warm colours as the leaves turn. I can't resist picking up a handful of leaves and taking them back to the studio to play with. There's nothing like the process of experimenting with artistic ideas for stimulating our work, even if you have tried the particular process before.

    A branch of leaves - or perhaps I should say, a twig of leaves in case we get too carried away - can make a superlative still life subject, but here I have pushed the leaves into thick watercolour paint straight out of the tube, applying a few different colours for each leaf before placing them on the paper. With a sheet of tissue paper over the leaf I then rub it with fingers to create the image. It can be hit or miss, but when it works the result can be inspiring. You can work in two or three leaf images in this way and perhaps add some spatter and further detail, lettering, collage or whatever. The addition of a little thickener such as Winsor & Newton's Aquapasta may help improve your results.

    You can get ideas on painting autumn scenes in my Landscapes Through the Seasons book, available through my website  

    We are now planning painting courses for 2022, and details of these should be released before long. At the moment I'm spending a lot of the time away from the studio, so these blogs have been in short supply. Anyway, enjoy your autumn painting and do have a go at recording those stunning leaf shapes in one form or another!

The importance of your little blobs

     I see my last blog was on 1st July, the long gap being the result of an all-action summer with little time for writing. In August I visited Germany, partly to do some research and partly as a holiday. Getting round the Covid tests proved quite a challenge, creating stress and uncertainty on occasion. In Wales I ordered a self-test from Boots, only to find I could not send it in time because there were no Priority Post-Boxes in the area, although the Royal Mail showed plenty of these around, including one apparently in Llanelwedd Quarry of all places! This is totally unacceptable behaviour.

    In Pembrokeshire I've recently dropped off a number of paintings at the Waterfront Gallery in Milford Haven. The gallery shows a wide variety of paintings styles and is a very pleasant place to visit. 

    This is part of one of the paintings at the gallery, and shows a quiet corner of the composition. The centre of interest is away to the left, off-picture here, and the boat acts as a means to balance the composition. I did not wish to make it too prominent, so I lost the bottom of the blue hull in the muddy foreshore and dotted in white gouache blobs here and there to add interest in suggesting seagulls. On such a small scale it's not easy to give the impression of birds, but I used a number one rigger and tested the white gouache on dark rough paper before applying it to the actual painting. This method also has the advantage of getting rid of excess white paint on the brush before doing it for real. If you over-blob and get a ghastly mess, simply wash it off with a damp brush, dry the area with a tissue and wait till the paper is dry and then try again. With practice you'll find this will improve enormously.

    I shall try to make my blogs more regular in future, but the call of the wild is hard to resist........

Creating a tranquil mood in a landscape painting

     As many of you will be aware, I love painting wild seas crashing on a rugged coast, but there is much to be said for the calmer moments. To emphasise this you need to concentrate on the horizontal elements as you will see in the painting below.

    As you can see, the sky comprises a series of horizontal cloud effects of evening light, and this is further emphasised by the long, horizontal horizon, with the vertical features such as the mature trees pushed well into the distance. To further enhance the calm mood of the scene the washes laid over the estuary are flat, undetailed ones, and even the line of waders in the foreground conforms to a horizontal pattern. And what if you're looking for a suitable animal to include in a calm scene - well for me none can compare with the dear old Friesian cow for suggesting a scene of utter calm and tranquility.

    This painting can be found in my Seas & Shorelines in Watercolour book which is available from my website  The original painting is on display in the Attic Gallery in Swansea, Tel. 01792 653387  The gallery is open from Wednesday to Saturday 10am to 4pm and can be found at 37 Pockett's Wharf, Swansea, SA1 3XL where a number of my paintings are on display at the gallery with a lot of other exciting artwork.

    Enjoy your painting!

Painting stormy seas

     This summer marks 40 years of my writing articles for Leisure Painter magazine, and the current issue (July 2021) contains an article celebrating this close relationship. Ingrid Lyon and her team are indeed lovely people to work with. The excellent Painters-online run by Leisure Painter and The Artist is also showing a film I recently made on how to paint a penguin, which you can see at  https://www.painters-online.co.uk/tips-techniques/watercolour/articles/how-to-paint-a-penguin-in-watercolour/    This was done from an expedition to Chile many years ago, when I visited a penguin colony near Puntas Arenas on the way to the Andes.

    I recently dropped some paintings in to the Waterfront Gallery in Milford Haven. It's a lovely gallery on the quayside with plenty of parking and sketching space if you like painting boats and other things that bob about, so if you're in or around Pembrokeshire do pop in if you have a moment.

    This is part of one of the paintings I left at the gallery, showing huge Atlantic breakers hitting the cliffs at Linney Head in extremely wild seas. I achieved the white splashes by leaving that part as untouched paper, but wetting the area to float in the blue-grey colour of the cliffs to define the splashes wet-in-wet in a negative way. When the paper had dried I then sharpened up some of the edges with the blue-grey wash, thus creating a varied edge around the splash. Do be extremely careful if you go out on a day like this, as the sea can be really unforgiving!

Painting a Mountain Stream

     Where I live we are blessed with countless streams and waterfalls tumbling down the hills and mountains, and I like nothing better than to wander beside a mountain stream with sketchbook, well away from the hurly-burly of life. One mountain stream is worth far more than a thousand mental health quacks for our well-being. In my short demonstration painting last week on the Shopkeeparty site I painted a mountain stream on a misty day, as seen below, and on Thursday 13th will be doing a much longer, more considered workshop on the site.

    In the painting I aimed to lose much of the mountain and its detail in background mist, using the wet-in-wet technique, pulling out some of the colour on the left-hand buttresses with a damp brush to suggest light catching the boiler-plate slabs of rock. This was accentuated when the paper had dried by painting in the left-hand buttress which contrasts the softer-edged wet-in-wet approach used on the right-hand one. The central group of conifers was also painted wet-in-wet so that a real sense of distance was created when the dark-tones trees on the left were added. Notice on the cascade how the rocks are placed with hard edges at the tops and soft ones where the rocks rise out of the tumbling water. 

    Next Thursday at 3.30pm I will be running a 2 to 3- hour workshop on painting a waterfall with sunlight and autumn colours, and you are welcome to join me. I shall be showing you how to tackle many fascinating features:

• how to introduce striking light effects
• creating effective rock structures
• making the most of exciting autumn colours
• the magic of wet-in-wet passages
• how to capture the energy of falling water
• the importance of lost and found edges   .....and so much more!

    You will find further information at  Workshop: Autumn Waterfall with David Bellamy (shopkeeparty.com)

    I shall look forward to seeing you then.

Introducing counterchange into a painting

 One of the little subtleties I enjoy putting into my paintings is that of counter-change, sometimes simply to create a variation and sometimes out of necessity. In my recent workshop demonstration at Shopkeeparty I employed the technique for both these reasons in the painting of a farm in Nant Ffrancon.

This is the central part of the watercolour, and you can see the slate fence in the right foreground with two of its uprights light against a darker bush, while the rest of the uprights are dark against a light area of the farmyard. I could just as easily painted the two left-hand uprights dark and it would still have worked, so in this case it was painted like that just to include a little variation.

If we now move across to the barn on the right of the composition you will see that the roof has been painted dark of the left-hand side where it stands in front of a light background, and then the roof is depicted light on the right-hand side against a dark background. In this instance it was necessary to introduce counter-change to make the roof stand out at both ends. This is an extremely useful device to have in your artistic armoury, so try to incorporate it into your work whenever you can.

I have further Shopkeepeasy workshops coming up in early May and you are welcome to join in. The first is on Thursday 6th May at 2pm, is free to Shopkeeparty patrons and lasts 45 minutes, which you can check out at Mountain Stream with David Bellamy (shopkeeparty.com)          while the second one which lasts between 2 to 3 hours is on Thursday 13th May at 3.30 pm, which you will find at  Workshop: Autumn Waterfall with David Bellamy (shopkeeparty.com) for which there is a charge. Both events will feature a mountain stream with a cascade or waterfall.

I hope you are all able to get out into the countryside to paint and sketch now that things are easing up.

Painting sheep and lambs in springtime

     The onset of spring nearly always gives us all a sense of hopeful anticipation of more pleasing times to come, perhaps more so this year than ever before as we attempt to recover from this dreadful virus. I hope you are able to get outside and take advantage of the better days, and perhaps manage a sketch or two. For me, daffodils always make a powerful foreground feature, and it's worth capturing some images of these while you are out.

     This image is part of a painting depicting lambs in early spring. Sheep are relatively easy to draw, but can pose problems for the unwary at the painting stage, especially where you have a light-coloured field caught in sunshine: you need a slightly darker area behind the sheep so that it stands out, and as you can see in this painting I have included several darker patches of grass in order to highlight the sheep. Generally I use Naples yellow for the main body, often leave a white top on head and body to accentuate the sense of light. This is normally left as white paper, but touching in a little white gouache can help rescue one that has not quite worked.

    When including lambs it is important to put across a sense of the relationship between mother and lamb, or between a number of lambs enjoying each other's company. This makes it look so much more natural. Compare the lamb by its mother in the foreground with the one on the distant right which is lying on it's own. The closer couple invoke a much more pleasing composition.

    One of the stronger background features is the gate. Although this has nothing to do with springtime I mention it because it is a good example of negative painting. Here, I have worked the darker colour around the gate and posts to define the light woodwork. I never include all five or so bars as it's good to keep some hidden in the long grass! The painting was done on Saunders Waterford NOT 140lb paper.

    Enjoy springtime, and you can find more help on seasonal work in my book Landscapes Through the Seasons in Watercolour, which you can obtain as a signed copy from my website www.davidbellamy.co.uk

Painting a mountain bothy

     Amazingly, even during these periods of lockdown there is just not enough time to get everything done, and it's not just because I am putting exercise as a priority. The weather has not been helpful lately, with an inordinate amount of wind and rain. Trying to film a demonstration watercolour on the moors recently out of the wind, was a real struggle. It affects the microphone badly, so I needed some shelter. Having found a reasonable spot I began the watercolour and then found the washes icing up on the paper - it was far colder than I'd realised, and well below zero. I hope to get it organised before long.

    In the meantime I did an online workshop about ten days ago on Shopkeepeasy, featuring a mountain bothy. With only 45 minutes it is quite a challenge to complete the painting, which is shown above after I've included a few little embellishments such as a little detail on the prominent rock pinnacle, some detail on the buildings, touches in the foreground and the addition of some smoke from the chimney. There are several ways of creating smoke even as an afterthought, and in this case I scraped it out gently with a scalpel. You need to be careful with this method of course, but it is useful if other methods fail. Sometimes if you have used staining colours around the chimney it is almost impossible to pull out any colour to form even a wisp of smoke, so this technique does have its uses. You can see the demo on  https://youtu.be/tSwuMvH9WQY

    On Thursday 25th February I have a further online workshop with Shopkeepeasy where I will be demonstrating a mountain farm. You will be shown how to create a sense of place, bringing in local character to enhance your landscapes, how to blend in the sky with misty mountain peaks in the background, introducing rogue colours that are not actually in the scene but will give it a lift, creating a semi-abstract foreground, and much more. You can obtain details from the above link.

    Hopefully, with the onset of the vaccination programme we'll be able to travel safely once again, before long, and once more be able to take part in courses on location. In the meantime, keep painting! 

Painting a Downland scene in winter

     I hope during this lengthy lockdown you are able to get out for exercise, fresh air and perhaps a little sketching, as these things are so vital to our well-being. Although it's quite cold today, these winters are pretty mild compared to what it was like when I was a youngster, so there are many occasions when it is fairly comfortable to work outside. I live at the foot of vast moorlands, so I get up there as often as I can. In mid-January I sat on a rock painting distant snow-covered mountains in warm sunshine, in more comfort than many a summer day.

    Today I have a winter scene on the Sussex Downs, which I did many years ago. A light coating of snow gives you the opportunity to bring in some colour while retaining the white of the paper where you wish to indicate pure snow. Keeping the landscape light in this way gives you the opportunity to make the most of cast shadows which will stand out strongly. I have cut a little off the left-hand side so that the details are not too small, although this does make it look as though I've plonked the farmhouse in the centre. Note the intermittent lines of ploughed furrows, which keeps it from being an overwhelming foreground. The massed trees in the distance have been enhanced by touches of highlights in places and the closest edge stands out where I have described one or two individual trees. The painting was done on Saunders Waterford NOT 140lb paper. 

    I shall be doing a couple of online watercolour workshops with Shopkeepeasy in February, the first being on Thursday 11th at 2pm. This lasts for 45 minutes, is free, and you can join me in painting a simple landscape. All the details, including art materials are shown on the Shopkeepeasy site and the free link is    https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/7916124614355/WN_kKSNDBCgQ9CyycEOLCCRgQ

The second workshop is on Thursday 25th February at 3..30pm and lasts 2 to 3 hours, for which there is a fee. Again, all the details are on the Shopkeepeasy site. I hope to see you there. In the meantime, enjoy your painting.

Fun with Foregrounds

     A Happy New Year to you all: I hope you had a great festive season and are looking forward to a better year ahead. Keeping our spirits up during these grim lockdown days is vital, and after so long it's not easy to come up with new ideas to stop our art becoming stale. Like many, I've been going through mountains of old stuff with a view to throwing a lot out, and that process itself has thrown up some interesting ideas. Firstly checking through old transparencies I've recently found some real gems from which to work up paintings. Secondly, sketches I previously hadn't given any thought about creating a painting from have inspired me, highlighting how our tastes and perceptiveness change over the years, and why it's important to revisit some of these old resources. Thirdly, some of the old art books can trigger ideas for new types of subject, a new medium, or perhaps a different approach to observing subjects.

    So this time my tips involve the foreground in a landscape where we may wish to include flowers, plants or wild entanglements. Above is a section of detail from a painting reproduced in my book Landscapes Through the Seasons. I painted the dark areas first and allowed them to start drying. When the sheen was off them, but they were still damp I used a painting knife to score out light stalks/grasses in the right-hand red patch. When all was completely dry I then painted on the cow parsley using white gouache applied with a rigger. Finally I spatttered white gouache in places with a toothbrush. There are more foreground methods in the book to give you ideas for this tricky part of a composition. See my website for details.

    Enjoy your painting, and do have some fun going through those old treasures - you never know what you may find!