My 'other' hobby

I'm at it again. It's been a while since I had a bake up and today was the perfect day for it. With the house to myself all day long I switched on the radio LOUD and had a good look in the cupboards. With eggs beginning to pile up again, first on the menu was 3 large farmhouse fruit cakes, followed by 2 dozen rock buns. Next up, a home made white loaf had the kitchen smelling wonderful combined with 8 pints of rich leek and potato soup. We have quite a lot of apples to use, so they went into 2 family sized apple pies, the rest were stewed up and popped in freezer bags. The customary tray of flap jacks were thrown into the oven, as it was on.....and whie I was on a roll with the pastry I thought I'd do a tray of large cheese scones. Although I sit here with an aching back after nearly 5 hours in the kitchen, it's so rewarding to know the freezer, fridge and cake tins are full of goodies. Aren't Alan and Steffi going to have a nice surprise when they get home?

Experiment for yourselves - and save some money

Many of you know already but for those of you who don't. In all my trials and tests on oils paints I have found pretty much most popular brands are suitable for the wet on wet technique. In today's class I quite happily proved this by using a total of not 1, not 2 but 5 different brands of paint. As I'm not tied into using any specific brands I'm free to use exactly what I want. One thing I will not do is compromise on standard and if it doesn't pass the test it finds itself left on a shelf somewhere in the dark and cobwebby recesses of my studio. With all these brands of paint squirted onto the palette side by side they all looked the same in consistency. You'd never know...... It's far better to pay attention to the actual quality of your painting surface, your base medium and the brushes you use. I really hope, as a tutor, I open up the many options available to students who want to set themselves up at home. Can anyone remember the test I done about 5 years ago? I painted 2 versions of the same painting side by side using identical brushes. Painting number 1 was made with student quality paint. Painting number 2 was made with professional artist paint. To give you a paint price comparison a 37ml tube of cad red student quality paint is £1.99, a 37ml tube of cad red professional artist quality paint is £10.39. 7 colours were used for the painting subject. When the painting was completed and dried I used to take them both along to art classes, explain what I had done, and ask the students to pick out which was the 'dear' one. And not many could. In one class I had another art instructor who studied both paintings, laughed and said 'Ha, it's obvious' and picked the wrong one. So, have fun, experiment, if you like a colour but it's not your usual brand - try it, the chances are in your favour it will probably work for you and mix in with your other paints just fine.

Well and truly bitten by the bug

It's not unusual to try a wet on wet style oil painting lesson and get bitten by the bug. After, all it's exactly what happened to me a few years ago and look where I am now! However, I don't think I've ever had someone book as many painting lessons as my new best friend, Cassie. Basically, she came along for one session and booked up every single class, with private sessions in between. Today was one of her private sessions - and she brought some friends with her too. What a lovely way to paint. You know everyone else in the class - and that's where the banter kicks in. All of my ladies are American and it was lovely hearing the sunny accent again - the last young lady who spoke it here a month ago was Joyce Ortner. Cassie's friends are total newbies to oil painting and were a little sceptical that they could achieve a masterpiece with their current skill sets and knowledge. Of course, anyone who has tried this technique already knows different....as long as you are shown how, explained why and demonstrated the whats, whos and the wheres, it's 100% possible.

Hello world

I'm sat here in the middle of some admin tasks wondering what to write for my news entry for today. This may interest you, it may not. It's certainly nothing to do with art. Sometimes I look into my website statistics more deeply than others - some days I don't look at them at all. To be honest, there's so many aspects to the statistics charts and I can't say I understand them all. I just concentrate on the more important figures - like what pages are popular, how people are finding me, what their word searches are. Where my referrals are coming from. It's very rare that I view the actual country locations of my readers but this afternoon I thought I'd check it out. Wanna know ? Going straight to the top of the chart we have the UK, followed by the USA. That I expect. Next we have - in order of sessions - Australia, Germany, Russia, Japan, China (that means I can expect some spam emails), Uruguay, Sweden, Ukraine, France, Mauritius, Spain, Colombia, Austria (Hello Helga), Bulgaria, Canada, Netherlands, Portugal, Indonesia, Israel and finally Kenya. Some visitors' locations fall under the heading 'un resolved' - no idea what that could mean. Some fall under the heading 'EU'. So - a big hello to the world, I'm watching you watching me........or rather, these beautiful blue eyes are watching you. They are the work of my recent portrait student. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Inspiration from a student..........mmmmm

Today's student, Lynne, has given me an amazing idea for a new painting subject and I just hope I get the time to work something out to see if it's viable. Even better if I can get it organsied this side of Christmas (there's that word again!). Today I taught Lynne a seascape using many of Joyces techniques. A more traditional style of painting, but a style where you can really tickle out some lovely details and effects. You do need a light hand for this and Lynn, managed just that with some amazing results, as you can see here. Lynne, always at the end of a painting session will critique her own painting very harshly indeed - always striving to do better and better. After today's lesson all she could fault was that she wished she had put 2 rocks in her painting instead of 3 - so that speaks volumes to me. Well done Lynn and thanks for the marvellous inspiration.

Portraiture in 3D - the new craze ?

I'm tempted to teach portraiture with a difference. Maybe some 3D effects would be quite cool. I've been experimenting with a couple of ideas - see what you think. Here's the story.......when I teach portraiture I need to have something to work on to use as the demo. One of the demo portraits currently on my easel is of my daughter, Stef. She was quite surprised to come home from work to see the underpainting stage, and I think she's quite chuffed with it so far too. She's already cleared a space on her bedroom wall, so that's a good sign. Now I've told her it will be a basic portrait and I don't intend to paint in her fiddly jangly dangly earrings. She's insisting I do. Jokingly, last night I took the portrait upstairs to her bedroom, found the earrings in question and tried to sell her my new 3D effect. I could simply pierce her ear on the canvas and loop the earring through - voila. In the spirit of artistic licence, I also took one of her longest, fullest, blackest false eyelashes and stuck it to the top of her eye - enhancing the dimensions and giving the portrait a very lifelike, touchy-feely concept. I guess you had to be there - but it was a right giggle. Of course, I'm joking, I'll paint in the eyelashes and a lot of other details too - still not sure about those earrings though.......what do ya reckon?

Popular Pop'in

During yesterday's pop art class, students painted a mixture of subjects - both celebrity and family members. It was a first time for all students and all of them were just a little doubtful as to how well they would do. That's when you just HAVE to trust your teacher....... Relax, put yourself in my hands, leave the worrying to me. It's what you are paying me for. Pop art is such a cool way to make a unique and personalised gift for someone special. Many of those who have learned it have received requests to paint more....and more.....and more. So, bearing this in mind and being well aware of the 'C' word that will be upon us in a few months, I am adding more Pop Art Classes to my class timetable. Your Pop Art session can be spent in several ways. You can start the work on a particularly complex and large portrait, or you can complete a 'normal' one. If you can't finish a Pop Art in the one session it is very, very easy to continure working at home - and several students have done this with 100% success. On the other hand, I have some students who use their class to prep several canvases with the sole purpose of working on many of them at home - enough to keep them ticking over for a few weeks. It's a great way of taking full advantage of my equipment. I only take on a few students at a time in a Pop Art class, which means it's a very intimate and friendly session - probably the next best thing to a private lesson. If you'd like to give it a go - click here to see the details of my next session. And if you can't wait - there's always private.