Welcome to the Filbert Splosh Newsletter. Your comments, suggestions or contributions are welcome.
See below for this month’s VERY SPECIAL OFFER
Featured Artist: Sue Pauli
‘Drawing as been a passion of mine ever since school, but
work, family and other things got in the way so it is only lately that I have had the time to take it up once again. Painting, however, is a challenge; the goal is to gain as much fluidity with the brush as the pencil. I take my inspiration from natural forms, then develop and exaggerate the shapes into more abstract images.’ Sue PauliThis month’s Top Tips for watercolour painting
Choose good quality watercolour paper, at least 300lb with a good ‘tooth’ (tooth refers to the roughness of the paper). Don’t use cartridge paper, it is too smooth and wrinkles too easily.
· Use the best brushes you can afford, cheap brushes simply don’t cut it.
· Always keep you brush fully loaded when working on washes. Make sure that one wash is perfectly dry before applying another unless working wet-in-wet.
· Always work from light to dark. Start as light as you can you can always darken areas later.
· It is a good idea to establish the lightest area and the darkest areas in your painting before anything else, and then you make sure your tones range between the extremes. This assumes you have worked out the idea for your painting before you start.
· Try not to fiddle or overwork your painting. Don’t use three brush strokes when one will do.
· Get to know your colours, their names and what happens when you mix then together. You should know for example, which reds and blues when mixed, will give you good purples and which give muddy browns. Remember those muddy browns could be ideal for some types of landscape painting.
Special Offer: This month sees a very special offer. As some of you are aware courses at Leintwardine will cease at the end of March and move to Aston on Clun because the facilities are better. So I am offering a two for one package on two weekend courses at Leintwardine. For the grand total of £95 you can come along to Inspired by Colour on 24/25 February and Inspired by Edward Hopper on 24/25 March. Both courses are completely new and explore lots of interesting ideas as well as developing great insights into colour.
If you want to take up this offer just reply to this email stating you wish take part, then pop a cheque, payable to Filbert Splosh Ltd, in the post to me at Ashfield, Luston, Leominster, HR6 0EA.
If you have already booked one of these courses you are welcome to come on the other one – just let me know. This offer only applies to subscribers of the newsletter.
Filbert Splosh’s News
Party Events
Do you or a friend have a special birthday on the horizon and want to celebrate it with something unusual? Why not consider inviting Salvador Dali, Picasso or Claude Monet along? Image, half way through your party Salvador Dali arriving and taking over everything. Image re-enacting his life story with your guests as characters – they are supplied with everything they need. Image what fun it would be, especially if you included a practical element as well – which would not require any artistic ability but is great fun. You could finish off your evening with Filbert’s equivalent of the Turner Prize. A truly memorable experience. For more details click
www.filbertsplosh.co.uk/party.htmChoose good quality watercolour paper, at least 300lb with a good ‘tooth’ (tooth refers to the roughness of the paper). Don’t use cartridge paper, it is too smooth and wrinkles too easily.
· Use the best brushes you can afford, cheap brushes simply don’t cut it.
· Always keep you brush fully loaded when working on washes. Make sure that one wash is perfectly dry before applying another unless working wet-in-wet.
· Always work from light to dark. Start as light as you can you can always darken areas later.
· It is a good idea to establish the lightest area and the darkest areas in your painting before anything else, and then you make sure your tones range between the extremes. This assumes you have worked out the idea for your painting before you start.
· Try not to fiddle or overwork your painting. Don’t use three brush strokes when one will do.
· Get to know your colours, their names and what happens when you mix then together. You should know for example, which reds and blues when mixed, will give you good purples and which give muddy browns. Remember those muddy browns could be ideal for some types of landscape painting.
Special Offer: This month sees a very special offer. As some of you are aware courses at Leintwardine will cease at the end of March and move to Aston on Clun because the facilities are better. So I am offering a two for one package on two weekend courses at Leintwardine. For the grand total of £95 you can come along to Inspired by Colour on 24/25 February and Inspired by Edward Hopper on 24/25 March. Both courses are completely new and explore lots of interesting ideas as well as developing great insights into colour.
If you want to take up this offer just reply to this email stating you wish take part, then pop a cheque, payable to Filbert Splosh Ltd, in the post to me at Ashfield, Luston, Leominster, HR6 0EA.
If you have already booked one of these courses you are welcome to come on the other one – just let me know. This offer only applies to subscribers of the newsletter.
Filbert Splosh’s News
Party Events
Do you or a friend have a special birthday on the horizon and want to celebrate it with something unusual? Why not consider inviting Salvador Dali, Picasso or Claude Monet along? Image, half way through your party Salvador Dali arriving and taking over everything. Image re-enacting his life story with your guests as characters – they are supplied with everything they need. Image what fun it would be, especially if you included a practical element as well – which would not require any artistic ability but is great fun. You could finish off your evening with Filbert’s equivalent of the Turner Prize. A truly memorable experience. For more details click
RECOMMEND A FRIEND
This is becoming popular way of earning £10. If you recommend a friend, who has not attended one of my art courses and that person subsequently books and attends a course, I shall send you a £10 Marks and Spencer Gift Voucher. For details of how this works CLICK HERE
Forthcoming Events
February Courses
Abstract Painting Weekend at Storridge Village Hall on 10/11 February 2007 – A great opportunity to experiment with colour shape and textures and explore mixed media
Expressionist Painting Weekend at Leintwardine Village Hall on 17/18 February 2007 – If your work needs more impact and ‘umph’ this is a great course for you
Inspired by Colour at Leintwardine Village Hall on 24/25 February 2007 – Everything you wanted to know about colour, mixing, relationships and great painting. See this month’s SPECIAL OFFER
Let’s appreciate Art
Content in Pictures
Content is the second of our three Elements of Art. Art historians have used a number of terms to describe Content; Subject Matter, Meaning, or Significance. They all amount to more or less the same thing i.e. what message is the painting providing. There are two ways of organising our thoughts here, the traditional and the more modern approach.
The traditional approach relies on sorting content in regard to its iconography -the term artist’s use for the language of images, namely the signs, symbols and conventions used to determine what content is being displayed in the painting. The type of content in a picture is called its genre. For example, a painting depicting a famous victory in battle, lots of guns, heroic soldiers, dark turbulent skies, death, destruction and ultimate victory etc., would be classified in the History genre.
A more modern approach is to split content into three categories like we did when we discussed the first Element of Art, Form, namely:
· What you see
· What you understand
· Considering the Elements of Art (Form, Content, Context) together to come to a conclusion about the work.
Let’s look at the traditional approach first. It was a very popular means of categorising content and was used right up to the beginning of the 20th century, particularly with institutions like the Royal Academy and similar august bodies in other countries. It was an easy, but ultimately crude way of arranging content and led to a strict hierarchy of genres. History painters were regarded as premier league painters, whilst the landscape painters had to be content with the less fashionable second division. If an artist was a flower or still life painter, he was barely in a league at all. This traditional approach is one of the reasons why John Constable was denied the accolade of RA until he was in his forties, while his contemporary J.M.W Turner, received the honour in his early twenties. Turner was a History painter where as Constable was just a mere landscapist.
Next month we shall look in more detail at the different categories used in the traditional approach.
Happy painting
Regards
Filbert Splosh
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