A lovely workshop at the studio today, with a full house to kick off the autumn term. A different way of painting for me, mixing up the traditional order of laying down colours in order to 'let go' of it a little more.
We started with a loose, watery wash of colour on the background after a great deal of discussion about paper and surfaces, playing with salt and clingfilm to suit our tastes. Only when this was dry did we start constructing our subject matter with a few loose pencil lines, adding a second layer of washes over this to give a vague sense of where our colour was going to occur. To spice things up at this stage, we included metallics in the form of inks or powders to our washes, only then pulling it together with darks to give the definition.
This is always a tricky class to teach as some gravitate to this type of painting and others take a little longer to get used to letting go of the precision. I think though, that everyone agreed that in order for the pieces to be successful, they needed to adopt the 'less is more' principle - easy to say and not so easy to do! Have any of you out there ever experienced this? Let me know won't you...
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