| You could see the artist coming through as soon as you walked in.
Melanie had arranged a black sheet to show off some of her quick oil paintings,
copies of her "30-minute oils" book, some brushes and very attractive greetings
card prints . . . . . . and she started on the right foot by giving us a copy of the book for the FSCA library. Many thanks. The first "secret" of 30-minute oils is to paint wet-into-wet with big brushes onto small boards. Her upright easel carried a 16" x 20" MDF board which she had prepared with a couple of coats of white acrylic gesso. I couldn't help noticing a second board underneath prepared with a pale yellow-ochre sort of colour. I give you one guess! |
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The palette is not the mess it looks. There is a logical
progession: a big blob of alkyd (faster-drying) titanium white near the Liquin
pot and then, from left to right for her, from cool/light to warm/dark: through
half a dozen yellows, 3 oranges, a few reds, some raw umber and below that a
row of 4 blues. Her left thumb points to a mixing area that she several times
scraped clean so that the mixtures kept fresh. But first she spent a few seconds on the top half of the board, lightly sketching a generic tree in charcoal and blowing off any excess. One nice thing about charcoal is that it's easily removed if you get it wrong. |
| In 30-minute oils you need to add new paint over wet, and so the
first coats should be applied thinly but with a minimum of added thinner, which
tends to make then too easily picked up by later ones. She illustrated this with three patches of French Ultramarine: one straight from the tube and the others thinned witth increasing amounts of Liquin. Even in my rather dodgy photo, below, you can just see that the white overpainting goes more crisply over the unthinned paint. Contrary to conventional oils practice, the medium seems to be used more towards the end of the work. |
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Melanie is another fan of Rosemary Brushes: tonight a No.7 (1"?)
nylon flat and a small softer round one. Burnt Umber and French Ultra give a good dark brown. She picks the paint up with the brush and works up the colour she wants on the palette. Using the flat brush, Melanie painted over the charcoal marks, establishing the branch structure and the shadow. For the greens, it's better to avoid colours that are too warm (although you can take this too far and become unnaturally vivid). Here she dabbed a dark green mix of Cadmium Yellow and Ultra all over the tree, then picked up increasing amounts of yellow, and finally white, for the sunlit side of the tree |
| She likes to do the sky last, because it avoids the
possibility of ending up with a "cut-out tree pasted onto a background".
The sky needed a well-washed brush, a scraped-clean palette, some Ultra lightened with white plus, very importantly, a tiny touch of Light Red (or Burnt Sienna or an orange would have been as good). The amount of "white and red" increases as you get closer to the horizon. |
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| Incidentally, Melanie cleans her brushes in (smelly) white spirit or turps but is meticulous about putting the lid straight back on. | Because she was working wet-into-wet she could take the sky into the outline of the tree, adjust the greens and add sky-holes, keeping nice soft edges. |
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She then did a generic summer landscape. Again we needed well-washed brushes and a scraped-clean palette but now Melanie followed the charcoal sketch with Cerulean, again lightened with white but modified this time with a tiny touch of turquoise (and Naples Yellow Deep lower down). The same mix, greyed with a complementary orange(?), made the clouds. More white was used in the distance and a slightly yellowed white made the "icing" on top. |
| It's worth remembering to make harder edges on the
tops of clouds and softer ones below. The rest followed a similar sequence to before: dark green to start the trees, then more Yellow Ochre, a distant light green field, then an Ochre field and a Raw Sienna foreground stroked on with the brush held vertcally. All this was done in a few minutes. I've trimmed it to leave the earlier blue patches so you can see how different the Cerulean feels from the warmer Ultra-based sky. |
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After the break Melanie started the real 30-minute oil, on the
other 16" x 20" board (a bit big for 30 minutes but one can try). She usually
pre-colours the board to give an overall feel to the painting. She did the charcoal sketch from a tiny one in her sketchbook, and you can see one or two places where she moved things. She had obviously used the same sketch as inspiration previously - there was a 60-minute oil on the table! Darks first, so she made an Ultra and Burnt Sienna mix for the cliffs. She mixed this with quite a lot of Liquin because she didn't plan do do much overpainting and wanted brush strokes to give a rocky effect (still with the flat brush). |
| Towards the top of the cliffs she introduced Cobalt
with Raw Umber and, higher, Raw Sienna until, for the grassy tops, the Cobalt
had only Cadmium or Indian yellow. Remember this is all
wet-into-wet. The Cobalt continues into the distant hills, this time with Raw Umber to give the grey-green, with even more white in the far distance. She first tried to continue the Cobalt into the distant sea but it didn't work and she scraped it off. She might get a better idea for sea colour if she did the sky first. For the sky, a mix of Ultra, Cobalt and white, and maybe a bit of Turquoise, was put on - thinly enough for the yellow background to show through. |
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| She used the earlier technique for the
clouds (Ultra with Burnt Sienna and white) and for the distant sea a mix
similar but darker than the one for the sky. Waves need practice. They are greener and darker in front and the spray needs a slightly creamy colour. As you approach the edge the water takes on more of the (Raw Sienna and/or Light Red) sand hue. The sand colour gets warmer inland. |
"Do what I say, not what I do"? The wet look relied on a heavily
thinned Cobalt/Magenta purple. Unless she was just making a point, Melanie
forgot her warning about trying to work on top of heavily thinned pain and was
not at all happy with the look of the patches of foam. Nor was she pleased with the figure.But this was a demo, with as much talking as painting, she had used a larger board than she would normally recommend for a 30-minute oil and she was very pressed for time. |
| It's proved to be a very enjoyable and
worthwhile evening. I've always been more pleased with the look some of my less-laboured paintings and so I'm inspired now to get my heat-set oils out again and see what I can do.  |
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