Sera Knight Demonstrations

Visit her at www.seraknight.co.uk. Contact info@seraknight.co.uk or 01276 856517

Mixed Media Demonstration, 26 June 2009

Sara is now strongly into collage - perhaps you could see the beginnings of this in her prizewinning entry to the 2006 Exhibition. She has come a long way from there. We were greeted with a fine array of samples of Sera's recent collage work. These are just some of them. I crave your indulgence while I get used to a new "cheapy" camera. Sam

Inspired by a black-and-white photo, Sara created more than the general composition with scraps of paper cut from a magazine and brushed down with PVA glue. This helps her thinking to develop: she was occasionally peeling pieces off; frequently covering bits that she did not like, sliding them to get alignments that pleased her and applying others of contrasting tone to re-define an edge. She distinguised clearly between the rectangular background blocks and the triangular ones that created the feeling of perspective. There was no wish to keep precisely to the perspective of the photo.
The choices of colours and tones of paper are not random: blue-greys give distance, reds imply foreground, stripes railings.	I was surprised at the amount of detail that went into the man and his reflection. Bits of paper no bigger than a few inches, in different shades of grey, were roughly snipped out and applied. Initially he was badly distorted but more bits refined the outline. Larger pieces of roughly-torn tissue paper and lots of PVA mellowed everything and got rid of any dry edges. Then the first paint was applied : acrylic ink, squirted directly onto the still-wet glue, thicker and darker at the edges, worked over, wet-into-wet (water spray to stop it from drying too quickly). The lovely purple/green greys had come from magenta and viridian, darkened with burnt sienna and finally dried with the hair-dryer.
Then came the ordinary acrylics. She's not fussy about who makes them - whatever comes to hand is OK. She knows she ought to use a limited palette, too, but finds she uses a dozen or so. The last 45 minutes of the demo were devoted to brightening, touching up, painting negative spaces, particularly around the man, glazing to improve tonal composition, adding highlights and countless tiny flecks of colour - virtually all, I think, with an inch-and-a-half flat brush. Nothing was mixed on the pallette. Whites were modified with naples yellow - pick up a touch of yellow, dip the brush into the white, apply and repeat. Subtle greens were made using Paynes Grey as the blue. She printed in the fencing with a 2-inch piece of mountboard.

	Almost at the last minute she chopped another small bit of paper from her magazine to make the notice board on the right. It needed only a light glaze to tone it in with the rest of the painting. Sera said she might do more but had reached the stage where care was needed to avoid "mud".
A great evening. What inspiration one can get from an old black-and-white photo!

Workalong, 21 October 2005

Before going around the room giving individual advice and comment, Sera gave a short lesson on perspective. At the end of the demo she distributed prints of some of her very early ink drawings, in which perspective was an important element, as possible source material. An interesting evening was enjoyed by all.

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