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How I loosened up my Painting Style
Loosen Up Your Painting Style
This month's email includes:
My video on how I loosened up my style painting with quick timed studies from life.
Details of my NEW Workshops for early 2027!
Last month I was working on series of painting ideas taken from old family photos - I enjoyed experimenting with lots of styles and mediums but then I hit a bit of a wall.
I felt like whenever I work from photos I tend to over explain with my mark-making. My paintings feel slightly contrived and laboured.
The thing with working from photos is that the camera captures all the information for you.
Whereas when that artist works directly from life, they are showing you the scene viewed through their unique lens,
“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see” Edgar Degas
So I decided to paint some quick timed studies from life and limited myself to short timescales.
I set up some simple still lifes and started with 20-30 minutes studies and then extending to 45 minutes to an hour.
My mindset when doing these exercises was to be completely unbothered by the outcome.
The brain goes into a weird parallel universe where I’m completely in the moment and simply responding to what's in front of me without any rational thought.
I became unaware of what my hand was doing and got lost in the shapes of colour and values.
When I stopped and looked at what I’d done I found that my marks were much fresher and more spontaneous.
I realised that previously while in the process of painting, I've been thinking way too much rather than just doing.
Such was the desire to paint more of these quick still lifes that I painted several more over the following weeks and have put them in my shop on my website.
I will go back to the family photo paintings at some point but for the time being I feel that I'm really benefiting from these exercises.
Lastly, I want to tell you about my new workshops I'll be running in the new Year.
I'm collaborating with my lovely artist friend - Illustrator & Textile designer Als Butler to run classes in her beautiful 18th Century barn in the heart of the South Downs.
Painting a Portrait in Oils workshop is for artists who want to develop their portrait painting skills.
Learn how to construct the head using oil painrs, focusing on observatiom. proportions, tonal structure and colour mixing with a limited pallette
Simplifying the Figure workshop is for artists wanting to develop a more expressive and confident way of depicting people. We'll be focusing on simplification, looking at shapes of light and shadow, proportions, relationships and how to avoid unnecessary detail.
Spaces are going fast so book your spot before Christmas (sorry to mention the 'C' word!)
That's all for now, I'd love to hear your comments or questions.
Thanks so much for your support and interest,
Livvy x
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