APRIL 7TH - FIONA PEART - WATERCOLOUR/PENCIL
Our chair opened the meeting with some announcements in connection with the forthcoming visit to the Patchings Art Festival in Nottingham and the progress of our website. The website will incorporate a gallery where paintings can be displayed and an application form has been dawn up for members wishing to place their work in the gallery. Our visiting speaker, Fiona Peart, was introduced to give her presentation on watercolour pencil techniques and she started by explaining the characteristics of the different types of soluble pencil.
All of the products she was about to discuss can be used dry or wet but, importantly, their colour only becomes light fast when used wet. Not all of the products were pencils in the accepted sense; the Aquatone product was in stick form, much like a crayon. This could be applied directly to the paper or deposited onto a palette for application with a wetted brush. The Watercolour product was a conventional water-soluble pencil and the other variants were the Graphitint pencil, which contained a mixture of graphite and colour pigment and the Inktense, which, as the name suggests, provided a range of vivid colours. This last product was unique in that it has a waterproof surface after it has dried out, similar to an acrylic paint surface. This means that it cannot be removed or modified but that it can be overpainted.
Fiona demonstrated the range of marks which could be made with the pencils and how they could be applied to a wetted surface or carefully wetted after application using a sable or squirrel hair brush. A method that she favoured and recommended was to create a palette on the border of the work surface with a thick application of the chosen colours. The colours can then be picked up with a wetted brush for working on the painting.
Fiona did some figure sketches before starting a busy scene of the Millennium Bridge with pedestrians, against a background of London landmarks, including St. Paul’s. Using the Watercolour pencils she drew in the buildings and the pedestrians, mixing her dry colours on the surface to get the required final colour. The dry surface was gently wetted to bring out the colours and render them light fast before preparing a wet palette of Inktense to complete the figures and add some detailed touches to the buildings.
The second demonstration painting was a flower study and Fiona started by showing us a brush design that she had developed; this was a flat brush in which the end was cut diagonally rather than square. Making a stroke with varying pressure made a mark where one edge was straight but the width varied with the pressure, a shape that is characteristic of leaves and flower petals. Using her Aquatone palette, Fiona made some preliminary washes and then went on to paint in the rose blossoms, buds and foliage before using her stippling brush to render the texture of some buddleia blossoms and the centres of the rose blossoms. Some finishing touches on the background successfully completed the second of her vivid paintings and the audience showed their appreciation for an entertaining and informative presentation.
David Price
