My Creative Processes

Welcome to the Creative Learning Corner where I will be sharing tips for your creative learning and some of the techniques and approaches to my own painting practice, which will hopefully help you with yours.

To introduce myself I'd like to tell you a bit about how I create my own art. I have two preferred ways in which I create my imagery. I love to play about with all sorts of different media and techniques, but the ones I consistently go to are oil painting and using watercolour with gouache, which I sometimes combine with digital tools to create the composition. I also include a bit of mixed media in my pieces from time to time and love a bit of collage! I go through phases where I like to explore different media, however when I am wanting to create a body of work it is usually those two main methods. I will be sharing much more detail about the two in my future posts.

To give you a bit of background to my artistic experience I think I should start by telling you that I first used oils to paint with when still at school. It was introduced to me by my then art teacher and I have never really stopped painting with this medium. That was over 30 years ago now! I've always loved this medium because I feel it to be versatile and there are many ways to work with it. Oils appeal to impressionist painters, those inspired by the old masters and artists who like a bit of texture! There is so much scope for any artist to explore this medium and decide for themselves what they like the most about oil paints.

Over the years as an oil painter I have explored various ways to apply it and to start a painting. For most of those years I was in the habit of drawing out my subject matter onto my canvas using either graphite or charcoal. Whilst trying out new methods for teaching my student groups, I decided to try out sketching out the outline of my subject matter directly onto my canvas using the oil paint. This felt (at the time) alien to me! I knew it was a traditional way to start an oil painting but I had become accustomed to using graphite or charcoal and relying on the fact that these two drawing tools are easy to erase, which can feel like a sort of safety net. Painting directly onto the canvas can be a scary business! However there are advantages and disadvantages to both methods. 

Fast forward to more recent times and starting my paintings with just the paint is what I am used to. The main advantages for me are the fact that I can sketch out and block in a first opaque layer in one. I can also rectify any compositional errors as I am doing this and a line of oil direct onto a canvas can just be washed back with solvent if it happens to be in the wrong place.

As a completely different way to create from using oils, watercolour with gouache is ideal for when I am working on smaller pieces and designs that start out as floral elements created as a group, which I then scan and digitally cut out so that I have a set of single elements I can play about with. The major advantage for working like this is I can really play about and any mistakes don't need painting over! However, it is an alternative way for me to create and can never replace the experience of creating a painting from start to finish, without the use of digital tools.

This different way of working is a more accessible way for creating my designs and imagery, especially when there is no time to prepare for oil painting. The beauty of water based paints is that there is no need to carefully wash my brushes after every painting session and I can down tools and go!

So, that's how I create my art, perhaps you might like to change things up and try my methods!

Thanks for visiting the Creative Learning Corner, hope you drop by again soon.