Somerset West was the setting for the biggest international art event in South African history. The IWSSA (International Watercolor Society of South Africa) recently hosted the 1st International Watermedia Festival, Colors of the Rainbow Nation, which featured 150 artists from 26 different countries. The exhibition itself took place from the 4-16 September at the Art Curator Gallery, Lourensford Wine Estate, but that was certainly not the only element of interest surrounding this event.
Coloured Pencil seems like a medium anyone should be able to master quite easily. It is – aside from crayons – most probably one of the first mediums you were introduced to as a child. It’s simple right – buy a set of 120 colours (how many can one possibly need anyway), get a good quality paper and TADA! You are all set to be a coloured pencil genius.
What makes watercolour such a challenging medium is that you can’t cover up mistakes as you can in other painting mediums. As watercolour is translucent and requires that you work from lightest to darkest values, it is extremely important to preserve your whites. In some cases, you can just paint around the shapes but when it comes to more complex or very small areas it becomes nearly impossible. This is where the masking fluid comes in. Essentially masking fluid is liquid latex which you can paint onto areas you want to preserve and protect from paint – and once it’s dry it can be peeled off, revealing the untouched whites below. It’s a bit like magic!
Pastels are a wonderful medium to work with. You only need to look at Degas’s sublime use of pastels in his ballerina paintings. You can work them delicately or with boldness and the colour is always powerful. The pure pigment in artist’s quality pastels is a pleasure to behold. It is a pity then to use poor quality paper on which to paint. I have tried many papers over the years of varying quality. Recently I tried out two pastel pads from Canson. Their Mi-Teintes pastel paper pads and Touch pads.
It’s probably the scariest three-letter word out there if you are just starting out in drawing realistic animals. I remember looking at fur and thinking it couldn’t be too hard. Just a bunch of lines right?
This may seem self-evident, but many beginners try to avoid this learning curve. Often tube colours are used without adjusting them very much. This can lead to unfortunate colour choices in your paintings.
As some of you may know from a previous post of mine, I have only quite recently (over the past year) rekindled my love for creating art after a gap of about twenty years. Not twenty planned years of taking a break from art, but just twenty years where life happened… and art didn’t.
We all have our Achilles heel and I’ll admit that art supplies are mine. It’s therefore quite fair to admit that I probably didn’t need the Caran D’Ache Pastel Pencil set I bought. Well, that is until I had used them. It is now quite fair to admit that I pretty much cannot do without them!
Having a favourite pen is pretty normal, but it might seem bizarre that some creatives can even become obsessed with smaller, seemingly less significant tools of the trade such as rulers, sharpeners, and (today’s topic) erasers!
You have to hand it to Daler Rowney for coming up with a brilliant name for their new gilding paste. For those of you who remember Sean Connery and the Goldfinger movie the link will be particularly appealing. But Daler Rowney have made Goldfinger the hero this time and rightly so. For the first time, I actually look forward to gilding. Let us take a closer look at this useful product.
