Australian Fine Artist

Archive for February, 2016

Colour Mixing for Artists

Workshop Number Two of Five 2016

Tutor: David Chen

The Basics: Mixing Clean Colour

Why you need to understand how to use colour:

  1. Understanding colour will help you to harmonise your paintings.
  2. Using colour with the understanding of soft and hard edges will gain depth in your paintings.
  3. A clean colour is the place to start before you grey off colour for tonal paintings.
  4. The mixing from a pure colour to tonal graduations will help when applying planes to your painting which adds to the depth.
  5. The understanding of the ‘undertone’ of colours will help to create clean colours that ‘look right’.

TIP: Understanding your colours, how they work with each other and how transparent they are, will help when mixing them for glazing with a medium such as Liquin.


Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown and Humphrey Repton and the Picturesque

During the late 18th century the Picturesque became a determining factor in the development of the quintessential English landscape garden. Two men central to this development were Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716-1783) and Humphrey Repton (1752-1818) whose interpretations of the Picturesque reflect the social and political changes that were occurring, and the influx of knowledge due to the Enlightenment. Additionally, the Industrial Revolution provided an increase in wealth in the middle classes who commissioned gardens with Picturesque designs to reflect their social status. The Romanticist movement also attributed to the changes in taste towards the Picturesque landscape garden designs of Brown and Repton. Paintings such as View of Ipswich from Christchurch Park c.1746-9 (Figure 1) by Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) and later works like Wivenhoe Park, Essex, 1816 by English Romanticist artist John Constable (1776-1837) are evidence of how the Picturesque was depicted in landscape painting. The widespread debate and argument, along with the influence of the Romanticist Movement, and a host of other social and political issues initiated a trend in landscape gardens. As a result, a combination of these exemplars became instrumental in the development of the Picturesque. Brown and Repton’s adoption of the Picturesque captured the zeitgeist of 18th century England, and the broad range of influences that changed English gardens has continued their impact into the 21st century.