Wokingham Art Society Max Hale demonstrations Return to Archive

Still Life in Acrylic, 16 August 2011 Visit him at www.maxhaleart.co.uk or email info@maxhaleart.co.uk for all tutor activities

It was good of Max to step in at short notice when our original demonstrator was unable to come. He gave us a brief outline of his background: Art School (with an inspirational tutor in Ken Howard), some commercial art (illustration, and an excellent introduction to the value of working fast), some photography and finally the big decision to go out on his own with painting, teaching and demonstrating (also valuable experience, because it improves your speed and spontaneity). Before the demo started he spent quite a time arranging his bits and bobs and lighting them to his satisfaction. Layout and lighting are vital in still life: to avoid awkward gaps, get levels right (why else the book under the big pot?), to have an interesting variety of shapes etc. For acrylics, Max works on ordinary hardboard prepared with several coats of gesso and a dark ground.

He used no acrylic mediums, preferring to use paint straight from the tube, and a brush just moistened with water. A stay-wet palette makes the paint too wet and he finds that paint stays workable for a long time on a solid palette if it is stored in an airtight container. For the initial drawing Max first marked the centre lines of the image and then discovered the scale: holding his arm at full stretch and measuring with his thumb on the brush handle. Surprise, surprise! He had laid everything out so that it was a simple 2:1 conversion! He started drawing very roughly with the brush, concentrating on general shapes but repeatedly checking that the relationships between them were right:- gaps, negative spaces, intersections, angles (carried across with the brush handle). You'll notice that after I took the first photo he slightly moved the cup and the bottle to get rid of the gap and make the cup handle break the line down the edge of the bottle. An interesting thing in this drawing stage was that for regular objects he often drew the whole thing - even the bits that were hidden. This is particularly important for the top and bottom ellipses - "Draw them several times in the air before you let the brush touch the paper".

Once he started filling areas in, tone jumped straight up to its vitally important position - much more than accurate colour. "Half-open eyes show up tonal differences". He used a fairly wide, 3/4" or maybe 1", flat brush throughout, making strokes that rarely exceeded one and a half brush-widths in length. This meant that the whole process was one of dab-dab-dab, moving to different parts of the picture all the time. Quite early on he began to notice the mass of different colours that were reflected in the shiny objects. You don't need to be accurate or complete with these. In fact he claimed that a photographically perfect image leaves nothing to the imagination - much better to make people intrigued by leaving much out and distorting colour, so that they keep looking for fresh interpretations of the work. Max used the same broad flat brush nearly all the time, rinsing and wiping it frequently to keep the colours (and the palette) fresh. He avoids black for the usual reasons (that's his unlit shoulder you can see here!).

The initial drawing was painted with broad lines and it was not until he was about half way through that he had enough of the detail to want to make these edges more precise. He defined the shapes of the bottles by careful painting of the background. Quite early on he started to put highlight reflections in (quite aware that he might paint over them later). But he continually flitted between highlights and shadows as he checked and re-checked angles and other relationships between objects. He kept stressing the need to look: "You should spend at least 2/3 of the time looking at the subject - not at the painting!" Max is also convinced of the value of the easel. It makes you more active, you see the work from a better angle and it's easy to step back and see it from the distance of a normal viewer. An important side effect of this is that after you have taken one of the essential breaks in another room you see it with a stranger's eyes as you return. Towards the end, smaller and smaller marks were being made, all over the picture, reinforcing shadows and highlights (but still with the wide flat brush)

As usual, as the painting moved towards completion I found all I could do was pick brief notes from his commentary: Make sure the background colours are reflected in the glass Make sure shadows tell the viewer that the objects are not floating in the air Don't live with your mistakes - they're easy to correct in acrylic The shadows in the curved objects are also curved. "Feel the curves and where they disappear, darker" Paint shadows in a colour complementary to the colour they are on "Don't stay in your comfort zone - experiment" "Ah! Time's up. I think we're almost there! If I'd been doing a studio still life instead of a demo I'd have spent considerable longer on most of the steps, especially the earlier ones (layout and drawing). And so another inspiring evening came to an end, with Chris Parry saying what so many of us must have been thinking: "I really must try to paint more like that"

Watercolour Portrait, 15 March 2011 Visit him at www.maxhaleart.co.uk or email info@maxhaleart.co.uk for all tutor activities
	There was Max with his sitter. A spotlight on her left. There was an easel and a piece of paper taped to an upright board. No preparatory drawing. A not very big pot of water, a few brushes and three or four minute specks of watercolour squeezed out onto a large white dinner plate. Max said he planned to give his sitter a rest every 20 minutes or so. The first session was the drawing. The paper was about 16" x 24": "Paint as large as you can", he said. It was just taped to the board : "It will go all wrinkly but it flattens as it dries". Tonight he was using Fabriano NOT, although he generally prefers the more expensive Arches Rough. A harder pencil might be preferable in the studio, too, but he was using a soft, 5B or 6B, retractable one for the demo, so that we could see it.
He just started cold, sketching the outline of hair and neck, freehand. At first I thought he was not going to mention all the conventional "rules" for laying out portraits (you know: "this distance equals that one and it lines up with so-and-so") but I began to feel more comfortable when he drew in a centre-line and an eye-line ("to get the basic shape right") and introduced a few such comments, like the corners of the mouth being below the pupils. But these were not (unless silently or subconsciously) his main considerations. "Look", he said. "Measure, horizontally and vertically". "Check relative distances". "Check angles". "Plot the relationships between nose and cheek, eyes and bridge of nose (both crucially important), cheek and collar, ear and collar". "Note how far back the ear is - much closer to the back of the head than you think - and do get its outside shape right". "Repeat measurements, just to be sure". "A likeness requires accuracy - it's just a bonus when you are working under the pressure of a demo".
	I obviously wasn't in exactly the same spot as Max when I took the snap of her. It just goes to show how vital it is to return to exactly the same place when you are checking portrait dimensions. When Max was happy with the drawing he went round it with a rubber, cleaning up smudges and getting rid of unnecessary lines. He concentrated first on getting darks down: in the hair, under the chin, behind the left cheek, in the shadow of the nose etc. Max is not one who thinks it necessary to imitate the natural colours of his model: the early darks were a mix of Alizarin Crimson and French Ultra but Cadmium Yellow was added for shadows on skin or more blue for the greyer areas. He worked very wet, using almost exclusively a large (1 inch?) thin flat brush - and worrying hardly at all about runs. Such a brush is just as good for thin lines and tiny touches as it is for wide strokes of colour. Although he was concentrating on building up the darks, Max kept reminding us that they define the lights. Several times he realised that paint had reached into highlight areas. Prompt removal followed, with tissue or damp brush: "Make sure it's dry before you go back into it".
Confidence is everything with watercolour. The way he spoke of getting the darks established at the beginning got me worrying that they were not dark enough or not well-enough aligned with the accurate drawing. But I hadn't realised how many glazes he would apply. To make lights brighter he repeatedly painted more darks around the edges of the lights, the brush jumping from one part of the picture to another to maintain overall harmony (and stop too much concentration on one area). As work progressed he produced a smaller box palette and clean water, and during the interval he even cleaned up the plate, so that fresh paint could be used. Cerulean Blue was added for the scarf and the brooch on the back of the head but, in to keep things cohesive, the same colour was also introduced into the shadows. Visible pencil marks were removed and great care went into making tiny adjustments to eyes and mouth. The hair, the nose shadow and the background were re-glazed more than once, not just to get them darker but also to define the light edges more accurately.
Max said that if one in ten of your pictures is a success, that's good going. Be brave. Keep changing your style, so as not to get into a rut, but limit your palette. It's particularly important to paint when you don't feel like it. Paint the same subject many times. A "real" watercolour portrait, as opposed to a demo, would normally take him 2 or 3 hours, non-stop, twice the time he had available tonight. One in oils or acrylics would be 2 or 3 weeks. This was certainly an impressive achievement in so short a time - and it gave us a most inspiring evening . . . . . . and look: the runs don't spoil it!

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