Wokingham Art Society
Jonathan Newey demonstrations

Visit him at www.jonathannewey.com
Pen & Wash Landscape
2008		 Return to Archive Acrylic Landscape
2011

Acrylic Landscape, 15 November 2011
For acrylic painting, Jonathan often choses Daler Rowney System 3 (student quality) and/or Cryla (artist quality, richer colour, better texture). He likes a stay-wet palette but uses capilliary matting instead of blotting paper because it can be washed (mould can be a problem if blotting paper is more than a few weeks old).

For this photo of a French farmhouse, he had decided to paint on a white canvas board, about 10" x 14".

He rarely adds water to acrylic but of course the brush should be damp. Throughout the demo he wiped the brush on a rag each time he washed it, to remove excess water before picking up more paint.
First you need to get rid of the white of the canvas. Here, where the scene is mainly blue and green, Jonathan covered the entire board with slightly diluted raw sienna (nice and warm). He scrubbed it over, using a fairly small brush with very little attempt to make it uniform (the photo may over-emphasise the unevenness).

Then started the drawing. This will all be covered over eventually, so its colour is not important (here, I think, he was using Paynes Grey, again with a litttle water). It is a rapid process, giving you the opportunity to re-compose the picture. In this case the buildings were made a little more prominent and the sky smaller than they were in the photo.		 The easel cast a shadow here.
Although he mixes his colours on the palette, using a knife, he says it's important not to mix too thoroughly - subtle differences are interesting.

The sky was Cobalt and titanium white, put on with a smallish filbert, 3/8" or 1/2". He likes filberts because they are good for detail, for lines and for covering larger areas.

Above the tree tops, raw sienna, softened with a little Paynes grey warmed the sky. "Not too much grey, or you will get green". He put this along the tree line and drew it up into the blue, to stop them mixing too much (again to avoid green)
For the trees themselves he dabbed in only roughly-mixed cadmium yellow and cobalt blue with the side of the brush (filberts are good for this). A touch of Paynes grey darkens greens very nicely.

For the grassy areas Jonathan used the same greens, lightened with white. A touch of burnt sienna and white warmed some patches, with more of the sienna where signs of soil were to show. Where he wanted small highlights in the vegetation he still mixed a little burnt sienna with the white to stop it from looking too cold.

More yellow is needed in the foreground but darker areas on either side give balance. Extra dark goes behind the pale buildings, too, for light-against-dark contrast.
The buildings needed a smaller brush and, to get sharp edges, a little more water in the brush. The colours are the same, but changing the proportions of grey, white and sienna gives good roof colours and clear distinction between the buildings' sunlit and shadowy sides. Although you can barely see it from a distance, the brush strokes clarify the slope of the roofs.

Demonstrators often remind us that it helps in holding a picture together if you have the same colours in different places. Jonathan certainly drove this idea home by putting hints of grass green and earth into both sky and trees, as well as touching sky blue into the grass and bushes.
In fact, during the final 20 minutes he kept on revisiting nearly everywhere in the picture:
adding white and blue (or yellow) into the sky;
darkening some of the shadows;
lightening the distant trees with a mix of glazing medium, white and cobalt ("don't make glazes with water");
adding more light-green touches to the foliage;
drawing in one foreground tree with the side of the brush (and converting a second foreground tree into plants, for compositional reasons and foreground colour);
growing greenery along the front of the building;
repainting the small grassy fields above the nearest roof (not just adjusting their colour but darkening the bases of the trees behind them - "shadows create light")
and with a small brush adding windows and creating a door (but leaving out the cattle, for some reason).
As usual, I remember several of his more general bits of advice, too:
Mix your own Paynes Grey: ultramarine blue and burnt sienna.
For acrylic paint use acrylic (nylon-bristle) brushes - wash and dry them very thoroughly.
Acrylic paint can easily ruin brushes, even if you do put the ones you are not using in water, so don't use expensive watercolour ones for acrylic.
Don't store finished acrylics face to face - they stick together, even if thoroughly dry.
Since oils give even richer colours (?) you might use them for final detail on top of acrylic.
Thanks, Jonathan, for another interesting and useful evening.

Pen & Wash Landscape
2008		 Return to Archive Acrylic Landscape
2011
Pen and Wash landscape, 18 March 2008
Jonathan started by telling us something about his background. He is a 4th generation artist based in Reading, who has been teaching art for 16 years and has been a professional artist for the last four years. At home he often paints in acrylics, but today he demonstrated a pen and wash painting of a scene from the French Alps.

He tends to use Pilot DR pens to draw directly onto the watercolour paper, as he feels using a pen helps improve drawing due to the inability to erase mistakes.

Starting the drawing he concentrated on the houses, trees and lakeside in the centre of the painting. He didn’t do much drawing away from the centre, but used the pen to hold the painting together. Drawing a tree to hide a small mistake, he said that he likes to go over the same line several times to get a sketchy effect.

Distance was created by using less drawing and fading the lines, and the water of the lake itself wasn’t drawn as Jonathan likes to create reflections in pure watercolour.

On location Jonathan uses Winsor & Newton watercolours in pans, and tube colours are used in the studio. John mixed most of his colours in advance, which allowed him to paint vigorously once started. He used quinacridone gold, ultramarine and burnt sienna for most of the painting, adding a small amount of transparent yellow for some sunlit grass in the middle ground.

Painting the first wash Jonathan concerned himself with outlining areas, shapes and blocks without trying to delineate individual trees. He didn’t worry about back runs as the pen work tends to attract attention, but did try to leave out white shapes for white tree trunks in the picture.

He advised to vary colours in larger areas to break them. He then painted the buildings, and went back over trees that needed to be darker. He used negative shapes to bring light coloured trees forward and added shadows around the light buildings to make them stand out more. He then worked on the water reflections, wetting the areas first and keeping the shapes simplified. He dropped in dark colours which diffused on the wet paper, and later lifted out the reflections of the lighter buildings.

Finally, whilst warning himself not to ‘fiddle’, Jonathan went back over some areas with his pen to re-establish areas that were lost by the painting but without creating a ‘cartoon’ effect. The end result was a lovely atmospheric painting and a lot of learning about working in pen and watercolour.

Annette Debruijn.

Pen & Wash Landscape
2008		 Return to Archive Acrylic Landscape
2011
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