Wokingham Art Society Back to Archive

Jake Winkle Demonstrations
www.jakewinkle.co.uk or email: jakewinkle@sky.com

Watercolour landscape, Dinan, June 2010 - Watercolour racehorses, April 2009

Watercolour Landscape, Dinan, 15/6/2010 Maddy's 2009 write-up, below, described Jake's background, so that needn't be repeated.
It was good to welcome Jake back. This time he came armed with a small photo from Dinan and a pre-prepared pencil drawing on a piece of 140 lb rough Aquarelle watercolour paper (on the back, which he slightly prefers).	Enough had been drawn to make sure that the composition and perspective were OK. This is very necessary for Jake's direct painting style. He applies paint boldly, relying on white space to avoid unwanted mixing.
Contrary to traditional watercolour practice he has taught himself to work from dark to light and to apply the paint with very little water. He had squirted paint from tubes into his paintbox/palette, so that he could pick it up with quite a creamy texture. "You're competing with acrylic painters". For most of the evening he used only one brush, a large round sable (about size 12) held well away from the ferrule end. This forces him to make confident single strokes, almost never going back in and modifying the initial mark. He often uses all the paint he has picked up on the brush, ending with dry-brush texture (look at his very first mark, one bold stroke under the sloping roof).
	The initial darks were mixes of french ultra, sepia and a little red, later modified with violet and raw sienna. These were continually re-mixed, to add interest. Jake reduces the picture from a large number of small shapes to a small number of larger ones, like the top left upper housefront. He does this by letting similar colours touch and run into each other (lost edges) whilst the outside of the shape is crisp against the white paper (found edge). For the distant building, cobalt blue cooled the colour but there were still quite dark shadows. Note how he paints the shadows before the line of the edge of the roof. Shapes merge in shadows - lost edges between slightly varied colour-mixes work wonders here.
Jake commented that whereas drawing should be made by reference to the original scene/photo, painting should be affected more by how it develops. However, for this drawing he had changed the figures in the photo. As the shadows were brought down into this area they avoided the figure outlines. This was done with the usual panache. "Accept the marks you make - don't fiddle or labour over them" Note, too, how he exaggerated the apparent (not real) difference between the pair of windows on the right
	He doesn't like to lift paint out (destroys spontaneous crispness). However, as he was painting the sky (very dilute cobalt blue, because there's so little of it) there was a run of paint right down the picture. He immediately took this out with his handful of tissue and I was struck by the way he went straght in with a brush of clean water to spread any residual blue over the white areas it had crossed. Still roughly avoiding the outlines of the figures, he applied thin washes (not glazing over areas that might not yet be totally dry) to the walls etc. For the road surface he applied a mixture of alizarin, cobalt and yellow with a big squirrel brush, darker in the foreground, and carried it up into the wall on the left.
The painting ended with a flurry of detail, all applied rapidy with the tip of the sable brush: more dark features the blue shadows curtains window glazing bars and shutters hints at wall structures ("alsmost any sort of meaningless mark can be used to break up flat areas") the people (see more below) the central drain gulley subtle touches of blue into the roofs and a few touches of white gouache for extra highlights until, suddenly, the stop-before-you-start-fiddling point was reached.

At the end there was time for a little tutorial about figures in landscapes: All heads at the same height Figures very rapidly get shorter Adjacent figures fuse at shoulders A little "V" of white differentiates fronts from backs "One-and-a-half-legs" create motion Arms not important Shadows, radiating from light source (top left smudge), add depth and perspective.
This brought the evening to a most interesting and satisfactory close Sam Dauncey

Watercolour landscape, Dinan, June 2010 - Back to Archive

Watercolour Racehorses, 21/4/2009
Jake Winkle studied Art at Bournemouth University and the Art and Music at Brighton. He writes articles for the art magazines and will be making a DVD tutorial in the Autumn. His wife has just taken over the Kolinsky Sable Brush Company; Jake had some with him for sale, as well as many stunning greetings cards. His style is very loose but bold, making almost abstract marks in places, to make the composition more interesting. The viewer's eye fills in the information. The chosen painting was a horserace, with horses bunched together, which Jake had already drawn on 140 lb. Arches watercolour paper. He found Arches paper took water more evenly that Bockingford, which dried patchily. The paper was stretched and not only taped to his board, but also stapled! With a hake brush, Jake first wet the paper, using diagonal strokes and missing little patches. Then, with a squirrel mop, he dropped in cobalt blue along the top, graduating into raw sienna and then burnt umber, all used very wet. This was allowed to dry flat before continuing.	Jake likes to paint the composition in one go, treating the subject matter as shapes rather than objects, and linking the shapes with variations of the same colour mixes as he goes. He squeezes tube paints into his palette before each session, to achieve a juicy mix more easily. The sunny side of the jockeys' clothes had been masked out and the masking fluid was removed once the background wash was dry. He suggested pouring a small amount of masking fluid into a container, and dipping the brush into soap before dipping into the masking fluid; this protects the brush and also the rest of the fluid in the bottle from becoming contaminated with soap. With strong mixes of all sorts of dark colours to accentuate the tones of the horses, and a size 12 brush, Jake worked from left to right, linking the horses but varying the colour as he went. He used warm colours for the leading horses and cool ones for the ones at the back.
Half Time
He painted with light strokes so that the marks didn't become repetitive. This created more interest, especially around the horses' legs, which were almost abstract. He liked to make a warm grey from a mix of burnt sienna and violet. Once the horses were painted, he started to put in the jockeys' clothes with bright colours - alizarin crimson, cobalt blue, Winsor blue and Winsor green and lemon yellow.	The finishing touches were to quickly indicate some shadows on the ground and a few splatters of dark brown really made the horses look as though they were moving and kicking up the track. As you can see from the end result, everyone was fascinated to watch Jake work his magic.
Full Time
Madeline Hawes

Top of page