Tabla de contenidos para Issue 9 Volume 2 en Artists Back to Basics

There really is nothing quite as exciting as opening the lid of a new wooden box to reveal the resonating beautiful colours of pastels, they almost whisper “potential”. Artists love pastels because of their extraordinary colour range and for their immediacy and ease of use. Pastels are made of pure dry pigment suspended in a binder (gum arabic, tragacanth, or methyl cellulose) and moulded into sticks. The softness and dryness of pastel colours allows the artist to control the colour applied to paper using blending or scuffing techniques. Pastels have a very high degree of permanence, but it is important that they may be “fixed” with an archival fixative spray to prevent the powder rubbing off. Gian Paolo Lomazzo wrote in 1584 that Leonado Da Vinci invented the pastel drawing…

My approach to artworks is primarily influenced by both the subject matter and the medium I am using. Nothing can be truer than the saying ‘out of sight, out of mind’ when it is applied to our marine environment. While we are drawn to its shores and frolic in its waves, mostly we only see the sky reflected on its surface and close our eyes tight when we go under. This blindness has engendered an appalling ignorance and lack of concern for the waters that constitute most of Planet Earth. I hope that my paintings will help others to open their eyes and look beneath the waves … and then maybe to think more about what we put in our marine environment; what we take from it and what we…

We’ll limit our brushes to two! This will encourage us to investigate the capabilities of these brushes, hopefully in a deeper way than you have before. Let’s start. Dish out a healthy slab of each of the following (in this order from left to right): • Burnt Umber • Dioxazine Purple • Ultramarine Blue • Pthalo Blue • Cadmium Yellow Medium • Alizaren or Cadmium Red • White (LOTS) I recommend starting with a smaller canvas. Build up to a larger canvas as you develop confidence. Draw a roughly horizontal line across the middle of your canvas. Remember, this is not a painting, this is an exercise. You choose whether you want the orientation landscape or portrait. Brush Exercise One Pick up a large dollop of white using your size…

Ok, in the last article we got through three of the main hand tools necessary to draw in freehand. To re-cap these are: Staedtler Mars Lumograph 2B drafting pencils, a stock of vinyl erasers cut into strips and wrapped in paper, and a surgically clean, sharp knife to not only slice up your rubbers into strips initially but to trim the end of the rubber every time a completely clean eraser is called for during the course of a drawing (a lot). Sharpening gear You’ll also need a good quality pencil sharpener for general use as well as a very sharp knife of some kind (old wooden handled kitchen knives with the blade cut off short are great as the handle feels good in your hand and the blade is…

This particular painting was commissioned for someone moving overseas. The scene depicts the view from their family home. The client wanted the dam, windmill and gum tree in the painting. The swamp hens in the foreground are frequent visitors to the house. They are local characters. Given a chance, they will make a mess on the verandah and steal the apples from under the apple tree. For the painting I used my preferred medium which is gouache and watercolour on Arches watercolour paper. STEP ONE Before I began the drawing, I washed the paper blue and let it dry completely. I accurately drew the swamp hen in first – from a series of photographs and some live sketches .STEP TWO Once I was happy with the drawing of the bird,…

How To Achieve An Iridescent Colour • Experiment with your colours and application techniques before beginning your painting. Do a colour study of a shell to practice the wet in wet technique. Ensure the paper is quite damp before applying paint. Let the colours blend together as you do not want any hard edges. • The same colours can be used for both the upper and inner sections of the shell, but the inner shell has very diluted washes.…

• The rigid rule when oil painting is to paint from lean to fat. I achieve this by upping the amount of oil in my medium as I progress. • The choice of the ground colour helps provide some cohesion to the work and significantly affects the final work. • For the initial stages (where overpainting is likely), tonking (placing a sheet of newspaper on wet work and gently rubbing the back of the paper) removes brush-strokes and texture that may interfere with later layers. Depending on the amount of paint to be removed, this can be done straight away or after it has partially dried. • Applying paint and using a rag to rub it in and remove excess paint, is an effective means of toning down backgrounds and…

• If you want to do a realistic painting of flowers rather than just a loose interpretation, then make sure you are accurate in the number of petals and stamens depicted. This hibiscus has a huge number of stamens but some flowers are characterised by five or seven only. Plants are identified by these distinguishing features. • When painting flowers, start by painting the least conspicuous petal and work your way up to the most prominent petal. This gives you an opportunity to practice your technique and get the colours right before you tackle the focal point that will be the most noticeable part of the painting. • When painting petals, make sure brushstrokes follow the direction of veins and crinkles.…

THE LOVE OF A GOOD BRUSH A good brush – what makes you love it? Have you ever stopped to consider how your favourite brush came to be in you hand? The making of a brush is a skilled craft, even on a mass production level. An expert brush maker rarely trims the pointed ends of the brushes, but will comb and arrange the hairs by hand and adjust them within the ferrule (the metal grip) to give just the right shape, even utilising the natural curve of some bristles so that they form a gentle inwards curve called an ‘interlocking bristle’. Everything else also comes into play – the quality of the Gum Arabic (the glue) that holds the hairs together, the brush handle (the wood type, the handle…

Elena Parashko Gallery was established in 2004 – initially as an online gallery at www.elenaparashko.com – and has since evolved into much more. Beginning with an online gallery was an affordable and manageable way to establish myself as an emerging artist. Having a website means that location and distance is no obstacle as people from anywhere in the world can view and purchase my artworks. My collection of paintings online also acts as a virtual portfolio for anyone who would like to review my work. This includes other galleries who are considering representing me and clients who wish to commission me to paint something special for them. The online collection is a good representation of my unique style and the type of artwork I create. Not everyone is comfortable with…

About the Author Elena Parashko is an award winning artist, teacher and writer from Sydney, Australia. Her artwork is held in private and corporate collections throughout the world and is represented by several galleries including Australian Art Sales and Hamilton Island Art Gallery on the Great Barrier Reef. Elena’s paintings have been featured in numerous art and home decorating magazines and she also writes for art publications in Australia, the UK and USA. Elena is a trained teacher with over 20 years teaching experience. She has a Certificate in Visual Arts, a Bachelor of Education and Masters in Adult Education. She teaches weekly art classes in Box Hill, NSW and each year conducts a week of seascape painting workshops at Daku Resort in Fiji. For those who cannot attend her…

CRYLA ARTISTS’ HEAVY BODY ACRYLIC COLOURS FROM S&S WHOLESALE Artist Tom Robb prepared this article about a wonderful artists’ product which he tested recently. The article first appeared in the November issue of ‘the Artist’ magazine and it has been reproduced with their permission. Daler-Rowney introduced the first Artists’ Acrylic Colours to Europe in 1963. Since then there has been a constant programme of technical improvement, and today Cryla continues to surpass every international standard. The Cryla Artists’ Heavy Body Acrylic Colours’ main characteristic is the thick buttery consistency. The paints have a very uniform and even eggshell finish across the entire range of colours and there is minimal colour shift from wet to dry. The consistency is such that when applied in heavy impasto, with brush or knife, the…