During the last bank holiday weekend in May, I had a display of work at The Lincolnshire Heritage Centre East Kirkby Lincolnshire, which I have to say was a marvellous weekend despite the weather doing all it could to spoil the event. As you will already be aware the Lancaster performs it’s Taxi runs twice each day, however to make the event very nostalgic there was a large re-enactor presence, with folks travelling from as far away as Holland to take part. A second event is scheduled for 26th and 27th July “Architects of Peace”. Well worth keeping a note in your diary, I hope myself to be attending with my sales stall.
Another local event I am looking forward to attending is the Wickenby Airfield Fly-in 28th-29th June. If you are in the area why not pop along, a very warm welcome awaits from the organisers of this event.

Art tip of the month

As promised in Mays newsletter I would try to provide an art tip for each month, so I hope this will be the start of many.

Many people who are starting to paint, and also a lot of people who are working up from just doing pencil drawings to coloured work, have problems with getting the colours right. This might sound quite strange, grass is green, sky is blue and who doesn’t know that! The result of a lot of first attempts, is simply the blues don’t look right and the greens don’t look right. They are usually way too gory or acidy. The problem here stems from the concept of actually painting what they know and not what they see. Let me explain...

Grass is indeed green, but only perfect grass, and we are talking in fact of the grass blades being green. We are not painting lots of grass blades when we paint a cricket scene, we are painting a large area of a field that once was quite perfect, but for our painting we are depicting an area of grass that is well worn and distressed to the limit sometimes. Grass with weeds in it, massive tracts of mud and or soil almost red with the contamination of clay in it. As we walk in a field, look at the effect of shadows, believe me they are everywhere, and I don’t just mean shadows cast by trees and people etc. some of the most effective textures in an area of grass can be the shadows cast by little lumps, slight undulations that yield interesting patterns on the field. Look at the friendly in my landscape gallery, there is actually very little green in the field. Look at the way the horizontal patches of shade in the grass get a little closer together as they appear further up the canvas, this all helps to give the illusion of distance. Some of the colours I use to add to a grassed area are naples yellow, yellow ochre. burnt sienna and of course white. A very small amount of paynes grey is always useful to knock a colour back and take away the naïve straight from the tube effect, but that will be dealt with in my next tip of the month.

Due to a heavy commitment to preparing and attending events in May progress has been slow on the artwork shown in my previous newsletter, but here is the progress on the little Lizzy. Nearly finished but to add flaps down, slats open and a little more work to do around the cockpit area. So I will hold the rest back for following month. I have also promised myself I would paint a pure landscape, some thing I really enjoy doing after the rigid complexity of aviation artwork, don’t worry aviation fans I am not doing too many.

Meet Robin and see his work: