art

Finished pictures by Dot and Tracy

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Dot continued to work on her Art Deco lady at home by changing the background from lots of small geometric shapes to larger ones. This has made the lady much more prominent. Lovely use of colours too, very striking.

Dot completed her orangutan pastel picture from the last session which was the pastel workshop. She’s added more hair around the head, beard and on the body using several orange and red pastels colours.

Tracy finished her orangutan pastel picture by adding more gingery colours to the body hair and and taking time on all the wrinkles and highlights on the face flanges. She particularly enjoyed creating the orangutan’s hands and using pipe lagging to soften the greens in the background.

Good work ladies, thank you for finishing your pictures for us to see!

If anyone else completes paintings or pictures from the pastel workshop, please send photos to Tracy or Steve to add to the blog.

May 2025

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Hope you’re enjoying the warmer weather but not getting too hot. Lovely to set up your drawing and painting equipment in the garden to enjoy the fine weather.

If you didn’t pay your yearly subs all in one go at the beginning of the year the next payment of £28 is due at the beginning of this month, which cover the next four months. Please see previous emails from Steve of how to pay this amount. Thank you :o)

This month the suggested subject is for both the Wednesday and the Saturday sessions, but with a slight difference. But if you prefer your own subject that’s absolutely fine.

Wednesday 14th – 7-9pm – Portraits

Many of you love drawing and painting portraits but lots of us find portraits very challenging! Choose any person, male or female, child or adult and create your picture in any medium. Don’t do the whole figure but head and shoulders or just the head.

VE Day 80th anniversary commemorations are on next week so maybe draw or paint a portrait of military personnel, men or women from that time, or their portrait when older.

Info about next week from the VE80 website… www.ve80.com

Saturday 24th – 10am to 3pm – Portraits – the Diversity of Humanity

Using any medium draw or paint any man, woman or child who is not of your ethnicity.

The United Nations had an exhibition in 2019 called ‘The World in Faces – One People. One World. One Love’ with 30 photographs by artist photographer Alexander Khimushin and it’s now available to view online… www.un.org/en/exhibits/exhibit/world-in-faces

Further photos have been released by the photographer (some are duplicates)… www.boredpanda.com/the-world-in-faces-project-diversity-of-the-world-through-the-portraits-of-its-people/fbclid=IwY2xjawKAht9leHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFDaUR3REtMRURXaFpXcnEyAR5k7hAnY3_nciwzfFwGSW_LgzyszKfwOtWswTviSFqCz5qD_JUGqO37qxTjAg_aem_R2FkZVAoRtWERVULE-3ypQ

Alexander Khimushin’s website… www.khimushin.com

They’re amazing photos but bring your own reference photos along if you prefer.

If you can’t come to the sessions but want to try the subjects at home, please send photos of your pictures to Tracy or Steve for putting on this blog.

Paul Hinks – soft pastel workshop – April 2025 – Saturday

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18 members attended Paul Hinks’ 5 hour soft pastel workshop and 2 members came along to paint their own subject. Soft pastels for some was a totally new medium and a day of learning for all.

Paul talked about pastel paper and different makes of soft pastel sticks and pastel pencils that he has used or uses now. Pipe lagging and paper stumps can be used to blend pastels and an ordinary plastic rubber can lift pastel from the paper. We were shown how to add a grid to a photo on an iPad using an app called ‘CopyIt The Grid Drawing Method’, which costs £9.99 from the Apple App Store, and how useful the greyscale tonal chart is for finding the tonal value of an area of a picture.

Paul had asked which wild animals the members would like to create in pastels and the top three animals requested were an orangutan, lynx and elephant, with a crocodile also suggested as you don’t see many in pictures. Using a large sheet of white Pastelmat paper he divided the sheet in 4 and used each quarter to concentrate on an animal.

With the orangutan Paul showed us how us how to complete the initial drawing and then add colours and shapes to achieve the texture of the hair and flanges. On the lynx we were shown how to achieve likeness of the fluffy ear hairs by using several colours of pastel pencil. The crocodile had scale shapes added and on the elephant we saw how to use dark pastel to create the trunk’s wrinkly shapes. Such a brilliant way to show all 4 animals in one go. Here’s the sheet at the end of the session…

The workshop started in a structured way as we coloured backgrounds and started sketching but soon we worked at different paces as some began adding pastel slowly and others confidently dived in with their pastels. Paul walked around several times to give advice to everyone individually and was a very personable and patient tutor as we could ask him anything and he helped us. Some members brought in their own wild animal reference pictures and he tailored his advice to each person.

Have a look at his accounts on Facebook as ‘Paul Hinks Art’ and Instagram as ‘paulhinksart’ to see his other artwork and commissions as they are amazing. Please give him a follow to see new works as they are posted.

Several photos were taken of members’ work at lunchtime as they left their desks to get another tea or coffee, but not all are shown. These photos show the many different makes of pastels being used and how we were a bit messy!

At the end of the session all the pictures were placed along the ledge at the side of the hall for all to see. The photos are grouped by similar animal, with individual ones at the end. Some are finished and others will be completed at home, so please send your photos to Tracy or Steve when finished. No one did the elephant’s head and full trunk, so will anyone give it a go at home?

Thank you, Paul, for such an informative and enjoyable workshop, we all had a marvellous day learning from you! We hope you will return for another workshop with us.

May’s sessions will be posted on Thursday 1st and the next session at the hall will be on Wednesday May 14th 7-9pm.

Art Deco – March 2025 – Saturday

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Last month many of the artists liked painting to the natural Art Nouveau theme and this month we decided that bold, geometric Art Deco was just as interesting!

Eighteen members drew and painted images inspired by New York skyscrapers. Clarice Cliff pottery designs, elegant ladies by the artist Tamara Lempicka, objet d’art, interiors, railway posters, fashion, wrapping paper designs and car bonnet mascots.

Some pictures were finished but others are works in progress, to be completed at home.

Some members created pictures to their own theme, including from the previous session on Michelangelo.

Lovely work everyone!

Look out on 1st April for the next newsletter and the next session will be on Wednesday 9th April 7-9pm.

Michelangelo – March 2025 – Wednesday

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Fifteen artists attended the session and we enjoyed drawing and painting pictures about Michelangelo and other subjects. Michelangelo was a difficult subject but the pictures produced were well drawn and will be finished at home.

There’s Michelangelo’s portrait, the hands of Adam and God, Eve from the Creation of Adam too and the Cumaean Sibyl from the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Also the chest and head of the sculpture of David in the Accademia Gallery of Florence.

Other members finished or continued their pictures from the previous subjects of Fauvism and Art Nouveau or their own themes.

Lovely work everyone!

Our next session is on Saturday 22nd March from 10am to 3pm. Please note that March has five Saturdays but we meet on the fourth one.

March 2025

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Isn’t the brighter weather better than day after day of dreary greyness? It’s lovely to see the spring flowers appearing in all their colours. Here are the suggestions for March but if you’d prefer to ‘do your own thing’, then please do!

Wednesday 12th – 7-9pm – Michelangelo 1475-1564

Michelangelo was born 550 years in the Republic of Florence and his paintings, frescoes, sculptures and architecture still adorn the places they were built, painted or sculpted, or are in museums throughout the world.

If you like drawing and painting faces and people then choose Michelangelo himself or any of the people in the stories of Genesis, painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Apostolic Place in Vatican City, or in The Last Judgment painted on the chapel’s altar wall. The Creation of Adam sees two hands almost touching, so you could study hands and draw them in detail.

Michelangelo’s sculptures include David, Pietà (others were sculpted later in his life), the Bruges Madonna, Moses, Bacchus, Victory, Apollo, and the Slaves.

Many buildings in Rome and Florence were designed by Michelangelo and he was one of the architects involved in the building of St.Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican.

Wiki entry… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelangelo

Website with lots of info, click on the words on the banner at the top… https://www.michelangelo.org

Michelangelo’s masterpieces in Rome… https://www.througheternity.com/en/blog/art/michelangelo-masterpieces-in-rome.html

Sistine Chapel… https://www.museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani/en/collezioni/musei/cappella-sistina/storia-cappella-sistina.html#lnav_explore

Ten famous sculptures… https://onlinegallery.art/en/blog/the-10-most-famous-sculptures-of-michelangelo-406/

Saturday 22nd – 10am-3pm – Art Deco

Whilst this subject might sound very similar to last month’s Art Nouveau, it’s actually the next step forward in the history of design. Gone are the sinuous, natural lines and forms of Art Nouveau and in come the geometric lines inspired by speed, modernism, industrial machinery and the bold colours of Fauvism.

After the First World War there were many artists and designers active in France but the world came to see these designs in an exhibition in Paris in 1925 called Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes (International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts), shortened to Arts Décoratifs.

Not just paintings, but sculptures, buildings (think of many of the skyscrapers in New York of Art Deco design), fashion, jewellery, home design etc. Well known artists and designers include Tamara de Lempicka, René Lalique, Le Corbusier and Georges Lepape. The costume designs of Romain de Tirtoff, who you will know by his shortened name of Erté (from his initials RT) has designs on the front of thousands of greetings cards and calendars in shops today. Clarice Cliff the ceramics designer used Art Deco designers in her work and we had a session on her in 2022… https://chalkartgroup.uk/2022/09/16/clarice-cliff-september-2022-wednesday/

Art Deco is very broad subject, so decide if you’d like to draw or paint people, buildings, objects, jewellery or one or two of each.

Wiki entry… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Deco

The 1925 exhibition Wiki entry… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Exhibition_of_Modern_Decorative_and_Industrial_Arts

10 Art Deco buildings… https://www.arch2o.com/10-most-fascinating-art-deco-buildings/#google_vignette

10 Art Deco artists… https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/art-deco-artists

Clarice Cliff… https://claricecliff.com/home

(Please note the session finishes at 3pm and we have another 15 minutes afterwards to put away our tables and chairs.)

Peta’s sketches of independent London shops

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Peta’s sketches of independent London shops have been published online on the Spitalfields Life website. Drawn in pencil then coloured in brown, black and blue ink, the subject evokes life as it was with independent shops on every High Street.

They’re fantastic sketches, Peta, you have such an amazing skill with a pencil and brush.

Good luck with your exhibition that opens this week in London!

The sketches have been screenshot to add to this post, but to see the images on the Spitalfields Life site click here… https://spitalfieldslife.com/2025/02/24/peta-bridles-shops/

Click on the first image below to see the writing under each picture, then scroll right to see them all. If you’d like to comment please do so on the Spitalfields Life website at the bottom of the page.

Art Nouveau – February 2025 – Saturday

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We had very busy session on Saturday with 26 artists attending including 5 new members. Welcome to Vikki, Chris T, Julia, Sandra and Nick. We hope you liked drawing and painting with us and we enjoyed meeting you!

The suggested subject was Art Nouveau and it proved to be a popular theme with many pictures drawn and painted during the day in pencils, pastels, acrylics and watercolours. Sinuous, natural shapes adorn the pictures. Two paintings had silver and gold metallic watercolour paint on them so they’ve also been photographed at an angle to show off the shiny paint. Some artworks are finished, some are works in progress.

Some artists drew and painted to their own subjects in different mediums.

Well done everyone for your enthusiasm on Saturday, it was fantastic to have such an interesting and creative session!

Next month’s subjects will be posted on Saturday 1st March and the next session will be on Wednesday 12th March from 7-9pm.