Week 6: moving towards our final projects

Great work tonight with everyone pushing themselves hard and making good progress in their work and increasing their skills.

Andy and Graeme: Black Sabbath Project - great to see the stronger and more confident use of colour in the backgrounds and the figures. We discussed how both of you have intimate knowledge of the working parts of a guitar which really helps you draw from memory in a convincing way and how if you add that same level of knowledge of hands and faces into your memory that the portrait elements will also achieve a better level of convincing. Find the best detailed photos of the musicians you can get hold of and study, study, study. Go for it! 

Caroline: excellent development of the palette, light and very good technique.  Now look again at all the shapes and see if you can add even more depth and character to the colours. For example, look at yellow ochre and orange to blend in to the cornfields.  Look at earthy greens to blend into the grass areas. And so on.

Dorothy: much better design control and pastel work. Don't fuss with details just yet e.g. trees and leaves. Keep your focus on adding more depth of pastel/colour to the basic shapes. If you cannot get more depth then try again on a more textured better quality paper - but remember to first draw in the design (the shapes) in soft pencil outlines and quickly check the measurements before adding the ground colours and the subsequent deeper layers on top. Enjoy working at the problems! This is going to be a great painting soon!

Ella: a striking portrait already. Keep working on the beard as we discussed, blocking in some simple big shapes  with flat tone then overlying eloquent lines of variable weigh on top for the hairs. I suggest you start blocking in the background soon to recreate the atmosphere in the photograph. The dark background will strengthen the face by providing a frame and confident tonal reference. 

Graeme: great to see you taking the painting stages further than previously. Much more interesting to look at. See my comments above on your Sabbath project work to develop this further.

Jeff: fabulous effect and good colour work in the smoke "sfumato" technique area. Start working on the remaining untouched areas of the paper to get further control of the colour developments as you enter the mature stage of this work. 

Rebecca: super colours and very good blending technique. You are learning fast. Keep studying thee colours in the original on the iPad and add more colours to each shape to get that unique pastel look. In the foreground field add the darkest blue you have to the blue lines and the darkest green to the green lines. Then blend in a really dark purple to the blue and see what happens.

Yvonne: this is turning into a beautiful study. To increase the feeling of quietness and closeness of the scene, continue to further darken the background greys well as adding more grey tones to the faces and arms of the adults and the baby's hat. This will create a "pool" of light on the baby's face and the mother's hand. 

Yvonne: lovely colour study showing some good investigative work! Keep making these small studies and you will soon realise how important they can be to your development and confidence.