TIM BAKER

Sarita was back, and although this session was rushed because I arrived late and some odd shenanigans with a misplaced order, it ended up well. First thoughts were that this session wasn’t as good as the last but actually these have grown on me. Especially the watercolour below with the lovely crystalline pigment interactions and loose feel, the 5 minute Markal drawing (always the 5 minute one that’s best!) and the mixed media (Posca, Markal AND Acrylic – wooh!) painting featured above and below.

That was a real pain, it’s always difficult to know where to start sometimes and my first marks didn’t help, and then the fight to keep the acrylics from going muddy – also I ran out of acrylics during this session (hence the brightness cos I had to use Poscas for certain colours, as it was the Ultramarine that went so a lack of deeper purples and a lot of lighter blues/phthalo green). Thanks to a couple of strange angels I had some for the week after, no thanks to a certain UK art store starting with C…*

The rest of them are a bit of a mixed bag, really. The last piece which is on the left below with the black Markal got me angry because the muddiness problem came back. The problem is time, or lack of it. There is barely enough time in 20-25 minutes to finish a painting, let alone in the few seconds between poses to go and change the water, replenish the acrylics and clean your brushes.

This is why I tend to work with paint from the tube rather than genteely mix the colours because the pose would be over by the time I had mixed a few accurate flesh tones! But it does mean it can get muddy as all the paint starts to mix together on the brush/page and in the water from image to image.

Also it’s why I avoid browns generally, or keep greens to background duty mostly – not going to go into pigment mode but basically adding brown to anything really dulls it down, but it can become muddy. Brown pigments are quite often red earth, rust or somesuch, the oldest pigments back to cavemen along with charcoal/bone black etc.

So for brightness and purity it’s best to mix your own greens and purples (and duo/trichromatic blacks especially for watercolour) if you want the colour to shine. If you mix premixed colours like green, purple etc. they might be single pigments which they’ll be fine, but sometimes those colours are multiple pigments which can get muddy. Anyway basic colour theory says to mix complements together = purple/brown mud, and if you start adding other colours to convenience premixes you can get odd results like that.

This is why I use the markers previously, they are ready to use immediately and easily cleaned and dry really fast. They really don’t have the look of paint brushes though, that’s pretty unique, and dry in a fairly lifeless matte, as they have chalk in them. Good for doing a prep drawing that you then paint over though.

* That order still hasn’t turned up, I was buying some old stock cheaply of the phased out 75ml acrylic tubes, not that I can afford it *sigh*. That store seems to have lost the order, and then promised to send it by courier…which again hasn’t turned up….really don’t bother with ‘Click and Collect’ orders from them.