Work In Progress

Rough Drawing - I can't think of a suitable title yet!

I've been so busy I have nearly forgotten about my blog! Hopefully this post will kick me into a blogging gear. As I type I am waiting for this painting to dry. I have applied a mixture of prussian blue and payne's grey on saturated paper in the hope of creating an atmospheric late evening background of fields and trees under a light dusting of snow. The finished scene will have Mole sadly recalling his old subterranean home and how he hasn't seen it for so long. The two friends are making their way back to Ratty's house, late on a winter's day, when Mole suddenly catches the scent of his home and becomes distraught. Ratty consoles Mole and quickly decides to find Mole's house in the hope of cheering him up.

I love sloshing watercolour around...

Two Paintings In One

Double Jeopardy

Every now and then I like to create two paintings on the same piece of paper. It saves time, paper and water because I soak my watercolour paper in a water tray before taping it to the board to dry and stretch. It may be a time saver, but working like has risks. I must be very careful to protect the half I am not working on from moisture and paint. Thankfully Scotch Magic Tape is brilliant for masking watercolour paper without overly-damaging the paper underneath. Fortunately the tape also adheres to the plastic sheet I use to mask larger areas, which means I can fix the sheet in place and seal all the edges so there is little chance of water encroaching onto the painting.

This message is not sponsored by Scotch Magic Tape, although I wouldn't mind if it was (they could pay in rolls of tape).

Here are the finished 'The Wind In The Willows' illustrations:

'Walking Through The Village'watercolour and gouache
24 x 31cm

'Heard The News?'
watercolour and gouache
24 x 31cm

My thoughts On 'Supper Arrives'

'Supper Arrives' watercolour and gouache, 31 x 40cm

This is my latest painting for Galerie Daniel Maghen. I finished it last Tuesday, and I'm not sure exactly how long it took to complete other than I felt I spent longer on this piece than anticipated. 

 

The scene is taken from 'The Wind In The Willows', when the carol singing mice are invited into Mole's house for supper. Soon they realise Mole is low on food, so two young mice are sent out with a basket to fetch more vittles for their evening feast. Here you can see the mice have returned and their fellow creatures are excitedly dishing out the basket's contents.

 

Normally I'm very confident when it comes to these cosy interior scenes, however this time I really struggled to keep everything warm and slightly gloomy (if that's the right word), especially when I was painting the blue welsh dresser. If you're not careful, a blue dresser can swiftly turn green when painting in watercolour.

 

The gouache highlights certainly helped to sharpen well lit edges, such as an ear, whisker or ceramic mug. The candlelight was deliberately kept to watercolour and using the white of the paper to create a bright glow. If you try to introduce gouache into something so bright it can look a bit flat and even grey as the opague paint doesn't always reflect natural light as effectively as watercolour paper.

 

Out of interest, most of the items in the kitchen are taken from Avebury Manor in Wiltshire. The kitchen table, dresser and stove are very similar to the ones in this painting. It's always much easier to draw something straight from reality than invent your own objects, and quite often you spot something that you would never have imagined too.

 

 

A Talk On My Career So Far, 18th Jan

There are still some tickets left to attend. With the aid of a projector and lots of prints and originals, I will be taking the audience through the various illustrations I have produced since graduating in 2008. I will also be giving away lots of freebies!!

'Paisley Rabbit and the Treehouse Contest' Continued

My last post on 'Paisley' gave you a sneaky peak at the huge treehouse cross-section I was working on - click here. Thankfully I eventually finished it and I'm going to show you the whole full colour version, including lots of details hitherto unseen on the web!

The Treehouse Cross-Section, watercolour and gouache 53 x 102cm

This took me roughly 30 days to complete and really pushed my studio's capabilities. For example the painting, when stretched on board, didn't fit my easel so I had to work with it propped against the wall. Also most of the time I was stood with my back against the opposite wall trying to take in the whole image as it progressed. You will see in the shots below, it was very easy to get lost in the details of this illustration and forget about how the whole painting should be knitted together with a consistency in colour, tone and level of detail.

A ball pool with individually painted plastic balls. Why, Chris, why!?

A well stocked cellar ready for Christmas festivities.

No treehouse is complete without a cinema

An American diner, because it's the 1950s (and America).

I think we'd all love an entrance hall like this.

Paisley's on personal library, with a secret staircase running through a hollow branch.

 

More illustrations than you can shake a stick at...

'Hey, Toad, look over here.'

Recently I have been updating my new website www.chris-dunn.co.uk . Please take some time to browse the site, as it provides links back into archive of this blog and highlight blog posts in relation to individual illustrations.

The most recent of updates is the full collection of 'The Wind In The Willows' illustrations I have painted for Guomai, a Chinese publisher. There is quite a number and I will be adding more in the next year, as I illustrate more scenes from the book. To see the collection, click here.

The Wind In The Willows

Over the past 3 months, and in-between other jobs, I have been working on a collection of 30 watercolour illustrations for 'The Wind In The Willows', to be published by Guomai in China.

Mole's house is getting a bit of TLC

It's a dream job for me, Kenneth Grahame's book has been a rich source of inspiration over the years. I just wish I had more time available to me to produce large illustrations instead of mainly spots. I think I will keep adding to this image bank in the hope I can get another book published in the future containing even more artwork.

Ratty sets out in the winter air to find his friend

You can see many more of these illustrations on my new website - click here

Circus Parade

A fortnight ago I finally finished 'Circus Parade'. Apologies for not posting the finished painting until now. Anyway, better late than never...

Circus Parade
90 x 50cm
Watercolour & Gouache

I hope it meets your approval. The painting was certainly an intense experience, especially when it came to painting the audience. Sometimes I wonder why I put myself through it!!

At the moment I am undecided as to whether I think this final painting was a success, which is my typical response upon completing a large painting that took longer than a week to paint. However once I have a good break from seeing it (about 2 months), I will be able to assess it properly.

'Circus Parade' Work In Progress

For the last six days I have been working intensely on this large 90 x 50cm watercolour painting. It might not be a mural but it's large enough for me!

Fuzzy photo time! Still using the drafting I was given when I was a school boy.

You can see I returned to the usual sepia tonal under-painting to maintain a warm hue throughout the image. I decided if all the action is inside a tent lit by gas lamps, without natural light, then all the shadows are going to be warm.

Fuzzy / wonky photo! Note the reflected warm light on the underside of the elephants.

Once the under-painting was completed, I blocked in all the local colour for every single character and object. In the process of 'blocking-in', I suddenly realised I needed to roughly outline most of the audience, using sepia, in order to create a mass of shapes that would convince the viewer they were looking at a group of seated animals. This took a  l  o  n  g  time, not surprisingly, but as I introduced local colour, when I returned to 'blocking-in', the effect was as intended and so worth the effort.

Final fuzzy photo! The current state of the painting, waiting in my studio for Monday morning.

Local colour down, I started to really render each individual character in the parade as best I could, starting from the left and moving across. I'm still in that tight rendering process now, but I'm happy with my progress. At this rate, I should be finished late next week - unless I run away to the circus.

Solo Exhibition Pound Arts 4 March - 23 April

If you are in the area please visit, entry is free. Below is a video by the wonderful Corsham TV all about the exhibition.

'Warming Up' Finished

Warming Up
Watercolour & Gouache
51 x 39cm

After a break from painting to work on other jobs, I have finally finished Mr Badger's kitchen. I'm very pleased with the final result but it does feel like I took longer on it than I should have. A possible reason for the drawn out painting process could be I decided to have red and black tiles, and a complicated Persian rug on the kitchen floor.

Below you can see a few photos I took as I painted. Sorry about the blurry shots, what can I say, having a wild badger model in your studio while painting can make your hand shake.

The beginnings of my rough drawing, getting the basic layout and positioning of the characters.

The finished rough - notice how I have changed the perspective, especially the fireplace horizontals. I realised I had to use two point perspective to create realistic diagonal kitchen tiles and so the two vanishing points positively affected the rest of the composition.

Once the under-painting was completed I then blocked in colour with a medium sized round brush.

I had nearly finished at this stage, I just needed to fully render the wash bucket, fireplace, food stocks and rug.

School Playground

 'School Playground'
Watercolour & Gouache
66 x 50cm

After working on other jobs and taking a week off to teach a summer school course, I have finally finished 'School Playground'.

I'm pleased with the overall result but I do think I could have developed the relationship between the characters and first school further. Maybe by depicting a young animal going through the doorway or a few heads poking out of the windows? I'm not sure, but it is certainly something I will keep in mind for future similar paintings.

Enough of the internal soul searching... here are some pictures showing my progress.

Rough Drawing

Concentrating on the background after finishing the sky and trees

For this passage I was closely copying a photograph I had taken a few days previously

School finished, working on the playground now.

Bit by bit I worked through the characters

Keep painting...

... and painting

... and finally pull out the gouache paints.

The school is based on the old Corsham Primary school which is now the Pound Arts Centre - where I have my studio! Next door to me are two other artists, the superb Penney Ellis and the extraordinary Caroline Rudge. We have an open studio every Monday, so please feel free to drop by and say hello if you are in the area.

See if you can spot any of these animals in the playground. The two young rabbits might be hard to spot.

School Playground WIP

No painting today as I am preparing for my upcoming illustration workshop at Marlborough College Summer School. However here are a couple of photos of the painting so far.

The drawing has been transferred and cleaned up with a 2H pencil.

Here the sky and trees well on their way and I've just started to block in the school and playground.

Picnic By The Lighthouse

Picnic By The Lighthouse
Watercolour & Gouache
70 x 50cm

Here is the most recent of my large paintings. It was surprisingly quick to finish, mainly due to the vast sky and relatively small amount of characters.

My aim was to produce an accompanying image for 'Rescue From The Storm', maybe depicting the day after - I'll let you decide.

More WIP

I've spent the last day and half working on this and it's finally starting to come together.

Picnic By The Lighthouse WIP

Day One: Drawn up, masked and wet in wet blue sky

Day Two: Defining clouds, more masking fluid on the grass and blocking in

This is the sister painting to 'Rescue From The Storm'. The same lighthouse from a different angle and much more pleasant weather conditions.

I'm hoping to pick up my brush again on Saturday, which seems like an age away!

'Rescue From The Storm'

The finished painting.

'Rescue From The Storm'Watercolour & Gouache
70 x 50cm

I thought you might appreciate seeing the whole thing and a crisp detail, rather than the blurry excuse for a photograph I posted previously.

Detail: I might develop the Torchcliff setting in future paintings.

A Sneaky Peek

Apparently some of these otters are 'catching a crab' - it's a rowing term

Recently finished but no scanner! A fuzzy photo will have to suffice. 

Rescue From The Storm WIP

"Paint, paint, paint, paint, painting!" (requires sing-song voice)

Woodland Party "Behind The Scenes" Continued

See my previous post here.

My drawing was approved so it was time to start work on the painting.

The process to get the finished drawing on to stretched watercolour paper can be a bit tedious but it has to be done. Firstly I enlarge the scanned rough drawing in Photoshop and then I print the image on A3 layout paper. The layout is just thick enough to go through my printer and thin enough to act like tracing paper. This enables me to trace on the reverse of the printed image, with a soft pencil and then place it on the watercolour paper and transfer using a bone folder. Some people like to use biro pens for transferring because it's more accurate, however rubbing with a bone folder is very quick.

I remove the print and find the soft pencil has transferred enough to give me a ghost image on the stretched paper. I then go into the drawing with a 3H pencil and very carefully outline everything I need and tidy up any areas that are not legible. By using a hard pencil, I'm able to erase the softer lead and wash watercolour over the top, all without losing the important line work. If I were planning to keep an area very light I might not use a pencil at all, just because the pencil line might show and distract from the overall image.

Once the line work is completed I start an under-painting in sepia watercolour (see below)

The finished under-painting. If you look carefully you can see lots of the original line drawing, especially around the lanterns hanging from the oak tree.

The under-painting serves me well throughout the whole painting process. It maintains an overall warm hue as the majority of the painting will be in transparent watercolour. Also it helps to create tone and define characters in a complicated scene, and it provides me with a useful beginning step into colour because I know, whatever colour I glaze on top, the under-painting will hold the composition together for me. There is nothing worse than having to re-draw a section because the paint has washed away the initial compositional drawing.

Colour decisions being made - there's no going back!!

Under-painting finished, time to get out the colour palette! I start by blocking in the local colours (i.e red for the badger's jumper, green for the leaves), at this stage I'm not thinking about reflected warm or cool light. I have a good idea how warm the final painting needs to be, so I make sure there are lots of yellows, reds and browns, however when it comes to the clothing I either make it up there on the spot or research some old Edwardian photos to get an idea of pattern and arrangement of colour.

Working mainly on the background.

There are so many decisions being made at this stage, such as how best to depict bark on the tree trunk, does it need to have a warm into cool transition, how much light do I need to show around the lanterns, how much detail in the lanterns is required, what colour should the sky between the trees be and why did I decide to paint such a complicated image?! That last question kept on being asked.

TBC