I find leaves like this really hard to draw—in particular, the veins and the subtle value shifts across the leaf. This was meant to look like the front of the leaf, but it looks more like the back.
Also capturing the form of the leaf. I’m never quite sure which way to make my marks to capture that, so my shading becomes quite chaotic. I probably need to study hatching/cross hatching. The soft pencil I used (6B) probably didn’t help either.
Any tips greatly appreciated!
The story of a humble fabric marked with miraculous presence is one with understandable allure for painters, whose entire studio lives are devoted to trying to imbue pieces of canvas with flickers of life and truth.
Justin Paton, McCahon Country
The idea of there being ‘competition’ in art is to my mind an alien concept, I have experienced nothing but help and cooperation amongst artists that I come into contact with…. We are not competitors we are community and it is from that standpoint that we support each other and collectively improve.
Nicholas Elliott
Check out the painting that goes with Nicholas’s post. He’s been doing a series of cup still lifes, and I particularly like this one. It takes on a whole new meaning with the name Community.
I Love Hue could be the ideal mobile-phone game for painters. It’s beautifully designed, and it’ll test your sensitivity to various kinds of colour contrast.
A New Zealand painter whose work I’ve recently discovered and really like is Melvin Day. Many of his landscapes remind me of Colin McCahon’s. I love the colour palettes; the layering and textures; the mysterious, transparent geometric shapes; the stencilled(?) words; the thick, dark lines around things; and even the cubism, which I don’t often like (it just looks too busy to me!). They’re the kind of paintings you could stand and look at for a long time, I think.
