painting materials
Some earlier paintings have been done with acrylic inks, but most of the paintings are created using gouache paint on hot-pressed watercolour paper, I've also used coloured pencils in combination with paint in quite a few of the images you will see in the gallery, although I've tended not to use this technique much lately.
Gouache is a water-based painting medium, similar to watercolour but with a greater opacity. I like this medium a lot, though it appears to be always the poor relation of paints. You cannot blend gouache on the paper to create subtle modelling of tone as you can with oils or acrylic, and you cannot put wet paint down onto dry paint without to some shifting of the underneath layers of paint, but it does have one greatly flexible advantage which is the ability to remove layers of paint from the surface simply by wetting and blotting it. A process of ‘unpainting’, which can be used to reveal the paint below. It’s not a foolproof process – top layers of paint bleed into lower layers, and lower layers get washed off, but I like the murkiness of the image that this tends to create, and I can afterwards work up areas to give them detail and sharpness. I have photographed several paintings in stages, which makes more sense than explaining in words what I am trying to achieve - follow the links below to see a couple of examples:
Stage-by-stage:
Dinner for Two
Stage-by-stage:
Tattooed Fairy
Stage-by-stage:
Mrs Minotaur
Something I almost always make use of when creating a painting is the ability some of the pigments have of staining the paper. There is no sure way to guess the behaviour of a particular colour in this way - you simply have to try them out first. After layering paint onto the surface and allowing it to dry I tend to wash most of it off again, often deliberately leaving a 'mucky' layer on top of the brighter cleaner colours, which can then be selectively removed to create highlights.
I realize, because I have tried to explain this to people, that it is difficult to understand what I mean, but I hope the sets of images above may go some way in illustrating the processes my paintings go through as I create them