Saturday in the Studio - Week 16

Hello and welcome to Saturday in the Studio. I am Helen, Helen Alice Johnson Artist and if you’ve not watched before, each week I show you around my studio and give you a glimpse of some of the paintings I’ve been working on based on Helen Alice Johnson Artist in the Garden series, where I visit a garden each week. Last week I showed the beginnings of a painting - seen here:

The Walled Garden, Sunbury on Thames - work in progress

This painting is based on the garden at Sunbury on Thames. It’s called the Walled Garden and is a beautiful garden. I am working on this painting again this week and showing you some of the processes I’ve been through, so I’ll take you for a little look around:

So the painting is as I left it last week. I’ve blocked out the colour and the basic block shapes. What I do next is I start to overpaint with different tonal ranges of those colours. So you can see that there is some lighter green going in to those exploding tree like shapes.

It’s still very basic, there is nothing major going on in terms of skill level with the paint at the moment, it’s just building up a variety of colours within it to give it a little bit more vibrancy and using a contrast of colours to be able to do that.

I also, often use my phone - so there’s a little thing that you can edit on your phone, just to create more ideas. I looked at the circular shapes in the painting and added a circular shape to the original composition because I wasn’t happy with that bottom right hand corner - it was kind of unbalanced.

Using the iPhone to play with composition

If you’ve watched my videos before you’ll know that I use the iPad quite a lot. I take a photograph, put it onto the iPad and then use the iPad to manipulate it. It’s a free tool that I use - it’s Adobe Fresco and it just helps me to gain some sort of idea as to how I’m going to increase the vibrancy here in particular but also to experiment with composition and shape and form. For example, there were some areas that looked a little bit too ‘heraldic’. There was a kind of shield shape that I didn’t want so I used the iPad to get rid of that.

Whilst all that paint is then drying, I started on these two again:

I’ve actually finished this one, which is the Carrouges garden - the Chateau at Carrouges - the garden from there. This is now a finished piece and ready to shipped back to England.

The other one is Mayenne and is still work in progress.

One thing I was actually keen to talk about this week was actually thinking time. I think it’s really important that you have thinking time, and certainly for me that I give myself enough thinking time. It’s not always about ‘doing’! Often you can get a bit bogged down - I have a bit of a guilt complex and think I haven’t done enough work and that I should be doing more - but actually thinking time is so important - so this painting (Mayenne) in particular I have had on my easel for two or three days now. I’ve done a little bit of work to it but very little and actually I am going to give myself that thinking time to stop and think and look and give myself time to work out what it is I want to do with it. It really is important, and for all paintings, if you are an artist, it is as important as doing the actual painting. A painting isn’t just about doing, its about what the painting means - it has to have a lot more to it than just ‘doing’

So I hope that you found that useful. I’ll keep working on the large abstract painting of The Walled Garden, Sunbury on Thames. I’ll keep videoing it and showing you the processes as it gets closer to completion. I hope to see you next week and I hope to see you in a garden somewhere tomorrow for Helen Alice Johnson Artist in the Garden!