Saturday in the Studio: Week 15

Hello and welcome to Saturday in the Studio. I’m Helen, Helen Alice Johnson Artist and this week I am in my studio in Les Gaigneres. I’m going to take you for a little look and show you some of the things I’ve been up to but the painting that’s behind me is actually a painting from the UK that I am carrying on with in the studio in Les Gaigneres. So this painting is the garden at Sunbury on Thames - The Walled Garden that I have done two videos of now as part of the Helen Alice Johnson Artist in a Garden series. (Week 19 and Week 22). It is a really beautiful garden that kind of feels like it’s exploding with lots of pomp and circumstance, lots of firework type plants and trees, so I was keen to make a really bright colourful painting that celebrates that garden. So I’ve done a few studies which I can show you as part of this blog. Little colour studies as well as some black and white.

I’ve used these as a starting point for my painting. You will see from the video that I have mapped it out in pencil and now I’m starting to block in the colours with the vibrancy of those colours. It’s a little bit like an under painting, whereas with a more traditional painting you’d do an underpainting in just complementary colours, although funnily enough that is complementary, the blue and orange - but this is just to map out for me the sense of where I’m going to go next with this painting. And to get an idea of composition as well as colour. So there is no kind of finesse at this stage, I’m just literally blocking out areas of colour and seeing where that takes me. Some of it will stay and some of it will change, but it’s important to me to actually get that so that I can start to look at it visually and actually see what it’s going to look like.

So this paint that I’m applying now is a paint that I bought especially for this painting. It’s called Cobalt Violet Light from Michael Harding Paints. Hand made oil colours, its and absolutely divine colour, incredibly vibrant and also quite expensive! I bought it particularly for this painting. I’ve mixed it with some Magenta Quinacridone which is another kind of pinky colour. Two vibrant purply pinks to make that colour and that was a Windsor and Newton paint. I’ve also used and awful lot of liquin in this painting so far so that it will dry quickly because it is literally just an underpainting and I want to be able to move on and work on top of it without having it sliding around which can sometimes happen with oil paints.

So I hope you’ve enjoyed that little tour of my process and as to how I’ve got to with this painting and I hope you’ve found it useful. If you watch me tomorrow - Helen Alice Johnson Artist in a garden - somewhere, there’s a real treat in store! I’m in the UK for that one, and if you continue to follow me for Saturday in the Studio you’ll see how that painting progresses and see whether this one gets finished by next week. Thanks ever so much for watching and I hope to see you next week.