Art course, Tuscany with Barry Raybould. Sept 2013

I did another Art Course with Barry at his home in Licciana Nardi, North Tuscany.  We worked on how to do a project from beginning to end. There was a horse show going on over the weekend in the village so we went with our sketch books and camera and spent the day and evening there making notes. This is the picture I did, using my sketch and a photo.

I also played around with the picture above, looking at the negative spaces, I liked the squares in the negative spaces, and the right angles made by the riders and the horses necks.  In Bernard Dunstan's Composition book 'Composing your Painting'  which I am reading he mentions these right angles which add to a very interesting
composition.

Workshop with Barry John Raybould in Knysna, South Africa

We studied Notan sketches, value, thumbnail sketches, 3 value exercises and painted on site by the sea. The course was very fast and we worked till 6/7 every night! It was a wonderful experience.

Barry writes courses for his Internet Visual Arts Academy. We had lots of course notes from his Academy to help us to follow his lesson every day. He taught us to make a very small, simple, 2 value design of the landscape first. Then, we had to do an outline study and number our values. We had to do an oil painting of this using just 3/4 values, keeping to just black, white and grey.  The idea is to keep everything very simple and clear at first. From this grey picture we had to transfer the values using colour! Not easy!!!

6x8" oil on paper