Turner in a day

I'm a big fan of Turner's work, often trying to emulate some of his techniques in my work, so I knew that to copy one of his paintings in his very singular style was going to be a challenge. What I hadn't expected, again as I found in the Mona Lisa, was the amount of intricate detail that holds the piece together. It's a huge step up in technical application compared to the Vermeer for example.

This practice has really cemented my ideas on my own paintings, and I feel I have a lot in common with Turner's style - The strong colours and sense of light, combined with details that contextualise the 'looser' parts of the painting.

Acrylic on A3 card

Colour Recipe study

This painting uses the same colours and roughly similar quantities to another painting. I was intrigued to find out how it would work in a landscape context, given that the colours should work no matter what.

As you can see, it does work, and gives me more fuel for thinking about my own work.

Acrylic on A3 card.

Colour Workshop 7

Our final workshop for this year focused around the colour content in a painting, not only the colours that comprise it, but also the quantities of each of those colours.

I have already found, through copying old masters, that the colours in a painting can be surprising when you start really looking round it in detail. The next step is to make a composition using these 'colour recipes'.