On Tuesday, 17th March, 19.30 – 21.30, artist Catherine McVean gave a live demonstration on painting a still life with silver surfaces.
Catherine explained she loves doing still lives, using objects that reflect light. She works with traditional oils and uses solvent thinner to start, then pure oils, on primed ply or gessoed linen, working quite small, typically on 8 x 10 ” boards, with Rosemary & Co brushes. She tends to finish her paintings in a day or less, as she likes the immediacy.
The objects were set in a box to control background and light. She started by drawing a few dots to create the ellipse of the jug, joining the dots, in thinned oil. She kept the shape loose and worked on how the various shapes related to one another.
She painted a thin wash of raw umber and drew on regents of lemons to protect the shadow areas. Starting with the silver areas, she created the darkest area of those, using transparent oxide brown, plus ultramarine blue to get black. Avoid using black itself – it deadens things. She added blue and cad red where shadows are more purple and added terra rosa (like burnt sienna) and yellow ochre to warm it up.
Added more TR and YO, plus blue to get more shadow-like colour but said you shouldn’t be tempted to add too many colours. Used a fresh mix of cerulean blue and cad orange – great for silver. It’s a clean colour and less muddy, purer. Keep checking tonal values, which parts need to be lighter or darker.
Lemons came next. Start with brightest parts as they are easiest to read. Cad yellow but needs to be warmer, so add TR and cad orange. Shadow area of orange – transparent oxide red, viridian green, then add cad yellow, white and TR to change the colour to the bottom of the lemon. Rear lemon is greener. Darker mix from before for bottom of lemon. Add TR for warmer, darker areas. Lemon reflections in TOR, viridian green and cad yellow to darken the shadow area.
Tablecloth is not pure white, so add YO. Next the cloth shadows of lemons. Warm and dark, so add a touch of blue to TOR. Use TR, white, YO for shadow variations. She uses very little pure white in a painting but keeps it precious and restricts it to where you really need it.
Background, needs be darker than cloth and jug. Ultramarine blue, TR, YO, and a touch of white. Time to refine edges of jug and strengthen darks on jug body. Used YO, TR, and sparing white highlights on spout and jug body, building up highlights. Don’t go straight to white.
Did the final lemon highlights, using TR, cad yellow, cad orange, white. Then lighter highlights, adding white to same mix.
She went over the foreground to add some warmer highlights. The finished picture was splendid and one of the attendees later bought it from Catherine!
Catherine’s website with her pictures and useful tips is well worth a visit. https://www.catherinemcvean.com
