On Tuesday night we enjoyed the welcome return of Charles Evans, a professional artist and demonstrator from the North East of England. Painting in his preferred medium, Windsor & Newton acrylics. We watched him create a woodland landscape and, after a short break, a beach scene from his beloved Northumbria.
Charles has the unique ability to paint, talk and entertain whilst simultaneously delivering advice and very useful tips on all manner of painting topics.
The two paintings showed us two vastly different representations of skies: The landscape with a pleasing sunlit summer sky; the beach scene with its dark foreboding storm cloud. Both were painted in a similar way to demonstrate how colour choice can make a huge difference to a painted scene.
Charles also showed us how a restricted palette of 8 or 9 colours can help maintain colour harmony and save cost, as any other colour can be mixed from those few colours.
He gave us many other pieces of advice during the demonstration including using wet and dry acrylic palettes and a tip on restricting blue within a painting. Stick to one blue he recommended using the same colour in both the sky and in the green mixes, again in order to maintain harmony within the work. For Charles this is invariably Cobalt Blue.
Altogether it was a very interesting demonstration by a master of his craft as well as being a very entertaining evening. Thank you Charles!