As students of David Chandler, we have very much enjoyed getting to grips with underpainting. As David comments, "We begin our watercolours by establishing the tonal values of the scene first, with a Payne’s Grey* underpainting. Paying attention to value before we add colour, helps us to give our work contrast, form and depth. Subsequent colours are then laid on in thin glazes, in the manner of the tinted drawings of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. 

*Before the invention of Payne’s Grey, shadows were most often obtained with Lamp Black, an unsubtle and sooty pigment which has a dirtying effect on other colours. To address this, Payne, an art teacher from Exeter, created a formula from Prussian blue, yellow ochre and crimson lake, that enabled artists to darken their colours without either changing their hue or overly dirtying them.
You can read a little more about Payne’s Grey in Jackson’s most recent blog post.

Using the same view that inspired John Sell Cotman (1782-1842), we then produced two more underpainted watercolours of Durham by day and at night.



Then we moved on to update our palette to the late nineteeth century by employing a triad of colours that were favoured by Post-impressionists like Cézanne and Van Gogh and rather more fitting to the warm, sunny South where they painted than the colours of Cotman’s cold, grey North…Viridian (or Phthalo or Emerald green), Alizarin Crimson (or other blue red) and Primary yellow (or New Gamboge or other mid yellow) all feature in David's painting of Église Sainte-Symphorien, Bunzac. 

As David said, note how the Viridian in the sky ‘flips’ to blue once the yellow is added. Proof, once again, of the power of one colour to alter the nature of another. 

At a recent Art Fair I came across an artist exhibiting  pictures using a Japanese technique called Gyotaku which I had never heard of before. The technique was originally used by fishermen who recorded particularly unusual or large fish by painting them with a mixture of soot and water and then using the painted fish to print an image on to paper.

 Artists are more recently using the same technique to paint fish and other sea creatures with various types of water soluble paint, having first removed any slime, and then covering the subject with a sheet of fairly thin paper so that an image of the subject is transferred to the paper.

There were some quite beautiful pictures of sea bass, prawns, crabs and other sea creatures produced in this way showing extremely fine surface details. It requires considerable care and persistence to get good results  and the prints can be tinted after they have been made.

 If you look up ‘Gyotaku’ on the internet there are a number of videos giving details of exactly how to use the technique. In the meantime, I am very grateful to Jane Evans.-contact:-  jane@gyotakugifts.co.uk - for letting me include these images.