Last week’s workshop ‘Three of a Kind’ was led by our member Janet Gledhill. We brought along paper, pencils, acrylic or watercolours. Janet provided everything else, from fresh mushrooms, pears and lemons, to a variety of photos. The idea was to paint three in a row, vertically or horizontally.
Julia Ogden showed us how to paint an acrylic portrait in a very unusual way. We were asked to bring a canvas or paper ready painted in YELLOW with the image pencilled on. We added lilac for all the shadows and continued with red for any warm tones we could see. Now we added green to our lilac and then used white to make corrections and to set highlights. With a small brush we used blue to paint in the details of the eyes and any lines. A brown watery wash finished the work.
On Friday 8th April our member Lynne Hickins gave a well prepared talk about how to draw portraits of people wearing glasses. As she used our microphone and camera everyone could follow with ease. We were astonished to learn that the history of glasses goes back a lot further than we had assumed.
It was first recorded in 1280 that crystal workers in Venice were creating lenses for focusing eyes. The first portrait we have of someone wearing eyeglasses was painted some 70 years later in 1352. This shows Cardinal Hugo de St Cher, and was painted in a fresco in Treviso, Italy, by Tomasso da Modena. Demand for spectacles grew after the invention of the printing press in 1452, but it was not until the 1700s that spectacles that were held in place by arms that fitted over the ears – that look essentially like modern spectacles – were invented. Before then, they had to be held in place with the hand, or perched on the nose!
Here is Phil Grimshaw’s finished picture from the Busy Hands workshop.
Halifax Art Society 