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News Update at 30th Dec 2020
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We wish you all a happy new year and hope you will remember to renew your membership for 2021.
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There has been a change to our April booking which will now be a Zoom demo of portraiture in pastels from Rob Wareing.
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There is an EXTRA too! The opportunity to paint along with NZ artist Richard Robinson on 14th Jan. Fiona Gale gives all the info you need to know HERE
NB Sorry but Mobile phone view is NOT recommended for this site. Laptop is much preferred
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Otter Vale Art Society
Write-ups of this year's demos
Green = link to artist website
Light yellow = link to demo write-up
4th April 2025 David Webb - Brixham Harbour in Watercolour
2nd May 2025 Kaili Fu - Chinese art
6th June 2025 Alex Boon on Nature journaling & Inktense
5th Sept 2025 Julie Dunster - Painting in oils
3rd October 2025 Lisa Parkyn - Flower-based Abstracts
4th October 2025 Lisa Parkyn -Demo-related Workshop [Sidbury Village Hall]
7th November 2025 Alison Whateley - Mixed Media Textiles
4th April 2025: Brixham Harbour in Watercolour with David Webb
David began drawing enthusiastically from an early age. He discovered watercolours as his preferred mediums when in his early teens and has been mostly painting in this medium ever since.
For two decades he worked as an illustrator, often producing meticulously detailed works connected with natural history. But then he rediscovered his love of watercolour and now works in a looser more painterly style.
He has worked on numerous art books and magazines.
David enjoys finding scenes that include boats and harbours and brought a photo he had taken of Brixham Harbour [above].
But he considers the composition carefully, moving some elements such as boats and simplifying other areas to make a more satisfactory design. Making pencil sketches [below] is part of this process.
A pre-prepared sketch
David worked on pre-stretched 140g NOT paper using just five colours: Cobalt Blue, Alizarin Crimson, Raw Sienna, Burnt Sienna, and a touch of Indian Yellow. He favours a 'mop brush', a very soft brush that holds a lot of liquid and is versatile enough to cover large areas or, with its tip, add relatively precise touches.
Typical mop brushes
David's palette
Firstly he wetted the paper copiously and then added washes in the loosest fashion working from the top downwards. A convincing sky resolved itself almost like magic and the major background areas were soon established.
Bit by bit the distant trees and buildings became established, and pigment was sponged out from where light-coloured boats etc would emerge.
David worked quickly, adding details of light, shadow, reflections and so forth until before long the work was complete
The finished painting.
2nd May 2025: Traditional Chinese Brush Painting with Kaili Fu
Kaili Fu offered us a masterclass in the traditions of Chinese painting.. From the moment she applied her first brushmark, creating a single vivid petal of a carmine tree peony shading off into faint pink, we could appreciate the great skill involved. With just four more strokes she had achieved this stage.
The origins of distinctively Chinese art goes back 5000 years. The 'detailed' [or 'Gongbi'] style requires meticulous outlining on sized paper and then multiple layers of colour. We were shown the relatively spontaneous 'freehand' ['Xieyi'] style which emphasises the freshness and immediacy of marks and uses a traditional repertoire of plants such as bamboo or peony, augmented by an animated creature such as a bird, butterfly or other insect.
Some of the elements that make a good freehand painting are
Artistic expression
Composition
Usage of Ink [valued above the handling of colour]
Calligraphy [the whole delivery of mark-making is essentially calligraphic]
Framing
The composition was conceived in advance, developing an S-shaped design incorporating a little singing bird.
Mrs Fu showed the importance of mixing the colour on the brush itself before applying to the 'rice' paper - which is actually made from materials such as cotton, linen trimmings or the pith of certain araliaceous trees.
For the leaves, rouge was added to the brush tip and a green made from yellow and indigo further from the tip. Again, it is considered very important to make the correct marks in one go, without reworking.
Once the fragile rice paper was dry, dabs of thicker yellow paint could be delicately added for the peony's stamens.
Finally, Mr Fu stepped in to add the calligraphy which is considered an essential component of a finished freehand work. The characters he added consisted of the title in Chinese characters ["Fragrant Flowers And Singing Bird"], the current Chinese Year [The Snake] and the artist [in this case Kaili Fu].
As a bonus, Kaili Fu was able to paint two delightful versions of a bamboo composition, one using just Chinese Ink [made from pine soot and animal glue] and the other using a mix of yellow and indigo.
6th June May 2025: Nature Journaling with Alex Boon (with a section on using Inktense pencils)
Alex Boon shared with us his overlapping passions for art and the natural world. He is based in Seaton and the art studios at Colyton but spends much of his time observing and recording in the outdoors.
As a child Alex was much taken with his grandmother's copy of Edith Holden's bestselling Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady. Along with the diaries and exacting observational illustrations of such as Beatrix Potter, Holden helped forge the template for nature journaling that Alex would come to exemplify.
This led to a childhood ambition to become a writer/illustrator, which he achieved by a circuitous route. He enrolled for a degree in Illustration in Lincoln but hated it and soon left. Instead he followed a science route, gaining a BSc in Environmental Science and then PhD focused on Soil Science.
Alex then fused these disparate interests after moving to Devon in 2016 and taking up nature journaling.
In these journals Alex documents his writing, his scientific observations, his diary notes, his illustrator's sense of cohesive design and layout and, of course, his artistic skills.
Alex has used a range of media in different phases of his work, including line drawing [pen or pencil], acrylics, watercolour, and inktense colouring pencils - about which there is more below. His journals are objects of great beauty in their own right, filled with everything from quick sketches of birds etc or schematic landscapes to be reworked later in more detail all the way to carefully composed pages such as the spread above.
So Alex has journals for sketching and also for best work. The pages shown here were selected totally at random from a vast treasure trove.
He found that Japanese Midori cotton books were excellent for working with ink and for coloured pencils. He considers the quality of paper to be the priority, then the quality of medium, and finally the brush quality.
Alex has diversified his outlets and now also runs a YouTube channel and has written art pamphlets and, recently, a couple of books, published by David & Charles and an illustrated map guide to the Seaton-Lyme Undercliff walk.
Inktense Pencils
Inktense Pencils by Derwent are a useful medium for the plein air journaler such as Alex. This is my own [Chris Poole]'s set with basic swatch [essential!] and waterbrushes. They act like watercolour pencils except that they are made of dry acrylic ink. Once wetted and then dry the result is permanent, which is bad for correcting mistakes but great for adding glazes of colour, wet on dry. (My set of 72 can be a bit cumbersome outdoors, to be honest. The 12-set is probably versatile enough).
Alex has written the above useful pamphlet on Inktense pencils. He explains that you can use them simply as colouring pencils. Adding water will intensify the colour but may leave texture marks on the paper [good? bad? Depends.]
Or you can wet the paper and make very vivid drawn marks.
Or [a great idea; thanks Alex!] draw on some spare card and use this as a palette, thereby getting good control over the colour and tone you will be applying to your sketch. (By the way, I sometimes draw my waterbrush across the pencil tip to get a pure colour that will be free of the texture of a pencil line)
An instant 'palette'
Making reference swatches
More swatches - excerpt from Alex's journal
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