Caroline Green is an artist based in Ledbury and now has her own gallery called Take 4. Her history with Cheltenham goes back to doing a BA in Fine Arts at the Cheltenham College of Art and Design. More recently she returned to the College to complete an MA.
Caroline works in a variety of media and likes to capture colour, light and movement within a variety of subjects. She loves the undulating landscape around the Malvern Hills, but also likes to capture the architectural heritage of the market towns in the vicinity. Caroline also enjoys painting animals – capturing their movement and character she finds particularly engaging. Her work uses expression and colour to draw out the particular mood of the subject.
Caroline also works as an illustrator and has produced children’s books inspired by her dog Oscar,
She described how she had taken part in the Sky Arts ‘Landscape Artist of the Year’ television programme. She had done this 3 times as a ‘wildcard’ entrant. These were all in different locations and various forms of extreme weather – either very windy, very wet or excessively hot. She has also taken part in Countryfile Live at Blenheim Palace. There she painted Winston Churchill with his dog based on the statute that stands outside the Palace.
For her demonstration she was going to do a picture of a group of chickens using an initial sketch in watercolour which she would then develop with pastels. She was using ‘Art Spectrum’ paper which can be obtained in a variety of colours and has a bit of ‘tooth’ to take the pastel. This brand of paper is quite expensive and you can now get an ‘Art Spectrum’ paint which you can use to create the same sort of surface on board.
Caroline started by sketching out the outlines of 4 chickens using watercolour. As reference material she had a variety of photographs of chickens. From these she chose ones that went together well as a group. She was keen to capture a sense of movement in the composition. Once the basic outline of the composition had been established she added some tone to the shapes, still using watercolour. She also noted that it was important to put in some ground so that you can see where the chickens sit.
Caroline then moved on to using pastels. She noted that it was important to continually keep referring back to the subject and standing back to get a proper view of how the work is developing. She was looking at how the light falls on the chickens and identifying the areas of light and dark. In making marks with the pastels it was best to make then in the same way as they appear on the subject.