Colin Brown was our artist today. He studied for four years at Canterbury College of Arts before moving to London, before moving on to Bath. He worked for Cadbury Hasbro Illustrations for 25 years before embarking in his own right as an artist and he is represented by Buckingham Fine Art Publishers. His artwork is currently on display in Artwork galleries all over the UK.
Colin demonstrated a very different way of painting to the Club members today. He began with a base of a scene in Cirencester, from his photographs, and proceeded with his painting which was upside down on his easel. His initial drawing had been painted in orange paint as its base and he continued with the work upside down using very bold lines of colour to establish shapes and outlines, which helps to make the painting more interesting. He uses flat brushes initially before moving onto smaller rounded brushes towards the end of the painting.
He used heavy body acrylic paint – Liquitex – and doesn’t clean his brushes between colours changes as the existing colour adds more dimension and unifies the painting. The use of a large ruler helped to establish some of the initial lines which then became more free-flowing which makes the painting more ‘lively’ and not flat.
As the painted proceeded Colin moved on to use his smaller brushes to add in the finer details, i.e. the car lights and number plate, handlebars and the suggestion of wheels to the bicycles and denote the pavement edges, to name but a few.
