‘Using photographic notes’ was the title of Martin’s workshop. We are very grateful to Martin for travelling down from Middlesbrough in snowy conditions, eleven members managed the dreadful road conditions in the West Midlands to attend.

Points from the workshop

• Take a lot of photographs of your subject.
• When photographing indoors use natural light from a window if possible, from the left to give shadows, use a white board behind the subject and use a tripod. Outdoors use a white board and tripod, it may not be possible to pick wild flowers.
• You need to see how all the structures fit and refer to a flora for the size of leaves, number of stamens etc. Your painting needs to be botanically correct.
• Measure all parts, including the size of leaves.
• Also record the the reverse of the flower, petals and leaf structures
• Do not paint/record distorted petals or leaves, you may have to merge two images to get a good painting.
• Beware of painting flowers or leaves that are drooping.
• Make colour notes from the plant, colour will not be accurate from printed photographs. sometimes you may need to use ‘Photoshop’ to whiten the background of the photo to get a more correct colour.

Members were then challenged to colour match and paint part of a red bromeliad.

Finally Martin took us through how he used photographs in his painting, in particular showing a painting of Rampion enlarged to many times its size but still in proportion. A thoroughly enjoyable and informative workshop.

Botanical Painting Workshop at Winterbourne House and Gardens with Jeni Neale, Saturday 28th April ‘Spring Flowers.

Enjoy a day of drawing and painting the delights of springtime from Winterbourne’s garden: flowering bulbs, emerging buds and beautiful Camelia. Concentrating on simple compositions, learn how to capture their form and vibrant colours in easy colour washes. Jeni will demonstrate drawing and painting methods at each stage and the limited numbers will allow for plenty of one-to-one tuition throughout the day.

For further information and bookings, please click on link: www.winterbourne.org.uk/whats-on/spring-flowers/

November is proving to be a busy month. The society had a stand at ‘Art Materials Live’ at the NEC, Birmingham from 2nd to 5th November 2017. A lot of interest was shown for our exhibition of work with some inquiries for joining our society.

On Friday 10th November twelve members visited Kew Gardens. Kew was bathed in sunshine showing up the lovely autumn colour. Time was short before our arranged visit to the Library and Archive so some dashed to the Shirley Sherwood Gallery to see the art installation – ‘Life in Death’ and the exhibition – ‘Abundance’ both worth the visit. Others had a leisurely stroll to The Hive and conservatories. At the Archive we were treated to view original art work by Verelst, Ehret, Redoute and Bauer. Also laid out for us to see was the earliest editions of Curtis’s Botanical Magazine from 1787, and art work for later editions through to the 21st century. We saw work by Walter Hood Fitch from the 19th century, by Lilian Snelling and Stella Ross Craig from the 20th century and Ann Farrer and Lucy Smith present day artists at Kew.

Dianne Sutherland was the demonstrator at the meeting on 19th November, Dianne showed us her technique for painting ivy leaves – first we overlaid the drawing with blue and yellow washes. Using wet in wet we placed the veins and then using her technique of small brush  strokes built up the contours of the leaf. Dianne achieves some lovely effects and a technique worth practice for the rest of us.

The December meeting is our paint a postcard competition, the theme ‘A botanical cracker’. Keih Larkin will be bringing books for sale at the December meeting, you can view his books on http://keithsplantbooks.co.uk. Lunch is also provided.