Spotted Dog art group

Work by Janet, Julie, Dave and Lynda.

Yesterday I had the absolute pleasure to work with the Spotted Dog art group in Beeston, Nottingham.

They had me at the name (having a spotted dog myself) but what a lovely group of people I met.

The workshop was called ” Pattern Play – a still life set up by Claire, a colour loving designer and painter” and so I set up several still lives of teacups against patterned backgrounds.

They’d asked for a number 7 on the challenge scale and I think in the five hours painting time that they had, that they all did fantastically well. I might have scored it an 8 myself given the time constraint – I didn’t finish mine!

In that time they had to tackle drawing the ellipses on the teacup, represent not one but two (and in some cases three) types of patterned fabric, paint the teacup, biscuit and spoon and do all the last minute jobs of darkening shadows and adding hilights and white points. No mean feat.

Josh and Greg – I loved how these two had outfits co-ordinating with their painting colours.

The use of masking fluid caused some concernation as one brand in particular didn’t remove itself without damaging the paper.

Brendon and Julie dry their masking fluid.

Pebeo art masking fluid is the best in my humble opinion but no one was daunted by the potential difficulties of using masking fluid and most had a go anyway and enjoyed the benefits of painting stripes and dots without worrying about other areas of the painting becoming dirtied.

Lynda, Linda, Suzanne, Pam, Dave and Madeline.

They are all very able painters and needed only the briefest demonstration of some ways that they could approach what we were doing.

Greg, Josh and Janet

It always amazes me how we can paint the same subject matter and produce such individual pieces of work which reflect so much of our own personalities in them.

Madeline, Pam, Julie and Suzanne

I talked a little about having an authentic paint-writing style (like a hand-writing style) and progressing the piece without loosing each persons unique approach and style and I think they were all successful in that respect.

Sandra, Judy, Fiona and Sarah

All in all it was a very enjoyable day and everyone left with a piece of work that they were proud of and/or had learnt from and that’s a good days painting in my book.

Brendon got a solo spot because he wasn’t around when we took the photo’s!