It's mushroom season! Perfect for painting!
All sorts of painting shenanigans this week.
Hello everyone, and welcome back to another week of loose watercolours! How was your weekend? Fantastic, I hope. Well, if you’ll look at the week, we’re almost at the end of September, which is crazy to think about. It’s well and truly autumn now, and I’ve definitely started to spot orange leaves here and there and conkers on the ground. Even Toby’s been sniffing around to see if he can find a fallen apple or two.
With that in mind, it’s definitely mushroom season, which was the theme of last Monday’s live broadcast - as always, it was enormous fun and lovely to see so many of you join in. Plus, it was great to see all of your mushroom paintings on the Beginners’ Facebook group as well! If you missed, it, you can watch the broadcast here. Just a quick note, though - there’s a slight change in the typical schedule this week, as tonight’s usual 8pm broadcast has been pushed back to tomorrow night at 8pm GMT instead. Hopefully it’s not too much of an inconvenience for you, but it just means you’ve got another day to get your paints and paper ready for another loose watercolour!
There was another autumnal tutorial released this week on loosewatercolours.com if you want to get into the spirit of the season! This one is called ‘Acorn Days’, and it’s very much a brown and blue number - perfect for trying to perfect those finicky details in the loose style. Have you seen many acorns yet? I’ve not seen that many, but there’s been quite a few squirrel sightings in my back garden. They seem to be especially fond of climbing the trees just before Toby gets there, which I reckon is probably a good thing.
As always, if you’re interested in learning about these tutorials as soon as they’re uploaded, then be sure to join the Beginners Facebook group, which you can access here. Videos and broadcasts are all linked on the newsfeed page, so you can easily find your next painting tutorial, and there’s an incredibly welcoming community of over a thousand beginner artists who post on there daily.
If you’ve already joined the group, or if you’ve watched any of my tutorials so far, you might have come across the Loose Gang - the set of brushes that do all of the heavy lifting in my tutorials. There’s four of them:
Miss Rigger: an absolute must for the loose impressionistic style. She glides across the page effortlessly like a ballerina, and is perfect for all those abstract details.
Big Brian: the backbone of the loose style. He covers large areas of the paper without leaving any tell-tail streaks, and is specially shaped to help keep your painting loose.
Dangerous Dave: unpredictable at heart, but with a variety of different uses. He can cover wide areas but still focus on the more delicate features.
Mini Dave: the smaller version of Dangerous Dave, he offers brilliant coverage for smaller areas. He has amazing lifting-off abilities and great when trying to create simple line work.
If you didn’t know before, now you do! These four brushes are used in almost all of my videos, sometimes with the Loose Cousins as well. They’ve served me well in all my years of loose watercolour painting, and they offer a great variety of scope for any type of subject matter - animals, florals, landscapes - you name it! If you want to get your hands on a Loose Gang set, you can purchase them via my website here.
In other news this week, I’ve been out and about practicing my plein air skills. Well, whenever it wasn’t raining. I often end up all over the place during my outdoor painting adventures, but this time stayed a little closer to home, painting the interior of one of the local churches near me. What do you think? Can you see the window features and the floral arrangement in the picture below? I was pretty happy with the way it turned out. Remember though, we were all beginners once, and that’s certainly true for me as well. I can still picture the day when I first picked up a paintbrush for the first time, and I’ve been practicing ever since!
That’s all from me this week, folks, as I’m currently in the middle of packing my suitcase - I’m about to go away for a couple of days on a painting trip. Where? That’s a surprise for next week. In the meantime, if you have any guesses, let me know. I’ll give you a hint - it’s slightly wetter and colder than England, but lots of beautiful architecture to paint! Plus, there’s lots of food and drink festivals on at this time of year.
Until next week, then, happy painting! And stay loose!
I’d also like to say an enormous thank you to all of you paid subscribers to this Substack, as it’s support from you that helps keep this page running. Hopefully you’ve been enjoying all of the additional posts and videos that have been coming out weekly, especially for you, and there’s more on the horizon. There’s also some longer posts heading your way on colour theories - a.k.a., why does orange look so good with blue, and other things that they tell you in art school, as well as some other top secret topics waiting to surprise you in the next few weeks. In the meantime, though, there’s an exclusive video included at the end of this post just to say an enormous thanks for your support. Enjoy!
