Birstall and District Art Society 

Appraisals Evening with Amanda Jackson

Tuesday 7 March 2023 

 

Amanda shared the benefit of her training and experience to explain what she thinks works well about a painting, and what might be done differently to improve it. Because this was a session appraising members’ paintings and we don’t have those paintings in front of us it is not useful to pick out comments relating to individual paintings, but I hope the following general advice will be helpful to refer back to.

 

Colour

Amanda had brought a colour wheel with her, so she concentrated many of her comments on the use of colour.

 

• Green, brown, orange colour scheme is restful due to being on one side of the wheel. 

• Split complementary colours give contrast but are not jarring (e.g. pale green against orange).

• Repetition of colours from one part of painting to the other create harmony. 

• Rural scenes - low saturation greens and greys. 

• Turbid green for sea - white over a darker colour to create the translucent effect.

• Make a broken line to make things more pleasing. 

• You can notice the colour of a shadow on a snowy day. For example bright purple on white. 

• Watch out for primary colours together that can give a picture a lack of harmony and a childlike quality. 

• Use dilute opposites on a colour wheel to brighten a dark area. 

 

Light

• In order to paint light, capture the darkness. 

• Look for what is most important in the picture. Could use backlighting to bring things together. 

• To overcome dark against dark, you can pick out some areas of light to provide contrast. 

• Dark things feel heavy and light will feel lighter. Think about making lighter colour on the foreground lighter to make it feel more grounded. 

• Use opportunities to create useful contrast in light and shade. 

 

Portraits and animals

• Take care when painting living things that curves don’t become straight. 

• Be careful that detail at the edges does not draw the eye away from the areas of focus.

• Where a face is turned away, take care not to include too much of the furthest eye.

• Try out glaze work - using a thin layer of paint to soften and blend. 

 

Landscape 

• Think about the route through a landscape (for example a path). 

• Use abstract techniques in landscape by concentrating on shapes.

• Composition: skating in - making a path meander through the picture. Have a reward at the end. 

 

General devices

• Use a key shape elsewhere in a picture to create shape harmony by repetition. 

• Lost and regained shapes echoed within a picture. 

• Mark making and creating shapes and then turning them into something engages a different part of the creative brain. 

• When something is loose and abstract it allows for imagination to take over. 

• Consider composition when cropping a picture. Also best not to let an object ‘kiss’ the mount. 

• Lost edges and crisp edges can be used to advantage by letting the edge bleed into shadow to help seat the object into the space. 

• Cubism - like looking at something from a different perspective through time.
  
  Meg Grant