Welcome to our latest issue, packed with features by our talented team of professional artists and tutors designed to inspire, inform and help develop your drawing and painting skills over the summer months. Capture the vivid colour of rapeseed fields with Paul Talbot-Greaves (pages 28 to 29), paint goodenough- to-eat strawberries in acrylics with Tim Gustard (pages 36 to 39); learn more about choosing colours for summer landscapes from Martin Kinnear (pages 49 to 51) and how to paint big summer skies with Jenny Aitken (pages 58 to 59). Also, re-joining our regular artist-contributors this month, I’m pleased to welcome back Aine Divine, who demonstrates how to paint a watercolour portrait in profile, step by step, on pages 20 to 23.
I enjoyed meeting Aine for the first time recently at one of her portrait painting workshops at the beautiful Cockenzie House in East Lothian. I was honoured to be invited to sit for Aine as she demonstrated how she approaches painting a watercolour portrait to her class of students (to be featured in a later issue). Sitting for the portrait gave me first-hand experience of how Aine combines constant observation of her subject with an intuitive approach using brushes, rags, sponges and expressive flicks of colour as she uses the light falling on the subject to reveal the person in front of her. Throughout the demonstration, Aine explained her thoughts and decisions to her students, who were clearly enthralled and inspired as the likeness came to life over the two-hour sitting.
Talking to Aine afterwards, I also learnt more about her 30 Days of Art with Aine, a fun way to inspire artists to let go of any creative preciousness and begin each day with a timelimited drawing or painting, to encourage enjoyment of the process without worrying about the final outcome. Each day Aine provided her students with an online video prompt for a subject to tackle and suggested materials to use, including a self-portrait in mixed media, a face from a photograph, someone asleep, a tree, your hand, an outdoor scene, your feet, a breakfast table set up and a piece of jewellery. The projects finished on day 30 with a side profile similar to the one demonstrated in her article in this issue.