LESSON PLANS WINTER TERM 2023 (2nd half) Painting the dog (or the horse)

There are so many different ways that horses and dogs have been painted throughout human history. In this lesson I'm asking my students to continue on that trajectory and paint from some of the ideas and drawings they worked with in the last lesson. They can choose the medium they'd like to work with and they can experiment in any way they like!

Winter Term 2nd half 2023 – lesson 5: Dogs and/or horses – the painting!

·         Decide on your medium. If using watercolour, think back to the first lesson this half term where we used a layer of really good wet-into-wet wash without worrying about anything other than possibly a few light places and making the wash wet enough so that all the colours moved on the surface of the paper. You can decide how wet your page is, from soaking to very damp (but not too dry!).

·         Once the wash has dried, look for hard-edges shapes, be ready to soften any edges you don’t want left hard. Be minimal in the information you put down on your page.

·         If using pastels, Choose a nice coloured or dark sheet of pastel paper. Snap your pastels to about 1inch long. Using them on their side, block large areas of simplified shapes, both light and dark. Allow the forms to emerge rather than trying to deal with any detail at the start. As the shapes go onto your page, you’ll begin to understand where you’ll build detail. Be minimal with your detail – see what you can do with more of a suggestion.

·         If using oils or acrylics, work on either a coloured canvas or a white canvas. Mix a neutral colour with blue and brown and thin it with turps or water. Have white on your palette as a corrective colour (like giant tippex). Using a medium sized brush, draw with your paintbrush to mark out all the main shapes. This thinned layer is very negotiable and will dry quickly. Gradually start to add tone and colour, worry about detail later – stick to the main forms at this stage.

Next lesson, last before Christmas: Either, continue with this week’s painting OR bring pen and sketch book for an unravelly drawing.