Hannah Bruce ‘Dramatic Light and Landscape’

Acrylic Demonstration

On Friday 28th March, Hannah Bruce, currently President of Woking Art Society and a well-known local award-winning artist, came to Frimley & Camberley Society of Arts to give a demonstration of ‘Dramatic Light and Landscape’ at Deepcut Community Centre.

Prior to becoming a professional artist in 2014, Hannah was a Surrey-based teacher of Art and Design for over 13 years. She studied Fine Art and English at the University of Wales and completed her postgraduate certificate in education at the University of Cambridge. She works in a range of mediums, including oils, resins, inks and pastels. This evening Hannah is going to be working in acrylic paints.

For the demonstration Hannah had prepared a stretched linen canvas that she covered with a light-yellow gesso so that she would never be working on white canvas.  She had chosen a panoramic landscape from a photograph she had taken at Horsell Common.  

She has cropped the reference photo so that it is the right fit for the canvas. She has also used Photoshop to increase the saturation of the colours and intensify the darks.    Hannah explained that what she particularly liked about the picture she has chosen was the shafts of light coming through the trees and the path that leads the eye to the back of the painting.

Hannah had a large range of Golden Acrylic paints. To start she used a cool and a warm red, blue and yellow. She also used violets and purples. She will paint with pre-made greens but she mixes these to make the colour she wants.  For this painting she will temper the greens with violet and purples for harmony.  She prefers to use a pre-mixed orange rather than create her own.  She also likes to use a natural grey.  She does not use white on its own.

Hannah decided to put the horizon on the one third line from the bottom of the picture. To draw a straight line she used her little finger under the base of the canvas to support her brush and then she ran the brush across the canvas from one side to the other. This horizon line was painted with a mix of hookers green, phthylo blue, purple, white and grey to produce a hazy blue grey. This was to give the effect of the sun going down and silhouetting the trees in the distance. 

Hannah kept emphasising how important it was to ensure that the base layer of green is completely dry before adding any other colour on top to stop the colours from becoming muddy. She also stressed that she always cleans her brush so that she never goes from green to another colour.  There is an alternative which is to use several brushes.

She started with big paint brush to paint the sky with violet, greys and pinks and later she added some cerulean blue.   It is important to remember that clouds also have a perspective.  They also go to the vanishing point of the painting.  She made sure she painted the whole sky, even the parts of the sky that were going to be behind the birch trees.  

Above is a finished painting which Hannah brought to illustrate that she makes stylistic decisions about how she is going to paint a picture. As can be seen she uses lots of colours. In the painting above she chose to use circles of colour, where as this evening she tended to use triangles of different sizes and colours, such as the small triangles of pinkish colour that can be seen in the sky.  It is important to make sure that each colour is used in several parts of the painting. 

To paint the birch trees Hannah showed a useful trick of using masking tape.  Of course it is important to make sure the painting is dry before putting the masking tape on it.  She applied the masking tape vertically in columns making the space that would become the trunks of the tree narrower towards the top.  Then she loaded a palette knife with some of the whites and darks in her palette so that there were blobs of lights and darks along the shaft of the palette knife.  She very gently scrapped between the columns of masking tape to produce the effect of birch tree trunks.  

She then used a slightly damaged brush with separated bristles which she separated even further. She used this brush to paint the birch tree leaves.  Remember trees also have perspective so paint the back of the tree and the front of the tree and bring some leaves over the trunk to avoid them looking like ‘lollipop’ trees.  At the top of the trees the leaves are mixed with violet so those nearest to the front are a lighter colour.

To paint the pine trees she used a much darker mix of green and she used a technique where she rolled a squared off brush along the canvas up and down to give the effect of the pine tree branches and leaves, once again putting some of the branches over the front of the trunk.

Hannah then put some sunray highlights through the trees.  This should be done when the paint below is dry, which was not really possible during a demonstration.  Rays also need to be in the same direction as the shadows and they should all be pointing back to the sun.  Make sure that there is a balance of darks and lights and close off the sides of the path so that it peters out towards the back of the painting.

At the end of the demonstration Hannah had undoubtedly produced a dramatic landscape full of light and beautiful colours. Thank you to her for all her helpful guidance and advice during the course of her demonstration and thank you to Marie Bunce for taking these photographs and the notes that have enabled this write up.