Michael Gage

About time I practised the sight-size drawing technique. I couldn't persuade anyone to sit for me for thirty-six hours, let alone afford model rates, but I managed to find an onion who offered decent terms.


Hard to believe that such a small drawing took me four hours.

One of many useful ideas that I picked up from the sight-size drawing course was that you don't need to draw a line round everything. Here, for example, the pale broken line at the top of the onion makes the highlight look much brighter.

Inspired by my attempt at oil painting, I decided to try out some more unfamiliar materials. This one's in gouache, with the drawing done with a Pentel brush pen. Last time I used gouache, it was for A-level, which was ahem years ago.

It's the last day. And as with sight-size drawing, I could carry on working on this one painting for weeks to come. The more you do, the more interesting it gets.

But we have to stop at the end of today. Here's the final result:



The photo is a bit darker than the painting actually is. Here it is next to the original setup:



Quite pleased with the result of my first attempt at painting with oils.

Started the morning by glazing over the ribbon in red. Blocked in the spring onions, which are already starting to dry up and change shape, and the brass pot.

Spent the morning painting the shelf. Lots of subtle changes in shadows and reflections from the objects.


...and the afternoon blocking in the peppers and the spring onions. Painted white in the highlight area of the ribbon; this will be glazed over tomorrow.

I've been wanting to try painting with oils for some time, so I signed up for another course at the London Atelier of Representational Art. This is going to be five days of painting a perishable still life: objects that are going to deteriorate over the week.

Day 1: Painted the canvas with a thin wash of burnt sienna, cadmium red, and white oil paint, as the ground for the following layers. The paint had lots of siccative in in to make it dry fast. Meanwhile, we made a sight-size drawing of the subject. When the canvas was dry, we transferred the drawing to it, and then painted in the black background.