As Easter draws closer, it marks the start of our out door events, the first being at Sandringham, Norfolk, A full list of all events can be seen on the website. I shall also have a trade stand at The Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre (E.K.) 23rd and 25th May, (please note this does not include Sunday 24th May, centre closed) The Two days consists of a re-enactment weekend taking E.K. back to 1943. Taking brief information from the E.K website you can expect to see:
Re-enactors from all over Europe
WW2 vehicles on display
2 x Taxy runs of the Lancaster
BBMF Fly past Lancaster, Spitfire and Hurricane

For more details please look on the E.K website www.lincsaviation.co.uk

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If you have been following the progress of the Royal Artillery painting, I can now reveal it is now completed.

The second painting is well under way as seen below. It is the actual gun that the radar unit in the first painting feeds information to. The rapid fire gattling type unit is to be placed roughly in the middle where the small blank area of canvas is showing. Still lots to do of course. One of the interesting aspects of a commission like this is that I sometimes don’t know what is going in next. I have a choice of several things to fill the bottom right of the canvas. Could be the corner of a typical shelter/hut thingy, or continuation of the gravel bags, (not too keen on that option.) A Warrior tank will be seen charging down the road kicking up loads of lovely dusty stuff, and a helicopter in the background somewhere as requested. A rather nice touch is the tally of missile kills on the side of the control hut, (top left.) Nose Art next! Hmmm. The long uninterrupted concrete blast barrier and the road running right across the canvas worried me a little as I don’t like things going right across an image like this, but I think maybe the strong vertical presence of the gun unit will off set this.

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Well done to Mr. Whittaker of Portsmouth by the way for pinning the unidentified rudder pedal assembly as an Auster. It was in fact a military Auster AOP Mk 9, but Auster was the closest, so to you is going a print of the Grand Slam subject, ‘Towards the End’

A recently completed commission for a collector of my work is a simple Lancaster study coming in to Wickenby. It was a double duty day. Quick turn around then off again. Very simple but worth doing, it was the customer's uncle.

I have been commissioned to do a Lysander caught in a moon scenario in France. This will be a really interesting challenge as the lighting will be very subtle and it is always a challenge to do something in a manner that has not been done before.

Art tip

I find that when a particularly dark area is required in an image, it is very tempting to use black. I find this is not always the best way to go. I think you will find that the mixing of two appropriate colours will do the job nicely and give a very good effect. Two colours I use quite often are French Ultra Marine and Burnt Umber. This gives a wonderful dark effect and you can bias it towards blue by adding more blue, or to the brown by adding more brown. If I require a particularly dark area, then sometimes I use a small amount of black but this is rare.

Shadows can be tricky to master when you first start to paint. One has to remember that when painting a shaded area, it is still the colour of the unshaded area only a darker version of it. A lot of people just paint a glaze of a dark colour over the area and it ends up looking like someone has spilled some paint on the ground! A good way of establishing the fact that an area on the ground is actually in shade for example, is to overlap the shaded area with, say a plank or broken branch, anything appropriate for the scenario really, so you can see the tonal value of the item change as it goes from sunlight into the shaded area.

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Well that’s it for this time. I’ll keep you posted again in two months time.

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If you require more information about ordering prints please telephone 01507 327681 or email robin@robin-smith-art.co.uk