John Hopkins Demonstration at Knowle Art Group

I have mentioned my art group (Knowle Art Group) many times, mostly it is a way of providing a little discipline into a very busy life. Once a week at least I sort out a few supplies, get into the car and drive to a meeting with some fellow artists where we all sit around and paint. Oh and we also put the world to rights while busily painting it. There is no formality, we all simply get on with painting anything that takes our fancy and the group uses, individually, a number of mediums. Oil, acrylic, pastel and of course watercolour are all represented. It is a small and happy group and we enjoy our Tuesday evenings. I am afraid that I have too many distractions these days to find time to paint in a very busy life, so attendance is the spur to create art.

However, four or five times a year we have what we call one of our special nights. These take the form of demonstrations or workshops, as many of them as possible with professional artists in the lead. Being a smallish group, we have to watch the pennies, after paying for the rental of the premises, exhibition expenses, refreshments for out meetings and various other fees we spend any surplus on demos by professional artists. One such artist, who gave us a very interesting and inspiring demonstration yesterday, is

 John Hopkins. 

John is a local professional artist with a very informal approach who is always willing to fully answer all the questions put to him. The group has in fact received several demos from John (see another) and one or two members know him from classes which he holds locally. You can see some of his watercolour paintings in his site gallery.

I am posting here a couple of watercolour sketches which I did some time ago, I guess that this type of painting still comes over in my pastel work. In fact the second was a painting which I did as a demonstration to the group, once upon a time, because of a large influx of  inexperienced painters and we put on a number of demos to try to encourage them.

But I have not done any water colour painting for some time. However, when we have these demos it is surprising how inspiring they can be. I have a small project on with the miniature acrylic canvases mentioned in the last two posts; I fully intend to do a few more for potential sale on Ebay, etc. I will be dusting off the watercolour paints though and putting in a little practice to get the feel of a brush back. Watch this space!