Sarah Jennings - Live art demonstration - August 2024

Contemporary Landscape in mixed media

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Sarah mainly uses acrylics. Watercolour is not great because it’s not easy to preserve whites. Oils are good but take a long time to dry. Mixed media gives freedom and Sarah can scratch back layers if she wants to. She mainly paints landscapes but urged us to paint what we enjoy painting. Sarah paints quickly but a bit of planning. Working from her own photos she takes landscape and portrait but enjoys working on squares. 

 

The horizon should not go in the middle so Sarah decides what the main interest is to decide where it should go. This is decided at the planning stage. What will work best is an emotional response. It may be that more than one option is used to make a series. 

 

In order to replicate what eyes see, a lot of detail is not needed. Sarah uses colour and shape in a semi-abstract way. Today she is painting a landscape that consists of a wildflower meadow with sky, trees and a pathway through. 

 

Working from a white canvas/board rather than a coloured board (unless plein air and sun-dazzled), Sarah uses: White, black, cool yellow, warm yellow, cool red, warm red, cool blue, warm blue, which she describes as a limited palette. Cheaper System 3 acrylics are used for base layer and Liquitex is added. 

 

At the start, the darks are ‘scrubbed in’ using a mixed dark green. Sarah mixes her own greens. She mentioned putting a bit of red in to stop it looking like a child’s paintbox. The rest of the landscape was blocked in using a small household paint brush. She also likes hog brushes and has soft Rosemary & Co brushes. Many of her brushes are flat. Mixing and matching different brushes gives a different texture to the work. Sarah uses water rather than medium to thin the paint. Occasionally she uses a medium with the Liquitex heavy body paints. 

 

A problem with working from photographs rather than life is that they can skew distance and colour. 

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Sarah uses a dry brush to work over and sometimes the end of the brush to scratch into the existing layers. She also uses palette knives and tools for applying tile adhesive that have a straight edge to use for objects such as telegraph poles and flat sides for scraping areas. Stabilo Woodys - water soluble crayons - are fun to use. Wax crayons and oil pastels can be used at the end. Fingers are another tool!

 

Sarah says ‘What is the least I can get away with painting? I like the eyes to do a bit of work.’ 

 

Sarah was a lawyer for years but has always enjoyed art. She gave up her legal career when she had young children. On moving to Stamford she started going to art classes. Her paintings tend to be more rural than urban, taking inspiration from dog walks. 

 

Working from dark to light, Sarah finds herself using more white (titanium) as she progresses. 

 

After a break, the painting was mostly dry and Sarah introduced more drawn elements to infer plant life and give extra texture. Woodys were used in green, orange and purple. 

 

If she finds it too ‘fiddly’ Sarah has to obliterate a part of the painting and start again. Acrylic dries a bit darker than they gone on and Sarah says she has to go back and adjust the colours. 

 

Sarah doesn’t include people in landscapes as they become the main focal point. No clouds have been included, purposefully as she wanted the texture to be in the bottom half of the picture.












 

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With a bit of time left, Sarah started another quick painting with a similar theme. Having slapped some colour on, moved it around with a scrapper, Sarah used a ‘tonking’ printing technique (often used in oils) to lift paint away using a piece of paper. She mentioned that this paper can later be used in collage. Sometimes doing something small at the end of the session to use up paint is very rewarding, the pressure being off it is possible to be more free, and you are already warmed up.