The Ray Hewitt Workshop held on the weekend of the 6th and 7th of November, was a great success, with more than a dozen of our members taking advantage of the opportunity to work closely with a renowned artist form Melbourne.

Ray is a tonal impressionist who enjoys working outdoors, so we took advantage of some reasonable weather to paint in Port Fairy all day Saturday, and we spent the morning on Sunday painting the river and view outside the club rooms, it was a little damp but well worth the effort. When the wind came up in the afternoon we retired into the gallery and painted still lifes.

Some of Ray’s top tips were:

Paint small outdoors because the light changes too quickly for big works.

Paint everyday, even if you only have 20 minutes, paint small, and do a sunset or a cloud study

Squint your eyes (as though the sun is in them) to get the tones right, and keep standing back and checking your tones against those of the scene in front of you.

Put dark behind light, or light behind dark near your centre of interest, and keep your edges sharp especially in this area’

You only need a few basic colours to mix whatever you need. (When Ray travelled overseas he only took five colours)

Use elements in the scene to create interest, you don’t have to stick to exactly what you see, you can change things around to make a better composition.

Keep your paintings simple, you don’t have to describe every detail in the picture, you can merely suggest things, for example, rocks, shadows, tussocks, pools of water.

When planning a composition, remember the rule of thirds

When using pastels, let the paper do some of the work. Ray likes a canson paper called “tobacco” for pastels, its a good midtone and is suitable for most subjects.