Charles Reid Workshop - Day 4

Up early to another beautiful day and the prospect of working outside again. The venue today was to be the village green in Urchfont. Urchfont is a beautiful place full of thatched cottages and charming properties, many of which date back to centuries long gone. It is like stepping back in time to wander around this gem of a village. This also gives a stimulus to the sort of exercise for today's study. As mentioned in a previous post, Charles has a collection of old photographs showing residents of Urchfont from some time ago and what he decided to do was to introduce one of these into a landscape chosen on the day.

The first part of the drawing was the introduction of one Fred Dowse into the foreground. Charles can be seen using one of his source pictures to complete the drawing. Note also the shade provided by the brolly erected to beat the glare from the white paper.

Initial Drawing

Next stage was the initial application of paint to the foreground figure. Interesting to note here is the fact that Charles does not always complete drawing across all of the paper before starting to paint.

Fred Dowse - Charles Reid, First passage of paint

Next was the drawing and painting of the immediate background to the figure, establishing all of the important tonal contrasts.

Fred Dowse - Charles Reid, intermediate stage

Background shapes are established next.

Fred Dowse - Charles Reid, background shapes introduced

One of the joys of working outside is the serendipitous meetings that take place. George Heath is one of the oldest residents of Urchfont, having lived there all of his life. George joined us and the pleasure to be had from listening to his recollections is immense. The old photographs depicting residents were a great prompt to his memory as he knew many of the individuals and had a fund of stories about them to lighten our day. As he sat talking I managed to make a small sketch on a new piece of watercolour paper with the intention of using him as foreground interest for my work to follow. A magical interlude.

George Heath


Charles moved on to the completion of his piece.

Final touches

All done

Fred Dowse - Charles Reid

Demonstration over, it was time for us to get to work.

Charles moves amongst the students dispensing wisdom.

Another great day.

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