This tutorial is a lovely image of a rower on the River Thames. Some great early morning light creates some fantastic reflections on the water surface. This is a relatively simple painting but the reflections and capturing movement create some interesting challenges.

This weeks project features a group of kids playing football on a hot day in a city location, most likely in southern Spain, Portugal or Brazil. What attracted me to this scene was the vibrant colours, strong crisp shadows, high contrast and sense of movement coming from the kids.

This is a really fun piece to paint, creating the feeling of movement within a painting. We will start with a background wash using wet in wet to build a nice blurry feel, creating that lovely out of focus feel so that the hero of the painting stands out. We use lots of wet in wet techniques to create nice soft edges using the 1 inch brush. We’re using yellow and permanent rose for the background, so we’ll have to work quick here as it’s a staining colour. Once we get paint on the brush we work from top to bottom to get our nice mottled background in place. Once dry we will move on to the subject and start with a light wash to give a basis to add layers, adding darker and lighter paints to produce a sense of movement within the footballer. We’ll apply some finishing touches, using virtually neat paint to create the badges and emblems, and to give a darker tone to draw the eye into the painting. We’ll also use add some of this darker mix to emphasise the shadows.

This is a great painting to try if you want to paint something with a little “action”. We will create a feeling of pace and power for the horse using various shades of golds, reds and blues. This give us a real sense that were in the heart of the action. Using wide brush strokes, combined with contrasting and complimentary colours, we use light and darks areas to create form. Later on in the tutorial we will use Quinacridone gold and reds mixed with some cobalt blue to really highlight the intense areas and create that feeling of fast movement within the painting. Using washes and brownish reds we will enhance the dusty feel within the background to give the horse and barrel a solid grounding. This is a really fun painting to try if you’ve never painted a fast moving subject before. Let's get the brushes out.

A painting of a young baseball player running for home plate, this is a fun little study in getting the colours onto the paper quickly for the background and then using some slower techniques to add detail to the body and face. It’s also really fun to add the shadows and highlights, especially in the dusty sand to show where the dirt has been kicked up. We mix the colours together fairly loosely in this painting and blend them together on the palette as we go along. We use a nice green to “pull” the baseball player forwards off the page to give it a really strong feel that there’s depth in the image.

This is a lovely study page of a young boy in the middle of catching a baseball. It’s great as an example of how to paint an action photo you may have. We only use three colours so it’s easy to practice again and again. We’ll use wet in wet techniques with a controlled wash to ensure we don’t lose those highlights in the white trousers. We’ve got some great vibrant colours to use and it will create a stunning finished painting. You’ll learn how to create both soft washes for the soft focus backdrop and also nice crisp edges for areas like the catchers mitt and shoes, then we will really focus on the creases within the clothes using the tip of the brush. It’s a great place to start with learning the techniques we use throughout our other lessons.