Colin Brown art demonstration review

Insightful demo delivered by Colin Brown for Lacock Art Group

By Elspeth Wales

Acrylic fine artist, Colin Brown, gave an insightful demonstration of his artistic process and technique to members of Lacock Art Group and visiting guests towards the end of July.

He told the audience about his professional background and how, after completing a four year art course at Canterbury College of Art, he worked for 24 years as an illustrator-visualiser for advertising, design, and 3D agencies in Bath, Bristol, London and Europe. He draws a great deal on his visualization experience to inform the painting technique he uses today.

Colin mainly paints street scenes from locations around the world, although has also branched out into painting racehorses for commissions from Cheltenham Racecourse. Whatever the subject, he always focuses on creating atmosphere and light, and bringing movement into his paintings, achieved through his dynamic style. 

You can see the influence of the Impressionist movement in his own style – free and loose, and unconstrained by detail. Claude Monet is one of Colin’s biggest inspirations, particularly the way Monet applied paint in single strokes of colour.

Colin uses photos as the base reference for his paintings but explained that he makes up a lot of the content too – another nod to his past experience as a visualiser. It was interesting to see how he paints upside down, which is a technique that helps the brain to simplify the image in front of you by focusing on looking at the shapes and angles. Colin paints upside down from start to finish but at the demonstration he turned the painting the right way up for the benefit of the audience! 

Working upside down!

Brushes and tools of the trade

Useful tips
One of the tips he gave was to apply a pink ground to the canvas, which helps to exaggerate the brush strokes painted on top of the ground. The placement and direction of his brush strokes are random, decided in the moment.
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For the most part Colin uses synthetic flat brushes, switching to round brushes for more detailed sections of a painting, as shown in the image above. It’s important to keep the paint fresh while you paint and he finds that synthetic brushes cope better with the paint. He uses a metal ruler as a guide for painting straight lines, which worked well.​

​There is never a focal point in his paintings; he believes it’s the overall value that’s important.

To create darks he uses dark purple or dark green instead of black, and always puts some green into a sky to achieve a more realistic turquoise sky colour. And he paints the canvas going round in circles, layer upon layer.
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People attending were fully engaged in the demonstration and several asked some great questions, which Colin was happy to answer. It was also good to see a couple of prospective members, who are on our membership waiting list, attend the event. On the night we revived the use of a projector and big screen, placed on the stage, so that people at the back of the room could see.  After a couple of false starts this worked very well in the end! 

The projector - up and running!

Part-way through - taking shape

Excellent feedback
We received some great feedback afterwards from attendees about Colin’s demonstration, who found it highly informative as well as good fun. Our thanks go to Colin for making it so interesting and also for taking the time to chat to people in the interval.
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Above all, it was fascinating to watch Colin’s painting evolve in stages on the canvas, from upside down blocks of shape and angles, the emergence of more detail as he applied colour, to the finished painting that evokes the hustle, bustle and movement of a busy street market in Norwich.

You can find out more about Colin and his work on the Buckingham Fine Art website.

Colin with his painting at the end of the demonstration

The finished painting, provided by Colin a few days after the demo. Notice the greater depth of colour, greater contrast of light and shade, and more detail. Image copyright: Colin Brown

​And finally, please take a look at our events page to find out about future demonstrations planned by Lacock Art Group.