Jake Winkle goes wild in watercolour

4/4/2024

Demonstration review
Watercolourist Jake Winkle, who’s known for his bold, loose and lively style, returned to Lacock Art Group towards the end of March to demonstrate his approach to painting wild animals. Before going any further, apologies to Jake for borrowing the title of one of his DVDs in the headline of this blog post. ‘Going Wild in Watercolour' is also the title of one of his art workshops at the White Horse Bookshop in Marlborough on 22 May.
Jake previously demonstrated his method to LAG in about 2016, and he remembered one or two members who had evidently made a lasting impression on him! This time around Jake created two paintings during the demo; a pair of otters were the main feature, followed by a quicker painting of a cockerel.

Equipment
To start with Jake gave a brief explanation about his preferred painting kit, as follows.

Paper
He uses Arches watercolour paper, rough, 140lb/300g/m2 because it absorbs water quickly and evenly, allowing the paint to bed into the surface of the paper in a consistent way. He also stretches the paper to prevent it cockling when applying very wet washes. The paper then tightens up again when the paint is dry.
Palette
Jake used a portable palette for the demonstration, although a white dinner plate does a sufficient job if you have nothing else – the base of the plate provides a big enough surface to mix paints while the rim holds blobs of paint. He said it’s important to keep the mixing space of your palette away from paint itself so that it doesn’t become contaminated.
Easel
His easel is home-made, portable and built to his specification, with all the key features positioned exactly where he needs them to be.

Jake's palette

Home-made easel

Paint
As he is a colourist Jake, uses secondary colours straight out of tube rather than mixing them to achieve greater intensity of colour. Using the full range of tones and colours is key to his style. The brands he tends to use are Winsor & Newton (W&N) plus a couple of Daler Rowney colours. He uses these brands partly because they are what he started with but also because, in his view, some of the other brands aren’t as thick as W&N out of tube. This is important for his style of painting, which involves applying dark colours straight away, rather than the more traditional approach of building up depth of colour in layers.
Brushes
Jake recommends using hair (sable) brushes because they create a clearer wash, and hold about three times the volume of water than synthetic brushes. With watercolour, he explained that for optimum results it’s essential to touch the paper with the brush as little as possible.

Practice, practice, practice
It gets complex when combining all the basic techniques of watercolours so he advises learning how to use watercolours through a lot of practice, to the point where it becomes second nature: you know how the paper reacts to and absorbs water; you can anticipate what happens when wet paint hits wet paper; how watery or thick the paint needs to be, and so on. Only when you are fully familiar with how watercolour behaves can you begin to consider your own artistic interpretation of the subject, which is what makes your art different to others.

Painting 1: Otters

As well as a reputation for loose painting, another feature of his work is simple backgrounds. Plus, he tends to paint lights and darks at the same time, in contrast to the traditional watercolour approach of working from light to dark. He also works very quickly, especially at demos. He spends the majority of time on the drawing.
The reference image he used was monochromatic, so Jake had to work out how to bring the animals to life through the use of colour, and how to make the flat fur appear interesting. He chooses bright, intense colours for his animal paintings yet manages to ensure they remain lifelike. Jakes puts in colour – purples and blues - where photo is grey. When watercolour paint dries quite a lot of the paper shines through and dulls the colour.
He started by painting the otters’ eyes with the paint sticky in consistency, but didn’t wet the paper first. He doesn’t always start with eyes, though tends to if he’s working wet into wet so that the rest of the painting builds up around it and to ensure the eye sits correctly within the head/body.
Jake paints what he sees. His advice was to not paint what you know (what you think you see) which you’ll do if you over analyse the subject. It’s not important to get it exact but ensure the shapes hang together and give the overall impression of your subject.
He paints the otter on the left first, making the hair blue, painting on dry paper, and changes the colour temperature as he paints, adding warmer colours of crimson and orange. Jake also recommended working with lots of liquid so that while the paper is damp you can go back in and work on it. He creates areas of lighter colour, which gives energy to the painting, and he aims to incorporate hard and soft edges.
For the white face and neck, he adds blue to white to get the right colour and puts warm colours next to cool ones to give luminosity. Warm pushes the painting forwards while cool pulls it back. He paints the whisker follicles while damp.
Above all, Jake always tries to make interesting marks on paper, doesn’t “paint by numbers” or just fills in shapes with paint.
He uses the dry brush technique for the darker hair on the otter’s neck and adds darker paint next to the chin to show its shape.
He makes the painting into a vignette towards base of paper, by softening out edges, or by loose, diagonal brush strokes.

First otter, painted

Jake works on the first otter

Second otter
The second otter, on the right of the picture, is very pale, providing contrast. Jake explains that paintings need busyness and quietness, achieved with tonal differences. Instead of grey, he puts in a combination of blue and crimson, wet into wet, to add depth.
Spattering paint helps break up patterns and shapes, but also can help bring together the object and background. Making the whiskers overlap onto the second otter also helps to connect the pair.
The background is a pale, delicate wash of cobalt blue, a dominant colour in the rest of the painting, helps to unify it and also helps to reveal the otters’ edges.
Jake also discussed how he fragments, or breaks up, the image to simplify it, adding that the key to simplification is, in fact, understatement not omission. Find a way to understate the image, not omit elements because that can change the scene, making it unrecognisable.
Understatement can be delivered through reduction – reducing lots of small shapes into larger ones by connecting them together, often by tone, and by merging shapes together with soft, blurred edges.

Painting 2: cockerel
This was a very quick, gestural painting.

Start with a pencil sketch of just a few lines.
Work super fast. Note the light comes from left.
Very wet cobalt blue even though it’s red on pic. Painting very wet allows you to drop bright colours in to give depth.
Bright red for the comb.
White gouache thick on head.
Alizarin crimson and violet for the top/neck.
Beak is yellow but he made it darker so that it stands out against the white background.
Dark into small eye.
Add shadows on the chest and front to create the silhouette of the body shape.
Warm and cool contrast as before.
Legs - sticky dry brush stroke. Red (warm) for near leg. Blue grey for far leg.
Tail feathers - have fun, go mad, use any colour you like.
Cast shadow on the ground adds perspective and movement.
Finish with some spatter to infer movement.

Finished cockerel

Jake takes questions

Wrapping up
It was a pleasure to welcome Jake back to LAG to show his approach. His demo not only proved to be inspirational for the 30 or so members and guests who attended, it also provoked some lively, good natured and amusing discussion from one of our more provocative members on the topic of sustainable art materials! Overall, this demo was tremendous fun, informal yet most informative.

If you’re interested in finding out more about Jake’s work please visit his website where you can also find details of the workshops and online tutorials he offers.