Weekend workshop with renowned artist Jamel Akib

One cold Saturday in January professional artist, Jamel Akib, delivered a workshop for LAG members featuring four different subjects, each to be painted in acrylics or oils, in the style Jamel is known for – confident, deft, bold, brush strokes, blocks of bright colour, and an economic approach.

​It may have been chilly outside, yet the atmosphere and mood inside Lacock Village Hall, where we held the workshop, was very warm, relaxed and good humoured. Holding a four to five hour long workshop on a weekend is a different type of activity for LAG members, the aim being to offer more variety and the chance to try out new techniques under the guidance of professional artists. 

Landscape – St Agnes
Jamel started us off with an ‘easy’ landscape; a photo of St Agnes in Cornwall with hillside tin mines and bay in the distance, contrast turned up high making the vast expanse of heather sloping down to the foreground burst into a riot of purples, pinks and oranges.

Reference photo: St Agnes

Jamel's finished painting

​He showed us the step-by-step process for painting this scene. Starting with a simple outline drawing on a canvas or board pre-prepared with a pink/purple base, he then painted the sky using a mix of Naples yellow and white, turquoise with white for the sea, and burnt sienna for the buildings. Jamel painted the heather with a wide, flat brush, using long, vertical strokes to apply blocks of colour – amethyst, oranges and yellows – and permanent rose for the path. He continued to build up the layers of paint, adding shadows and highlights to the buildings, and depth to the heather. Then we all had a go! Photos on the workshop gallery page show how Jamel approached this and you can also see some of the paintings we produced on the day.

A few of us generally paint with watercolours and have little or no experience of acrylics so we felt out of our comfort zone. Nevertheless, it was good to try something completely different for a change. To attempt four paintings in four and a bit hours meant the pace of work had to be super-speedy! This was too ambitious for some so several of us opted to do two or three paintings during the session, rather than the full set.

Feathered friends - owl and hummingbird
Next up was to paint an owl and a hummingbird. Again Jamel took us through how to approach these subjects in a step-by-step process. This time, however, we didn’t draw the outline of the birds, we went straight in with paint. Jamel blocked out the shape of the owl’s body and head, using pale orange for the neck, darker orange for the body and turquoise on the right of the body to create shadows, adding permanent rose next to the blue for darker shadows. He applied amethyst for wing shadow detail and body feathers, giving it shape. For the face, he used a paler blue with a dab of yellow, and amethyst to suggest the beak, and chin line (do owls have chins?). Amethyst mixed with black were used for the eyes, with a speck of white as a highlight. To finish it off, Jamel painted large brush strokes in amethyst as the background, making the owl merged the body edges into the background. 

Reference photo

Jamel's finished painting

​Jamel used a very similar approach to paint the hummingbird, building the painting up in blocks of colour and applied orange and raw sienna for the head and body and explained the need to use interesting brush strokes. White and yellow were used for highlights, and green with raw sienna for the top of the head. To convey movement, Jamel advised blurring the body strokes into the background colour.  

Reference photo

Jamel's finished painting

Lion – up close and personal
The final subject of the day was a lion’s head or, to be more accurate, it’s face showing an intense gaze. By the time we got to this painting, the end of the workshop was in sight to time was fairly limited.
This exercise involved using a paste applied to the surface of the board to create a textured base, spreading it fairly roughly and randomly with a palette knife creating. This textured foundation really helps to produce a realistic effect for the lion’s hair. Jamel used a variety of colours for this painting: raw sienna; burnt sienna; burnt umber; and neutral grey. His finished version was impressive, as you can see from the image. 

Reference photo

Jamel's painting

Jamel’s workshop definitely stretched us, but it was also hugely enjoyable and many of us learnt new techniques to put into practice in the future. You can see the artwork we produced during the workshop on a dedicated gallery here.
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To find out more about Jamel’s work, please take a look at his website:  https://www.jamelakib.com/index.html