All my life I have admired people who can make marks on paper that capture your imagination in some way. That has widened to include other forms of design, like furniture, pottery, sculpture, fabric design, even knitting. I’ve never stopped trying to do that.

All these activities mean acquiring skills but also learning what are essentially tricks. I’ve often told people about my dad saying ‘let the saw do the work’ and it taking me another 20 years to realise what he meant (don’t over work it, establish a smooth rhythm). If you know the trick, then the skill often becomes easier to achieve. About 45 years after my dad first said that, someone watching me make stage sets remarked on the sheer speed of my sawing and I gave a little inward smile.
Last week I mentioned to Shelley Art Group the old watercolour sky trick. Skies often have deeper colour at the top of your view than at the bottom. If you are using watercolour the liquid tends to run downwards, taking the pigment with it. If you are painting on the flat, then it tends to run to edges of the area you are painting. If you are painting a sky, then turning the paper upside down makes the pigment run to the top of the sky. which is usually what you want. If it is a blue sky with white clouds you can dab the clouds out using an edge of cloth or tissue.
Knowing the trick doesn’t guarantee a result but it usually means that you are not working against the materials. This in turn allows you to concentrate on developing the skills to make the best use of that trick. As with my sawing, you suddenly develop more freedom and control in what you are doing. In watercolour that often means that you can use wetter applications of paint that flow.
In one group of people I painted with, one of them had been an art teacher and went to the Slade Art School. I watched him working on a scene with figures. This is a hard thing to do. He did the background and then sketched the figures on separate pieces of paper and cut them out. He moved them about the painting till he was satisfied, changing figure size if necessary, then marked them in place and set to painting. I’ve never forgotten that trick and I now use it in digital sketches for painted works. The painting at the top of this piece is one I was asked to do, of a kestrel sculpture I made that is down in Bristol. I had a couple of photos and I played with layouts, using a mixture of bits cut from photos, that I moved about and changed the angles of in Art Rage, and digital paint for the sky. When I was happy with it, I painted the sky first, using a mixture of palette knife and brush, then added the house roofs (palette knife). Finally I cut out the kestrel, moved it about, changed size and shape slightly then marked it in place and painted it on. I moved the rod, that holds it up and allows it to be seen from different angles as well as possible, so that it was there but worked best with this painting angle.
One of the simplest tricks people often forget about is to keep standing back to look at what you are doing from further away. Find some way of standing it up and look from the other side of the room. Do it often. If you are making a sculptural object, put it somewhere that you can walk round it and peer at it from different angles. You don’t have to develop a skill for this one, just remember the trick. If you are working digitally keep zooming out to get the same effect.
So there you are your trick starters.