“Chúc Mừng Năm Mới”…that’s Happy New Year in Vietnamese.
Susan and her husband, Neil, visited Vietnam at the beginning of 2020, during the Tểt celebration for the Lunar New Year. She took many photos and drew sketches of their holiday. Susan used these references to paint the following two pictures in pen, inks and watercolour, beautifully evoking her visit to an amazing country.

Susan was also inspired by the suggested idea of using the two Pantone Colours of the Year, yellow and grey. Using just Payne’s Grey and Lemon Yellow she has mixed the two colours into many different colours and tones. The subject was a walk from the first lockdown in April 2020. What a dramatic sky over fields, hope you got home before the clouds burst!

Super work, Susan, you have created paintings that will hopefully inspire other members to get painting this month.

Sketchbook challenges are run throughout the year by many artists on social media, but this challenge was run by artist, printmaker and author Susan Yeates on her website www.magenta-sky.com. Every day Susan emailed and put on Facebook a prompt and and video of how to attempt the prompt, with hints, tips and advice of how to tackle the subject.

Here are all the prompts from the month, so if you didn’t take part at the time, you could pick a few ideas and have a go at sketching them now.

Cynthia took part from day one and every single day created a detailed sketch of the prompt. A few are in colour and the rest were done with pencil, achieving great detail in all her sketches. Here they are in several photos. (Tap on the first photo to see the image in a larger scale and then tap/click onward to the next photos.) Cynthia enjoyed the month so much that she is carrying on sketching every day, with a prompt suggested by her husband.

Tracy started the challenge a couple of days late but soon caught up. A friend at Gravesend Art Group gave the tip of using Post-it notes for the sketches. This means the sketch is small, doesn’t take a long time, can be done on colourful paper and then stuck into a sketchbook. Sketching small took the pressure off having to create a big image every day and taking a maximum of 15 minutes per sketch meant the task was quickly achieved. The sketches were done in pencil, pen and a little watercolour.

Kay did two prompts but working full time and monitoring two teenagers doing home schooling has meant not much time for art. It’s a great start so hopefully when life gets back to normal do look back at the prompts and sketch a few more.

Here are a few ideas for you to paint at home as we still cannot meet at the parish hall for our sessions. Send Tracy photos of your paintings by email, text, WhatsApp or Messenger by the end of the February, giving details of the medium, paper, time taken etc.

Portrait Artist of the Month (PAOTM)

These two very famous actors were born in the month of February…

Dame Elizabeth Taylor and Sir Norman Wisdom.

They had long lives and careers so you can draw or paint them young or old or as absolutely any tv or film character they played. Such a vast choice of images online, so choose a favourite one. As mentioned before, you don’t have to spend hours on a painting, take 30 minutes to draw their likenesses.

February is not named after a Roman god but the Roman month Februarius, from the word ‘februum’ meaning purification, after a ceremony that was held on the 15th.  

Saint Valentine of Rome is celebrated on February 14th, so you could paint his image, or anything to do with our modern Valentine’s Day.

Pantone Colour of the Year 2021

Pantone is the company known worldwide for its colour matching system.  For the past 20 years they have chosen a colour to represent the year, but for 2021 they have chosen two colours.
They are Illuminating (13-0647) a brightish yellow like cadmium yellow and Ultimate Grey (17-5104) a mid grey.  Read what Pantone have to say about these two colours…

Choose the yellow and and paint birds, flowers like daffodils and tulips, butterflies, sunlight etc, or use the grey for skies, landscapes or grey animals. Or you could combine the 2 colours in one painting, realistic or abstract.

Chinese Year of the Ox

Draw or paint oxen pulling ploughs or carts, in fields or in the wild.