If you’re looking to explore the intriguing city of Brighton and Hove in the not too distant future, it may be worth scheduling your trip for May, the month where the city comes alive with two major showpiece events, the Brighton Festival and the Brighton Festival Fringe.
The latter takes place concurrently with the main festival, but has managed to carve out its own niche identity in recent years as one of the best open access festivals in the UK. In fact, today it’s England’s preeminent arts festival. If you want to learn more about the ins and outs of the Brighton Festival Fringe, the information provided in the guide below goes into a little more detail.
Brighton Festival Fringe: Everything You Need to Know
The Festival Fringe has become established as a major force on the cultural calendar, and now shines out as one of the fastest growing events of its kind around the world. The Fringe has been alive in some form since 1967, growing significantly through the decades before enjoying a new lease of life as the ‘Festival Fringe’ in 2002. Lighting up Brighton for three weeks during May, over 600 events usually take place at venues across the city. The event has been such a success that today, the organisers for the Brighton Festival Fringe 2011 can expect to cash in on £500,000 worth of ticket sales before the festival has even begun.
The Festival Fringe as it would be recognised in its current guise first developed in the 1990s, the brainchild of Samantha Hutton Bell in 1993, who thought the Fringe could benefit from an official organising panel. Working without funding for the rest of that decade, the onset of the 21st century saw the Fringe evolve into a registered charity, which is now run completely independently of the main Brighton Festival.
The independent spirit of the Festival Fringe becomes evident once you scrutinise the organising process a little more deeply. Unlike many rival events, the Festival Fringe is open-access, meaning anybody can stake a claim to put on a show or display, and any venue can be used to host an event, from local parks to pubs and beach huts. It’s the eclectic nature of the festival that has arguably helped build its name both in the UK and abroad. In fact, such is the growing reputation of the south coast festival, it’s beginning to offer real competition to the world famous Edinburgh Fringe.
The water colourists skill is really tested when they need to represent the effects of weathering and the natural textures produced by the ageing of wood, stone and metal. It makes no difference if they’re creating a landscape or the background for a pet portrait, texture is a good way of adding interest into a picture. Subjects such as this allow the artist to improve their handling of the paint. continue reading »
Easels can help make the life of the pet portrait artist much more comfortable, providing secure support for their canvas, at just the right height and angle. All the same, there are a few of varieties to go for, each one designed to meet the particular needs of the artist whether they’re in a studio or outside.
The most versatile is the sketching easel. continue reading »
Way back before the pencil was invented, artists wanting to put down a detailed drawing before commencing a portrait used something called a metal point. This was the usual way of producing a delicate mark on prepared grounds like gesso.
The metal point just consisted of a piece of gold, silver or lead which was fashioned with a small tip allowing it to make a mark, similar to a hard pencil. continue reading »
Since the early Renaissance, artists working on portraits in oil (or any other subject for that matter) have always started with a layer of size to seal the raw canvas or board prior to the gesso ground. It’s intention is to protect the canvas from the chemicals in the paint that may cause it to decompose. Today, if you use an acrylic primer, size is not always needed, but it’s remains a good way of protecting the canvas and if you make your own gesso is an important part of the preparation. continue reading »
Pet portraits in oil can be varnished to offer a protective layer that preserves the picture from the atmosphere, it is also used to create a consistent finish whether gloss or matt. Given enough time a varnish will itself be attacked, collecting dust and dirt, sometimes cracking and eventually discolouring. Consequently, any varnish has to be easily removed and replaced by a new layer. continue reading »
A crucial part of any painting, whether a pet portrait or abstract picture, is the relationship in colour and tone. Tone is the degree of light and shade in the picture, it exists independently of colour and can be measured on a scale which progresses from white to black. The sense of colour is created by the eye’s reaction to light of certain wavelengths; pure colour exists only as light, and as far as painters are concerned, all colours are also modified by tonal value. continue reading »
The oils used by pet portrait artists and others are called drying oils. These are vegetable based oils that, when combined with oxygen, acquire a solid film which is immune to atmospheric pollutants and many solvents. Oils dry out really slowly and although the paint film is touch dry inside a few days, it in fact takes a few years for the paint to get completely dry. continue reading »
Pigments used in the preparation of paints are true pigments, meaning that, unlike dyes, they have form. They come as a fine dry powder, and should be free from impurities. Artists’ paints use pigments derived from many sources, traditionally this used to be naturally occurring stone, earths, metals but over time many have been replaced by man-made materials which provide a more permanent and stable pigment. continue reading »
The pet portrait painter painting remotely and developing a unique style is quite a modern concept.
Until the close of the 18th century successful painters ran businesses in which methods of production, quality control and sales to customers were often very highly organised. In medieval times and during the Renaissance these were conducted in places that were literally workshops, usually rooms on the ground floor of a building that could be opened onto the street by means of shutter doors, thus acting as both a shop and a studio. continue reading »