Artist Insights: Tom Shepherd

Tom Shepherd is a UK-based watercolour painter, teacher, and the co-presenter of the Ask an Artist podcast. In this Artist Insights film, Tom demonstrates his watercolour painting process, explaining his set up, materials, and his approach to colour as he paints. Tom also reflects on the importance of discovering painting as you work, and how articulating ideas through his teaching practice gives him a deeper understanding of his own painting practice.

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Artist Insights: Tom Shepherd

 

 

Contents

0:00 Introduction

0:38 “I just dove straight into it”

1:19 “Watercolour is where I really found my artistic voice”

2:17 “This is my standard watercolour set up”

3:02 “If possible I like to work standing up”

3:38 “Mop brushes get everything flowing really nicely”

4:03 “I’ve grown up loving wildlife”

4:19 “Be consistent in how you lay out your palette”

4:45 “I have my core set of colours”

5:58 “I like to discover the painting as I’m going”

6:24 “The drawing is the gateway into the painting”

6:54 “I go from light to deep tones”

7:26 “I love the balance between the logical and the intuitive”

8:03 “Don’t think of it as painting the subject, but laying the foundations”

8:31 “How my studio is organised is really important”

8:56 “A painting space is a sacred space”

9:37 “You can map out the painting quickly without committing too heavily”

10:25 “Watercolour is a lot more forgiving than a lot of people think”

10:49 “I find the act of using watercolour incredibly inspiring”

11:16 “I enjoy the challenge of trying to capture the light”

11:49 “I want to let the medium do its thing”

12:38 “I’d like to experiment in sketchbooks a little more”

13:13 “Bringing the paint to a single cream consistency”

13:48 “Even if you’ve only got six colours, play around with how they interact”

14:11 “The biggest mistake I see is going too dark too soon”

15:07 “When it comes to painting I’m quite impatient”

16:10 “Don’t overthink it”

16:43 “One artist who stands out for me is Sorolla”

17:32 “How far can I push these brushstrokes?”

18:48 “Some people like their paper to be completely flat”

19:23 “Notice what the watercolour is doing”

19:52 “The key element that opens up watercolour is understanding paint consistency”

20:17 “Keep the area alive by getting more moisture on it”

20:32 “Teaching other people has significantly improved my practice”

21:37 “Drifting into the deep shadow”

22:13 “The medium dictates when the painting is finished”

22:58 “What are we trying to do as a painter that might be different from the photo?”

23:32 “A solid foundation in theory is like a springboard”

24:17 “I’m not trying to labour the paint too heavily”

25:00 “The more confidently you do it the better”

25:56 “Do paint what you love”

27:34 Credits

 

 

Extract

I always loved drawing when I was younger. Whilst I did want to explore the idea of being an artist, it didn’t really seem like a viable option so I went off in the direction of studying geography at university. But drawing was always in the back of my mind.

After doing a little bit of travelling after university, I had to work out what I was going to do with my life. Much to the pain of my parents, I decided that I was going to try and become an artist with absolutely no training, and no idea how to make a living whatsoever. I just dove straight into it, which in many ways I think is the best way to approach stuff.

 

 

I started off painting artwork on guitars because I thought nobody was possibly going to want to buy a painting of mine. So if I can trick them into buying something else, like a guitar with my work on it, I thought that might be a viable option. It took me off on an interesting tangent for a few years. I really got stuck into the music scene and guitar-making.

I always had the calling to get back to actually just painting on canvas. Through a series of circumstances, I ended up doing a small apprenticeship with an artist where I learnt oil painting. That introduced me to the world of fine art and representational art. From there I kind of drifted along. I started doing a little bit of teaching, I drifted into acrylics, and in the last five or six years I moved to watercolour. Watercolour is where I would say that I really found my artistic voice. That’s where a few different things all came together and connected.

I’ve always grown up loving wildlife and loving birds, so I paint a lot of those subjects purely because I love them. I tie that in with loving the light and loving watercolour as a medium, and it becomes this lovely holistic package of fun and experimentation.

 

 

I like to work in this looser, more painterly way. I find that standing up and slightly away from the painting keeps you looking at the painting as a whole, rather than homing in on individual bits a little bit too much. I think when you focus on a small area, you can often do so at the cost of the whole painting. The whole painting is always more important than the individual parts.

The way I lay out my palette is a really important thing for me. I don’t think it matters how you do it, but I think once you’ve found a way that works for you, being consistent is a good idea because you want things to become second nature and more intuitive. When it comes to actual colours that I like using, I have what I would call my core set of colours, which is quite small. With students, I always recommend they start with this core set of colours. For me, that’s a split primary, so you have a cool and a warm of each primary basically giving you six colours. From there you can expand a little bit and start to explore your colours.

I am a huge fan of Indian Yellow. I’m a total sucker for warm yellows, a bit of red in there really pushes it towards orange. That dominates a lot of my paintings. I’m always looking to experiment with granulation, the Daniel Smith colours in particular. They’ve got all of these amazing colours that granulate and do very, very interesting things. I’m finding as I’ve got more comfortable with colour mixing, I am slowly bringing in more unusual colours and feel a lot more brave and comfortable doing that. I think one of the biggest bits of advice, though, is don’t change everything at once. I tend to just swap out one or two colours at a time so that there’s some sort of consistency with the other colours.

 

 

I do tend to draw out first for most of my paintings. Drawing out the painting, whilst it’s not overly complicated, is an important element for me because I start thinking about the way that I’m painting it. My mind’s easing into the process. I don’t plan my paintings massively, but I might start to think about where the different blocks of tone are going to be, and where I’m going to work very wet-on-wet. I don’t overthink it, but I find that it’s the gateway into the painting.

For me when I’m painting, I love the balance between the logical and mind-based stuff. That’s your theory, your principles, and your understanding of techniques, mixed with this very intuitive, impulsive, creative way of working. For me, my painting is at its best and I love it the most when it’s somewhere in between the two. I’m using the theory to allow the creativity to really come out.

I need a clear space and not too much visual clutter everywhere. The painting space, both physically, mentally, and emotionally, is almost like a sacred space. You have to get into that space and get into that zone. I have a few ways of doing that. I might burn a little bit of incense because it just sets the mood. It puts you in the mindset. It’s like, “Right, I’m painting”.

 

 

One of the big misconceptions of watercolour is that it’s very unforgiving. And whilst it can be unforgiving once it’s dried, as long as there’s loads of water and pigment on the page, watercolour is a much more forgiving medium than I think a lot of people think. You can pull stuff out. You can push it around.

The act of using watercolour itself I find massively inspiring. These days I do like to paint a little bit of everything, a little bit of all subjects, but the thing that usually unites them is that I see something in the subject that I think, “Oh, there’s a great opportunity for a big area of wet into wet work.” Or “I could do some really lovely loose brush strokes in that area there”. So it’s driven by the love of the medium itself.

Light can be so evocative and so emotive. That for me is always at the heart of things. When I look back at my very early work, I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was always fascinated by the light and the way that it hits objects and illuminates them in different ways. All of these things are wrapped up in trying to capture the light.

 

 

I would like to say that I’m the sort of artist who has loads of sketchbooks lying around in the studio. I think maybe at some point if I have a little bit more time freedom, I could imagine experimenting in the sketchbook a little bit more and trying things out. But as it stands, I just get on with painting in the studio.

Even if you’ve only got six colours, really play around with how they interact with each other. What happens if I mix a cool blue with that yellow, versus a warm blue with that yellow? What happens if I add more water? More pigment? Just play, play, play, and get to know your materials.

When it comes to painting I’m actually quite impatient. I like a result to appear fairly quickly or at least see that I’m on the way to some sort of result that I’m going to be happy with. If I’m not, it tends to get thrown away fairly quickly. I tend to work very, very quickly as a result. I like working quickly because it doesn’t allow too much time for overthinking. It encourages a slightly looser, more painterly, more intuitive way of working. What I love about watercolour is that it often dictates the pace of a painting. You get ready to paint, you start painting, and that’s it. Then you’re on the roller coaster of watercolour. You’ve got to roll with it while it’s wet. Then it gets to the point where you can’t do anymore. The medium says stop and that’s it. You can’t really just keep piling on paint to make it better like you can with so many other mediums. I really like that roller coaster and the rhythm of a painting.

 

 

There are loads of artists throughout history that I’ve drawn inspiration from at one point or another, but one artist that always stands out for me is Joaquín Sorolla. I’m a huge fan of his work. There’s so much colour in his painting, and I found it very inspiring that you can do extremely colourful paintings and really push the saturation and the chroma of colour, but without making it garish. Just everything about his work I found fascinating and such an ability to capture light and atmosphere.

The key element that opens up watercolour to people is understanding paint consistency. Paint consistency is how it feels on the palette. Is it very watery? Is it milky, creamy, thick like Marmite? And then how wet is your page? The interaction between those two characteristics is really important.

Teaching other people has significantly improved my own practice. Having to articulate what I’m doing all the time, having to explain processes and ideas in many different ways to many different people. It has really given me a much deeper understanding of the foundational principles that apply to all of us. It’s also given me a really good insight into my own mindset and the way that I think about painting.

 

 

Wherever you are on your painting journey, but particularly at the start, I think it’s really important to understand that theory is a really important part of painting. I’m always wary of saying this because it can feel a bit opposing to what people think that painting is. You might think “Oh, if I focus too heavily on theory I won’t be really creative and produce really exciting work”, but actually if you flip that around and think of theory as the tools that enable you to express yourself better, it’s like a springboard for you.

I think there are a few people in the world that are born with a natural attitude which you might call talent, but I think for most of us it’s focusing on the right things, working hard, and persistence. If you have a vision for what you’re painting you want it to be, focus on that vision and you will get there. I really do think it is all learnable.

Paint what you love and what you’re inspired by. There’s no point going into a painting if you’re not excited to paint it. At times you might want to push your boundaries a little bit and tackle some subjects that you don’t usually do, but on the whole, you’ve got to paint what really fires you up and what really inspires you and that will lead to the best paintings. The best paintings are not the ones that are most technically perfect, they’re the ones that are slightly less technically perfect, but they’re painted with enthusiasm and energy.

 

 

About Tom Shepherd

As a surfer with a geography degree, Tom longed to give free rein to his creative instinct. He started by using graffiti pens to draw bright and colourful custom artwork on guitars, but the infinite variety of subjects and the endless possibilities of other mediums was always beckoning him. Subsequently daring to pick up a brush, his encounter with more traditional mediums, like oil and acrylic, opened a world of imaginative inspiration. He hasn’t looked back since, with watercolour being the place where he found his artistic voice.

Whilst he loves painting a wide variety of subjects, especially if the fall of light is exciting, Tom frequently returns to his first passion: painting wildlife, in particular birds. Where possible combing his artwork with conservation efforts close to his heart. Tom has become a highly regarded and much sought-after tutor through his Online Watercolour School, as well as in-person workshops and painting holidays around the world. He also co-hosts the popular Podcast, Ask An Artist, created to help creatives of all forms with the ins and outs of making a living as an artist.

Visit Tom’s website

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In Conversation with Peter Keegan and Tom Shepherd, Ask an Artist

 

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Further Reading

How We Collaborate With Artists

Tips for Watercolour Glazing

In Conversation With John Cogley, Daniel Smith

A Guide to Stretching Watercolour Paper

 

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