Telling a story through painting and drawing

Posted on February 19, 2016 Updated on February 18, 2016

This week Angus showed us a technique to create a narrative painting, with a bit of a coloured pencil lesson thrown in.

Narrative painting tells a story. Angus illustrated this with some famous – but complex examples.

One is Pieter Bruegel, a Dutch artist whose works include Netherlandish Proverbs, a sprawling work that features images representing 116 proverbs.

A second example is Hieronymous Bosch. Among his works is The Garden of Earthly Delights , a triptych that is rich with symbolism.

Angus also talked about the work of Martin Handford, who created the Where’s Wally books – a more modern version of a narrative artwork.

After a few minutes trying to find Wally, Angus showed us an easy technique to start creating our own detailed masterpiece.

First we made a number of different drawings around a theme. Then we traced them all onto a larger piece of paper, arranging and overlapping them to create a frieze-style picture.

Finally we were able to add colour using coloured pencil. An effective technique was using white pencil to mask off areas that we wished to remain white. This was useful for creating dots and patterns. (We also used this technique when learning about watercolour pencils)

Angus’s example centred around ‘The art room is a strange place…’.

Angus’s finished picture

The aloe is alive!