The Charles Tunnicliffe Society
Established 2005
"To promote greater awareness of the life and work
of Charles Frederick Tunnicliffe OBE, RA  1901-1979"

Creating Paintings

In the BBC programme 'True to Nature' Charles Tunnicliffe
explained how he set about creating a bird painting, from a
field sketch to the finished work, and in his own words:

"You must start from the live bird to get the life into your drawing. 
You take a sketchbook out and get as much of the live bird in it as
you possibly can, and when it flies away from you, you go home and
 have another sketchbook, where you try to memorise what you have
seen, and from these you possibly have an idea of the bird you
want to paint, and you look at all of your information about the bird.
 Quite a few of these are memory drawings..

The next thing is to compose this into a picture, and for that I use
small sketches, just to get the elements of the design settled and
then go onto larger cartoon and all the details will be defined. 
I shall then start the finished watercolour."


  Stage 1 - Example of Field Sketchbook


Stage 2 - Example of Memory Drawing - 8" x 9"

   
Stage 3 - Small composition sketches, each 2.5" x 3.5"


Stage 4 - Example of a large cartoon - 19" x 27"

 
Stage 5 - Example of a finished watercolour - 10" x 15"

 Home Page       Website Index