Sarah Cleeve Art

How I’ve progressed with my oil painting, plus finally trying wood engraving

So far in 2023, besides my comfortably familiar colour pencil work, I’ve been on a steep learning curve with my oil painting attempts. Thankfully I’ve found the best (in my opinion!) explainer of alla prima oil painting on the internet – Alex Tzavaras – whose Patreon channel is excellent, and shorter versions of his tutorials on Youtube are also pretty darn useful. So many “ohhh THAT’S how it’s done” moments! His recommendation of Richard Schmid’s Alla Prima II book has led to my knowledge and understanding of the practice of oil painting coming on leaps and bounds. This means I have some oil paintings that I feel not too embarassed to share on this blog post. Still room for improvement though!

As well as oil painting, I’ve made a start with wood engraving – a medium I’ve been admiring since beginning to work with rare books in my day job. Illustrations in books have always fascinated me, and as a kid I used to draw for my own “novels” constantly! One day, back in the my childhood, a kind neighbour randomly gave me a fineliner pen, and I’ve been hooked on black and white line imagery since. Recently I’ve produced work in pointilist form, and also got into the wonderful world of dip pens, spoon and mapping nibs and bottled inks. Wood engraving now is proving to be another happy avenue on my art journey (also an expensive one too, but excellent value for money!). Feel free to judge my efforts so far, alongside the oil paintings 😃