Practise making thumbnail sketches.

Either set up a still life, or use a photograph. Make bold, basic shapes to plan the position of the various elements on the page.

• Keep the shapes very simple; think in terms of geometery and how the rough silhouettes overlap.

• Add lines over the drawing the work out the line the eye will travel through the painting.

• Start with the basic shapes, add the grid of thirds AFTERWARDS. This is a different order to the one suggested in most bookks - give it a try and see if it helps to do it this way around.

• Similarly, rather than draw the picture shape and fill it in with the composition, draw your design first and place the edges of the picture AFTERWARDS.

• Concentrate on the main elements

Above all, DO NOT be drawn in to adding detail!

NOTE THE SIMPLIFICATION IN THIS EXAMPLE.

Extension : try using more than one photograph to come up with a design.

Richard Pikesely was born in London in 1951, and studied at Harrow School of Art, the City of Canterbury College of Art and the Univerity of London.

Equally at home in watercolour or oil he is often found painting en plein air in either medium in his home county of Dorset.

In an interview he gave for the New English Art Club, of which he is a past president, he gave an insight into his philosophy towards has painting stating that ‘…painting is a conversation with the visual world and starts with painting in front of the subject. It is always a matter of finding equivalents in paint, for light and space and seeing the world ‘in paint’ continues to be an obsession.’