About
Hello my name is Nigel Ragg and I started painting as a pastime and hobby about 6 years ago. So far I have concentrated on watercolour and pencil drawing, with a scattering of soft pastel work, acrylic and oil. I also thoroughly enjoy sketching and tend to use pen & watercolour for most of the work in my sketch books.
A reason to paint
Over the past 5 years I have been working my way around the coast of England on a rather lovely electric push bike and this has given me a great opportunity to stop on route to sketch the various landscapes of our wonderful country. I tend to cycle about 35 miles per day and stop each day for around an hour to do a drawing. Back at the hotel, or B&B that night I get out the watercolours and complete the picture. This way I build up a fabulous record of the trip, which has so far taken me from my home in north London, up the east coast as far as the Scottish border, then across the top of England, around the Cumbrian coast to Preston. I hope to commence the next section in May 2022, which should see me manage to get round much of the Welsh coast. I'll add the blog to this site, so do keep your eyes peeled for the latest news on the trip.
This Site
This site is dedicated to art and I will continue to add pictures as and when they are completed. I will also add to the blog and hope that the information might be of interest to fellow artists. I'll try to include events and workshops that I hear of and good tutor recommendations.
Also, having pre-covid, studied at the London Art Academy, I can thoroughly recommend this experience. They use very accomplished artists to teach different styles of painting, as well as sculpture, printing and model making.
The Artist at Work
Choosing your subject
It's never easy choosing a subject, so what I tend to do, certainly during the winter months, is to set up a still life on the kitchen table and work on that for a couple of days. Otherwise, again during the winter months, I tend to use photographs of landscape scenes. It's also quite a good idea to use examples from the host of 'how to' artists books available. This enables you to learn new techniques and experiment with new ideas.
Which brushes?
There's nothing like a visit to your local art shop to hunt for new equipment and let's face it, art is just another of those wonderful opportunities to buy new gear. There's drawing pencils, coloured pencils, propelling pencils, oil pastels, soft pastels, charcoal, watercolour paint, acrylic paint, oil paint, water-based oil paint, a heap of different types of paper and of course, canvases. Then there are all the containers, pencil wraps, boxes, carton's, pencil sharpeners, erasers, masking pens, easels, light boxes, etc., etc, on and on it goes. That is, of course, before we get to the brushes and of those there are literally hundreds, if not thousands of different types available - get down to that shop now and start hunting!