Wendover Art Club – update, November 2022
The Wendover Art Club’s year got off to a brilliant start with a demo by local artist Mark Fennell, who studied Art at Amersham College. His first career was as a Art Director in advertising but he became disillusioned with this, turning to professional portraiture in oils.
For his demonstration Mark used a photo image displayed on a tablet, a few feet away, similar to the distance with a live model and worked on a primed linen board. Mark avoids the use of a grid to help transfer an image to his board and instead uses his brush to measure distances and angles as shown in the first image.
The initial drawing out, using Mark’s favoured flat brush and raw umber paint, took about 45 minutes, establishing tonal values and using constant comparison of lengths and angles in order to establish a likeness.
Mark used a palette of some 10 colours ranging from white and yellow to alizarin crimson and black, this palette can be placed in a freezer to help prolong the life of paints and reduce the expense of wasted paint. Working in the dark to light and “fat over thin” mode usual in oils Mark at first put in the darker areas such as the top of the head, hair and eyebrows, shirt and background. Flesh tones were generally created with the 2 yellows and 2 reds in the palette.
Mark concluded by adding lighter and smaller areas including the highlights in the eyes, concluding a demo of some 2 hours. When not working to a very tight demo deadline Mark can take some 3 or 4 days to complete a portrait. If you would like to see more of Mark’s work or were thinking of commissioning him, he does dogs as well as humans!, please visit his website at;
To find out about Wendover Art Club’s programme for 2022-23 go to: