BethR

A few things to do today so I thought I'd have the day off and read a book but the kindle battery died on me during the afternoon so I thought I'd have a go at an inktense figure in what time I had left.  Today it's a debut for BethR as the model.

The four colours in there today are deep indigo, bright blue, Persian red and leaf green.  After putting down the pencil outline, I started in the darkest of dark places with indigo, extending this into places that still looked dark with the blue.  I then went over the medium toned areas with the red and put a little of the red over the blue and indigo in places.  At this point I felt I needed another colour so brought in the green, going over some hidden edges that I didn't want to be hidden and generally adding some colour to the right side of all the 3D shapes.

After wetting all the marks with water I was a bit disappointed with how pale everything came out.  I don't think it's me being more disciplined about how I put down the dry marks: it's as if I'm using a different paper to normal.  Maybe I screwed up in my last order.  Anyway, I added a second layer of colour.  I did this not too long after wetting the first layer: things dried so quickly that I'm even more convinced I'm using different paper to usual.  In the second layer, I used more of the blue and indigo to darken shadows that were too light and added red over lots of the green bits that weren’t looking in harmony with the rest of the painting.  And after wetting the second layer of marks, that was me done.

There's really not much to say about this one.  It's going up for sale but it feels like a painting that I've done hundreds of times before.  My figure drawing is becoming samey and that worries me.

Towards Warren Cottage

I’ve caught up on my sleep now and can finally complete my three watercolours in three days challenge, two days late.  The challenge for the third painting was greenery, so I picked one of the many the many photos I've taken in my daily walks across Queendown Warren.

There are five colours in there today: French ultramarine. Transparent yellow, quinacridone magenta, burnt sienna and viridian.  I can,t really allocate a colour key to this one with a green playing quite a prominent role as well as there being both a warm and a cool red in there.

I was dreaming about this painting last night and, in this dream, I'd put down an underpainting using the brown and the magenta and then painted everything else over the top.  This included painting clouds in brown and magenta and later glazing the blue over the top to make the clouds grey and purple.  A quick experiment before starting this morning told me that this wouldn't work, so I painted a more conventional sky in the blue, leaving white gaps.  I dropped in a grey mixed from the blue and brown and then a little of the magenta into the grey in a couple of places.   It I did underpaint everything else with the magenta and the brown, using the cooler magenta for the more distant hills.  And I took a photo of how things looked at this stage:

Interesting, yeah?

After that, I painted in the shapes from the back to the front, mixing interesting greens in the palette from all five colours, painting them in and then dropping in individual colours wet into wet for variety.

And I kept doing this, eventually being faced with the problem of the big shape in the foreground.  I started by putting a bright, yellowy green along the horizon to attract eye.  A good start.  But then Don't Answer Me by the Alan Parsons Project came on and I had to stand up and move about.  And when I did this and turned back to the painting I was shocked by how good the foreground looked.  If I added anything else to the painting it would only make things worse.  I don't care if this looks unfinished; that was me done.

This feels like a big success and has given me a big confidence boost at just the right time of year.  It's always tempting with landscapes to paint the background, middleground and foreground all in detail, confusing the viewer.  There's no confusion here though – there's no foreground and the viewer is left in no doubt that he should be looking at the background.  That's what gives this one a huge sense of space.  This one's up for sale.

Applying To Landscape Artist Of The Year

I won't be completing my three landscapes in three days challenge.  One of the painful lessons I've learned over the years is that if I'm not "feeling it" then I shouldn't be painting.  And after staying up until 2am last night watching the chess, going for my daily four mile walk this morning and then walking the dog afterwards, I'm definitely not feeling it.

So instead, I've finished my Landscape Artist Of The Year application, twelve days before the deadline.  My main submission is The Mukurob (Finger Of God) as it's my favourite of all the landscapes I've painted over the last year or so.  My second submission is Church Of San Pedro De Atacama, Chile as I know the judges will want to see some paintings of buildings.  This one narrowly edged out Torre Nubia as I wanted to show off how I can make white buildings reflect a whole spectrum of colours.  And for my third painting I wanted something a bit off the wall and picked Kingsferry Bridge Under Three Different Skies just ahead of Lewes Castle.

I've also added a link in the labels along the top of the page for LAOTY judges to click on to see my better watercolour landscapes.  Not only my very best ones but all of the half decent ones.

Now I just have to wait.  Don't be expecting any news before the end of the year because I'll probably be told to keep things quiet if I'm offered a pod or a wildcard place.

And now that's all done, I'm putting my feet up to read a book and may well snooze off for a couple of hours at some point.  With tonight being another chess night and Monday being a busy day, it will probably be Tuesday before I get back to painting.

Nuuk Cathedral

Day two of my three watercolour landscapes in three days challenge and today it's buildings day.  I picked out a scene in Nuuk that had a church in the bottom right.  Because churches and Greenland landscapes tend to turn out well for me.  During one of my breaks in painting, I googled around and was shocked to find that the church in the bottom right is Nuuk Cathedral.  Well, well, well.

Being a Greenland scene, it was a no brainer for me to use the tundra colours.  They were supplemented today by French ultramarine, rose dore, titanium white and cadmium yellow.

I started by putting down pencil outlines, sling all the white bits and rubbing a candle over the bottom  hill and over the hill in the middle.  After that I just worked from back to right.  The sky, then the blue background hills, then the closer background hills, then the buildings/roads/grassy areas (all separately) and finally the bottom left hill.  Then I removed the making fluid and added some finishing touches.

The sky went down in a couple of layers.  The first layer was looking quite dark so I dabbed at it with kitchen paper, only for it to come out too light, so I added a second layer.  And maybe dabbed at it a bit more.

The blue background hills are in tundra blue with a bit of tundra pink and violet dropped in.  I like how I've been a bit loose and let some sky holes shine through.

The middle hill and the grassy areas use all fine tundra colours, with different colours being dropped in wherever felt right.  The hill has more of the blue and pink in the grey, rocky areas.  The grassy areas have much more of the orange and green than of the other three colours.

The road has all five colours and at one point I lightened it a bit by putting on watery titanium white and dabbing it off.

For the houses to appear bright enough I had to bring in extra, more saturated colours.  So the buildings have a couple of layers of rose dore in there as well as the tundra colours.  The blue houses started with tundra colours but looked a bit dull so I glazed over some French ultramarine.  The French ultramarine doesn't really count as an extra colour as it's already one of the ingredients in three of the five tundra colours.  The rooves and any grey houses were just made from the tundra colors.

The hill in the bottom left gave me the most trouble.  I made a few attempts but wasn't happy, so dabbed off a lot of paint.  Doing this tends to leave me with a horrible looking light shape with a thick dark border around it, which is pig ugly.  I ended up putting on very dry versions of all five tundra colours and then lightening it in places with titanium white.  It seemed to work and there's just enough of the tundra green visible in there for it to fit in with the rest of the painting.

Once this was all done I removed the masking fluid and made a few small changes.  I added detail to some of the big white masked areas like the doors to the cathedral and whatever building that is in the bottom left and the clock on the steeple.  Then I deed some tile lines and cladding lines to some of the buildings.  And the white window and roof frames were standing out a bit, so I did some more work on them.  First I added a grey glaze to any shadowed areas but this wasn't enough so I added watery French ultramarine, rose dore and cadmium yellow to all the sunlit white areas and dabbed at them with a kitchen towel to leave behind only a hint of colour.  And that was me done.

I'm feeling reasonably happy with this one.  Good sky and hills.  And the buildings are managing to be colourful enough to reflect their reality while still harmonising with the rest of the painting, which isn't easy.  I guess it's obvious looking at this that I've used masking fluid and that I've been quite loose with it but I’m coming to the conclusion that that's just my style and I have to get used to it.

Climate Change In City Of Rocks National Reserve

I need to get back to painting more landscapes, so that I can be ready for Landscape Artist Of The Year if selected as a pod artist or as a wildcard.  I've decided I'll be doing three watercolour landscapes in three days.  One will have rocks, one greenery and one buildings.

I started today with the easy option.  Rocks.  It's loosely based on a rock formation in the City Of Rocks Reserve, a National Reserve and State Park in Idaho.  Because there were three rocks in my source photo, I thought I'd have a go at a climate change painting.  This is one where I use all three sets of Schmincke supergranulators and transition from tundra colours on one side of the painting to desert colours in the other with Shire colours in between.

I made a mistake straight away with the composition, putting the coolest colours in the nearest rock and the warmest in the furthest away.  Everyone knows that cool colours recede while warm colours come forward, so I'd have been better off doing things the other way round.  I made a similar mistake with Ross Kemp.

The sky just uses the three sets of supergranulators.  From left to right it's tundra, Shire, desert.  For once I existed the urge to use cerulean blue for the Shire and desert skies and just made the best I could have the supergranulators.  At the end of the painting I added in the birds to disguise a few rogue drips.

For both the Shire and desert rocks, I started by wetting the whole area and dropping in lights and darks from my supergranulators where er I could see light and dark areas in my source photo.  Then I added in slightly thicker paint, creating extra colour wherever I thought it might look good.  I also put in some drips of water and granulation medium.  As it was drying, I thought the colours looked a bit too dark, so dabbed at them with a kitchen towel, which created some texture as well as lightening the colours.

The rocks came out interestingly variegated in terms of colour and tone but were lacking in three dimensionality, with no cracks or bulges.  Some of the edges were softer than I'd have liked too.  So I added a second layer of colour in much the same way as the first (so still using granulation medium and kitchen paper) but this didn't make any difference really.

Oh, and, as usual, the Shire supergranulators were supplemented with burnt sienna for some warmth and with green apatite genuine and forest brown for some dark green hues.

The tundra rock on the left followed the same process except that between the first and second layers of paint I added some sepia and indigo acrylic inks and tried to encourage them to go crazy with granulation medium.  I got some interesting effects but the second layer of supergranulators has pretty well covered them all up.

I'm left with a painting that is good enough to go up for sale but one where I'm annoyed with myself for the compositional error and where I'm frustrated with myself over not being able to make the rocks look craggy enough.

Alan Shearer

Lots of stuff going on at the moment so I thought I'd be better off just going for a quick inktense pencil painting today and give the sepia pencil it’s first proper workout.  Looking through all the portraits in my ideas pile, the one that looked like it might work nest in monotone was one of Alan Shearer, so he got the nod today.

So I put down a pencil outline, coloured all the dark areas in sepia, wet the pigment, let it dry and rubbed out all the pencil marks.  Here's what I ended up with:

I was pretty disappointed: maybe it's the sepia colour, maybe it was me app,sing too much pigment or maybe it was to do with painting large areas but everything looked too streaky for my liking.  It was all a bit ugly.

So I added some more colour.  First some Iris blue over all the background darks and over background middle tones recommended by the Notanizer app.  Then wild flame over all the darks and middle tones on the face.  Things still weren't quite right, so I got the app to recommend to me some light areas and I went over these and some of the middle tones with sun yellow.  And that was me done.

I guess there's a likeness of sorts there.  And a great likeness in the right eye.  But it's far from perfect and a bit of a comedown after the last two paintings.  It's not going in the shop window.

Tomorrow might be a day off, with. BT engineer coming round at some point to sort out the wifi.  That sort of thing trashes my day.

Ally MacLeod

A grim day today with a power cut in the morning and then no WiFi when the power came back on so I'm grabbing a sneaky coffee in Costa while I write this one up.

Tiday it's another portrait from the Scotland squad at the 1978 World Cup in Argentina.  Tiday it's the manager, Ally MacLeod, a man who had us all believing that the World Cup was coming home before everything went horribly wrong.  Just like Joe Jordan and Archie Gemmill, Ally's been done in notan style, using the tundra supergranulators.  Except that I now know the correct terminology is that he's been posterised and this is a term that I'll try to use in future.

The first step was to reserve all the white areas.  As well as the whites recommended by the Notanizer app, I put in a couple of highlights in Ally's eyes because the twinkle in there was a big part of ally's aura.  More on those highlights later.

As is normal when posterising with the tundra colours, I painted over all the light, medium and dark areas in tundra pink.  Today, though, I didn't just drop in water and drier tundra pink to create some variation, I also dropped in some watery tundra green and tundra orange.  I added the orange around Ally's cheeks nd the green on his forehead and chin, befitting the typical colour temperatures of those areas.

Then I painted tundra blue over all the medium and dark areas.  Again I dripped in bits of the brown and orange as well as more of the blue and more water.

And then the third layer was tundra violet in the darkest area and I made it interesting with more water, violet, green and orange.

The final stage was all about searching for a likeness.  I made corrections to the pink, blue and violet shapes where I'd missed res from the value plan.  I wet and lifted out some paint to suggest some teeth in Ally's smile.  And I added more pink and blue in places that the app wasn't recommending but where I could see value differences in the source photo that I thought might improve the likeness if I added them.  Finally I dropped some of the pink and blue into the highlights in Ally's eyes because the white highlights there looked too bright.  And that was me done.

I didn't think this one looked that great close up but was shocked when I looked at it from the other end of the studio.  The likeness and the personality are both there when this one's viewed from a distance.  The close up cropped view of the face is doing everything I wanted it too, looking deep into Ally and revealing, dare I say, a childish naïveté?  And his optimism is infectious.  Not only do I still believe Scotland will win the 1978 World Cup but I believe I'll win Portrait Artist Of The Year next year.  Ally's up for sale.

The City

After yesterday's experimentation I wanted to use all the lessons from it as quickly as possible, so that's what I've been doing today.

I started by putting down pencil outlines of the same London skyline as yesterday but of a different figure underneath.  Today's model is Sam.  Not Big Sam, just Sam.  I've painted Sam before.  I picked out this pose because it was sideways on, so at an angle that produced a line that looked like a skyline.

I then went over the lines with the fineliners.  For the London skyline I traced the while line, thickened some edges with the brush pen and added the needles on top of the dome.  For the figure, I started by inking in just enough lines to suggest the figure, no more.  I changed the shape of San's nose to look like the top of Canary Wharf tower and left out her knee so that the top of her shin and thigh looked like two separate objects.  I thickened some of the lines with the brush pen, varying the thickness everywhere.

Then I added the interesting bits, bits that I thought about on my walk earlier today.  I first turned her chest into the Dome.  I wanted to add the wheel somewhere and put it in the triangle between her two legs, with the outline of the wheel tangential to two missing lines on the back of her shin and thigh.  I felt that I needed one more London landmark, so added Tower Bridge, taking advantage of those lines down Sam's right leg.  Finally I added three cranes, something I was always planning on doing after I'd added the landmarks.

Once this was all done and I'd rubbed out any pencil marks, I opened up the inktense pencils.  Today I used them differently.  Normally, when I know that I'll be wetting all the dry marks, I apply the pigment using the edge of the lead.  But for this painting, where I was planning on leaving lots of pencil marks dry, I used the inktense pencils like I use coloured pencils.  I held the pencils lightly at the wrong end and applied the colour with a really light touch in small circles.  I added four or five layers of colour today.  As you can see, I went for neutral colours in the top left and bottom right corners again but this time my diagonal light burst was a rainbow of colours rather than just random saturated colours everywhere.

The final stage was the quickest and the most interesting, wetting the pencil marks.  My marks were all downwards today: there was no attempt to "sculpt the figure" with my brushstrokes.  The brushstrokes were of varying length and I tried hard not to create a regular periodic rhythm of strokes.  I tried to make some of the water marks look like out of control drips and in some places make these drips pool on lines that they landed on.  And that was me done.

Throughout the painting, I tried to tread a narrow path with the figure, making it not look too much like a figure or a skyline but something that could be interpreted both ways.  I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out.

This is one of my all time favourite paintings.  There's so much there to think about.  The first thing I see is the rainbow light, then I see two skylines, then I see that one of them is actually a figure.  Is there another figure there too?  Someone in the triangle between her legs.  The wheel is his body and the two lines on the back of Sam's thigh like the forearms of someone with his hands behind his head.  A lucky accident but still!  And then there's the message.  What is the painting trying to say about London?  Or about the people that live there?  Or, with the rainbow colours, about the LBTQ community?

I'm going to just call this one The City and leave it to people to create their own interpretations.  This one's up for sale.

Because The Night

I was in an experimental mood today.  I wanted to try out more of my new Inktense pencil colours, the saddle brown and sepia ink not having been given a runout yet.  And I wanted to try a bit of minimalist drawing after reading the Frédérick Forest book.  

My plan was to fill the paper fairly randomly with inktense pencil marks, albeit leaving a bright sunlit band of saturated colours sweeping over it, leaving unsaturated colours in the tip left and top right.  I'd then use a water rush to paint a London skyline across the top of the painting and a simplified figure along the bottom (Becca being today's model, by the way).

And I did all this,  the most difficult bit was being able to see the outline that I'd drawn before adding the pencil marks.  I did go over the pencil marks with the green inktense pencil to try to make them clearer but they ended up looking too clear.  Clearly it will be a delicate balancing act if I go down this route again.  Still, after wetting the skyline and figure lines, this didn’t look too bad for a first attempt.  I added some more water in downwardly dribbling vertical lines be this looked good too.

But then I tinkered and ruined everything.  I thought the composition could do with some diagonal lines to keep it interesting, so I sprayed some watery lines into it, from top right to bottom left.  I think I used the wrong spray bottle here, ending up with too much water on the page.  Maybe just flicking a bit on with my finger would have been better.  Still, there are always ways to make things even worse and I did this by rubbing kitchen paper diagonally along the watery marks, leaving everything in a mess.

And then I rescued things by going over the lines with a fineliner pen.  After doing this, I even wet all the remaining marks with kitchen paper, stroking from top right towards bottom left.  And that was me definitely done for the day.

It was an interesting g experiment.  Some stuff worked, some didn't.  But I know that next time I'll start by going over the lines with fineliners.  Then I'll add the dry Inktense pencil marks, then wet them with brushes in a downwards direction, not necessarily exactly to/from the lines.  And I may add some small watery drips but nothing excessive.  Still, that's all for next time.

This one's not going up for sale.

The Art Of The Line In Drawing, Frédéric Forest – Book Review

This book has been sitting around near the bottom of my wishlist for a while.  I kept thinking of it as a luxury book: something that I probably didn't need but that nevertheless might be interesting or inspiring and that would make an interesting birthday present.  But then the price dropped a lot over the last few days and I decided to treat myself and buy a copy.  What harm can it do?

The book, as you've probably guessed, is about a certain style of painting.  I'd call it minimalist drawing.  It's like drawing but (i) you don't colour in the shapes, and (ii) you'd probably have trouble colouring in the shapes anyway because not every edge goes down on paper – only enough edges to tell the story.

The book is a 128 page paperback, so thinish.  Chapter–wise we have

– 23 pages of introduction and buildup

– 8 pages pages on materials

– 12 pages on where to find inspiration

– 78 pages of demonstrations

– 7 pages of closing and index

I said that the book was thinnish.  I'm going to change that and say that it's thin.  Each of the four chapters starts with a double page spread with nothing but the chapter name – not even photos of paintings.  Fred must have been struggling to fill the book.  I also found the introductory and inspiration chapters to be a bit empty of content.  So, really, we're looking at, what, a 82 page book?  8 plus 78 less 4 blank pages.

The six pages on materials are very useful, with lots of alternative suggestions and opinions.  That gets a tick.

And then the meat of the book is the 76 pages of demonstrations.  Fred takes us through loads of different subjects including landscapes, portraits, animals, figures, hands and legs.  Plenty of variety.  For each subject, he goes through two demonstrations of line paintings in different styles and shows us two more finished paintings.  So that's four paintings, two of which we see step by step.  The demos are demos and not instructions, which I like, but I find them disappointingly short of explanations of why he took different approaches.  There are a few tips in there too, but not many.  There's no coaching on how to observe or how to do contour drawing.  If I learn anything from these demos it's in the order in which Fred puts the lines down and in when he chooses to stop.  So while there are few tips, there's something to be learned from just watching how Fred works.

So it's a thin book and one that I didn't learn much from but that may well act as a source of inspiration for future paintings on days when I don't have the time to put together the Full Monty.  It's not one of those books that annoys me with lazy writing.  It's more what I'd call minimalist writing which, of course, matches the style of artwork in the book and messes with the brain a little, turning me into a minimalist thinker while I read it.  Maybe that was the idea?

Overall, compared to other books that are all about inspiration such as those by David Bellamy or Bill Buchman, this feels like a step down.  Not just in terms of thickness and scope but also (as expected, to be fair) artistic quality.  This is a luxury book, not something that everybody should be heading out to buy.  It looks good on the shelf but I'm not sure I'd replace it if my studio burnt down.  And that means it scores two palettes.

🎨🎨

Lewes Castle

Here's a question for you.  Who had a UK number one in the 1979s with D.I.V.O.R.C.E.?  Good guess but you're wrong.  It was Billy Connolly with a spoof version of the Tammy Wynette original.

But why am I telling you this?  Well, at the start of the song the Big Yin says that after he first heard the original version on the radio he couldn’t keep his hands off it.  And I know exactly how he felt because I saw a photo of Lewes Castle on top of a hill with a row of colourful houses underneath it looking like flowers.  And I just had to paint it but with the houses growing.  It helped that I lived in Lewes for about five years in my early to mid 20s.

I picked out Indian yellow, quinacridone magenta and French ultramarine as my three colours, putting this one in the key of purple warm.  The blue and the red are great for white buildings and I opted for a warm yellow to go with them because I wanted the painting to have a warm feeling to it.  Titanium white was also used later on.

After putting down a pencil drawing red the whites for the window frames in the houses and a couple of windows in the castle via wax resist by drawing them in with a candle.  I thought this would give a ghostlier feeling than reserving whites using masking fluid.

I started the sky, extending it to an underpainting over the whole page, looking to kick things off with a bit of warmth.  I even put a bit of paint over the white houses: just enough to make them look whiter than white in the sun.  After that it was a case of adding layers everywhere and building up the painting.  Rather than detailing everything in chronological order (which I don't have the memory to do) I’ll talk it through element by element.

So, the castle.  This started off as a thin layer of the blue and I dropped a little of the red and yellow into it.  In that blue layer, I worked reasonably quickly so that I left the odd empty spot that added a bit of sparkle - something that I keep seeing Robert Mee doing on his YouTube channel.  Much later I added some detail in a darker layer of blue but dabbed most of this off to keep things looking ghostly.

The leaves on the tree were stabbed in using all three primaries, quite dry and using a Terry Harrison foliage brush.  I didn't put on any paint for the tree trunks and branches, instead creating them by running a wet brush through the pint marker that I'd already put down on the paper.  That worked.  The trees, though, were a bit too colourful and hard edged for my liking and I tried to tone them down later, first by wetting and dabbing and later by the titanium white truck, applying a layer of a watery titanium white and dabbing it off with kitchen paper.  Things improved slightly but I think I'd have been better off painting the trees in just blue.

All the greenery uses all three primaries.  I tried to make things interesting in Shirley Trevena style by deliberately inviting cauliflowers by dropping in wet paint at the wrong moment and by adding granulation medium in places,  I so added some salt.  Things ended up looking interesting at the top of the hill but not so much further down.  And my row of the trees along the very bottom is a bit too regular/periodic.

For the houses, not much to say.  I mixed up some paint and coloured them in.  At the very end,  I applied the titanium white trick to them and this improved things slightly.

I finished thinks off with some brick and tile work and three birds.  And I improved the trees slightly by adding some sky holes in titanium white and dabbing the white off.  And that was me done.

And I like where this one ended up.  I was expecting the houses to remind me of the moving arrows in the opening credits to Dads Army but they're reminding me more of The Scream by Munch.  The sky, birds and castle are top drawer and I'll be trying to repeat this success sometime soon.  The washed out castle does, though, clash with the heavier paint in the hill below it.  I'm not sure whether this is a positive or a negative but it's definitely interesting.  It's as if the castle is visiting from another universe.  Until you realise that with those weird houses, the castle's probably from our universe and visiting someone else's.

This one was quickly bought up by a previous customer.

Yaugher Lane, Queendown Warren

We’re getting close to that time of year when the oil pastels start melting in my hands and become unusable so, with today being a lot colder than yesterday, I seized what might be my last chance for months to give them a runout.

For subject matter I punched a view looking down Yaugher Lane where it goes through Queendown Warren.  This hill is one I walk down on what's by far the most regular circuit I take on my daily walks.  I was drawn in by the one point perspective, the light area at the vanishing point and the tree on the right.  My oil pastel set has a lot of greens in it, having been put together by Sennelier for landscape artists rather than figure or portrait artists and I thought I’d let the greens do most of the work today, something I rarely do.  In fact my most green paintings have tended to be portraits.

For most of my oil pastel paintings, I tend to fill areas with lots of different colours and then smooth them together with my fingers or with tools.  Today, though, I only really did that for the road.  It took several layers of colours for me to get it right, probably because it took me a while to work out that smoothing it with a finger along lines radiating from the vanishing point worked better than smoothing from left to right.  My excuse is that left to right strokes would probably be the way to go for watercolour.

For the leaves in the trees, and to a lesser extent the leaves on the road, I gave it the full Van Gogh and just stabbed in loads of colours and didn't smooth them.  In the trees I started from the darkest greens, gradually getting lighter and finishing at yellow, trying to have the lightest colours on the top of the leafy clumps.  After that I stabbed in some random bits with red deep and delft blue, my favourite two oil pastel colours.  I left gaps in places to show the blue sky behind the leaves but later stabbed white into the sky holes to match the van Gogh style in the leaves.  I adopted a similar approach to the leaves on the road but with more autumnal colours and less green.

For the starting trees on the right, I put in all sorts of colours, then smoothed them out with a rubber tool, moving quickly backwards and forwards from left to right and slowly along the tree, to create the feeling of a long cylinder.  I did something similar for the fenceposts, albeit without so many colours.  And I scraped out some wires between the posts with a craft knife.

And then there were the rest of the trees and the branches. I started by just drawing these in, first with some dark browns and later with other colours like reds, blues and greens.  I might even have scraped out the odd twig or branch with the craft knife.  Things looked OK but I couldn't resist tinkering and, for once, the tinkering was a huge success and revealed to me a great new technique.  First, I went over all those monotone trees and branches with the rubber tool on a stick, again moving slowly along the branches but quickly side to side to create cylindrical shapes.  It worked brilliantly.  I could have stopped there but I thought I'd try something else new.  I went for the side to side cylinder creation manouver again but this time I did it over the leaves without drawing a branch in first.  So I was mixing together all the leaf colours and creating branches from nothing.  And this worked even better.  An amazing discovery.  And that was me done.

I'm happy with this one.  There's a lot to like about it and I think it will be popular.  It's up for sale.

Secret Tunnel Under The M2

The weather forecast said that this afternoon would be a lot warmer than yesterday, that the morning's wind would have calmed down and that there would be no rain, so I've been out painting.  It was may be a little colder than I expected and it was always threatening to rain (but never did) but it turned out to be a decent day for painting.  I headed out to a place I only discoverer a week or two ago.  It's a footpath that goes through a tunnel under the M2 just East of Medway Services.  The footpath doesn't seem popular: in four walks to the tunnel I’ve never seen anybody else here.

I picked out three cool colours as my main colours; Mayan blue genuine, transparent yellow and quinacridone magenta.  Three cool colours make for a chilly looking painting which suited the day well.  And the grittiness of the Mayan blue seemed appropriate to the subject.  There were also appearances for hematite violet genuine, cadmium red, cadmium yellow and white gouache.  The warm cadmiums played a significant enough role for me to not be able to classify this as being in the key of green cool, the key of cool blues reds and yellows.

I started with a loose underpainting using all three primaries and some of the hematite violet in the concrete for its texture.  After that, I just kept adding layers made up of the three primaries in various mixes.

There's a lot of the blue in the trees at the top: the idea was to make them recede but it do this I should have painted the blue in lighter.

I stared the fenceposts with some negative painting, leaving them white while I painted in the trees behind them.  In a later layer, I mixed a dark brown for the shadowy side of all the posts and a light, yellowy brown for the sunlit sides and allowed these to mix on the paper.  I wasn't 100% happy, so I later added very dry blue to the shadowy sides and some white gouache highlights.  It would have been easy to add too much of the white and leave the fence looking like snow had settled on it but I think I held back enough.

I also used the white gouache in the lift bit at the end of the tunnel, adding in some tree trunks.  It's good to have that dark/light contrast at the focal point but I can't help thinking the light at the end of the tunnel would better match the treetops at the top if those treetops had been lighter.

The most difficult bit, and the bit I was least looking forward to, was the foliage in the bottom two corners.  It was essential to have it there, framing the path and the tunnel.  This is where I used the cadmium red and yellow, in an attempt to make the foliage stand clear of the tunnel behind it and to get the yellows and reds to pop.  The colours have actually ended up a bit muted, which is probably a good thing.

I added some snowdrop flowers with the white gouache at the end.  They've ended up competing with the light at the end of the tunnel to be the focal point as there are big light/dark contrasts in both places.  I still don’t know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.

I'm reasonably happy with this overall.  It's not as good as my studio efforts but it's one of my better plein air paintings.  It feels compositionally right, with a pleasing pattern of lights and darks under the tunnel.  This one's up for sale.

Purdey

I wanted to give some of my new inktense pencils a runout, so that's what I'm going today.  And with three of those new colours being fleshy looking reds, I thought I'd have a go at a portrait.  I have a big stash of photos that I want to turn into portraits but most of them have been deliberately picked out because they look idea for watercolours.  I ended up picking out a photo of Purdey, from The New Avengers, played by Dame Joanna Lumley.  It was a portrait that suited pretty well my medium.

It wouldn't have worked trying out all my new colours in the same painting, so I only gave debuts today to the three new reds.  I started with sea blue in all the darkest areas before moving on to Persian red, wild flame and paprika, which I put over the medium tones, being mindful of how the Persian was the darkest of the three and paprika the lightest.  I also put Persian red over all the blue in those dark areas, looking for some violet tones and some sort of red unification.  Before wetting the colours, I added some indigo in the darkest of the dark areas.

And then I wet all the marks, starting with my smallest brush in the most detailed areas.  In the hair I was especially careful to follow the direction of the hairs and to leave a big white highlighted band.

Once everything was dry, I rubbed out all my initial pencil lines.  I might have said in the past that wetting the marks was the best thing about using inktense pencils but I'm thinking now that rubbing out all the pencil marks must come a pretty close second.  I can’t do this with any other medium and all the edges look great afterwards, whether lost or found.

After my Roger Moore nightmares, I'm really pleased to see the likeness shining through in this one.  I also think the colour scheme works well and that my decision to throw in some indigo was a good one.  Purdey's up for sale.

The Persuaders! Collection

And here they are together, The Persuaders!  Lord Brett Sinclair works better as one of a pair than he did on his own. I'd start with The Persuaders.

What I find fascinating about The Persuaders! is that when the series was sold to German TV, rather than translate the script into German and overdub it, the Germans played the Eric Carle Magic Roundabout trick and rewrote it, racking up the cheese and comedy levels. I've seen an  few of the original episodes now and can see how much they'd benefit from this.  Wouldn’t it be great if someone could get hold of those German scripts, translate them into English and overdub the original episodes with this alternative script?  Maybe with a couple of impresssionists playing the Curtis and Moore roles?  It would be amazing.

Anyway, here are links to the two separate portraits:

- Danny Wilde

- Lord Brett Sinclair

Lord Brett Sinclair

And here's my second marker portrait of the day, Lord Brett Sinclair played by Sir Roger Moore.

Just like Danny Wilde, he's in monotone greys but with a brightly coloured background.  Because I didn't want his hair to be one single dark shape, I started this one with the cool grey 4 in the darkest places, including the whole of the hair: this let me add grey 5 and black later, leaving the grey as highlights.  Next I went for grey 4 in the medium toned shapes.  These first two layers gave me. Good start and something to hang everything else off.  I then followed up with all five greys and the black, ending up again with six different values plus white.  The greys are generally darker in this one because I spent longer searching for a likeness: Stephen Fry and Alan Alda kept trying to gatecrash the party.  Eventually I had to stop, smooth things out with the marker and add the light green background.  And that was me done.

Roger Moore is a tricky one to get a likeness of and I don't think I ever got there, although now and then my eye catches a little bit of him in there.  Which I guess makes for an interesting "artistic interpretation" like Morag Caister's Lenny Henry painting that people are still complaining doesn’t look like him but which Sir Lenny insists has caught something.

Still, because Danny Wilde came out so well, this one is going up for sale as part of The Persuaders! Collection.

Danny Wilde

I didn't know what I wanted to do today so asked my iPad for ideas.  It suggested that I do a portrait using markers.  If I do a portrait with the markers I generally follow up with a second portrait on the same day, so I needed to think of a pair of subjects that went together.  Having found myself watching so much cheese on the GREAT TV channel late at night recently, there was only ever going to be one choice: The Persuaders!

I found two possible source photos showing both the main characters.  One was really dark and shadowy and might make a good watercolour painting another day, so I went for the brighter one.  I decided to go for Danny Wilde first, okayed by Tony Curtis.

I thought I'd work in black and white today.  After getting a pencil outline down, I went into all the darkest ares with (cool) grey 5, then for the medium tines with grey 3.  Things were looking really good at this stage, so I darkened most of the grey 5s to black and most of the grey 3s to grey 4, then went in with the grey 1 and grey 2 in some of the lighter, non highlighted bits.  I ended up with six different grey/black values on the page, seven if you count the bits I left white.  I used the blender to smooth things out in places.

Right at the end, I coloured the background in orange because I find that the a colourful background emphasises the monotonicity of the greys in a painting like this.  And that was me done.

I'm happy with this one.  The likeness is there.  Good job.  It's up for sale as part of The Persuaders! Collection.

The Planets

So here they are all together, The Planets series of paintings.  Eat your heart out, Gustav Holst.

This, I should add, is a series of paintings rather than a collection.  There's a difference.  These are eight paintings created to shine individually and not to form a collection whose merits exceeds the sum of its parts.  That's why any of these that are up for sale are priced individually, rather than everything being put up for sale as a set.

The quality of these is a bit up and down.   Mars and Uranus are my favourites and Venus and Saturn look like clunkers.  And Mercury was quite popular on my social media pages.

Here are links to the eight individual planets:

- Mercury

- Venus

- Earth

- Mars

- Jupiter

- Saturn

- Uranus

- Neptune

Flatter To Deceive

I've finally gotten around to completing my Planets collection with a portrait of Earth.  I don't know why this has taken so long because I've had the idea of a flat Earth painting in my head for a while.

The min colours today are Winsor blue (green shade), quinacridone magenta and Indian yellow and there were cameo roles for virudian, titanium white and white gouache.  The Winsor blue was always going to be first choice and I close the red and yellow that combined with it to make the best background space colour.  With viridian not being that different from a cool blue, this one is in the key of triadic left.

There are three elements to this one.  Let's take the background first.  I started by spattering in a starry background and removing any spatters on the Earth and most of the spatters in the top left.  This was the only masking fluid I used today: I didn't mask out the icy ring.  Then, once the spatters were dry, I wetted the while background, then started with a sunset sky in the top left, with a band of red along the horizon, followed by the yellow, more red and the blue.  For the rest of the sky, I dropped in all three primaries in places, allowing things to mix and trying to keep things generally dark.  The dark background ended up looking a bit too colourful, so I laid a couple of thin glazes over the top, with a dark colour mixed from all three primaries.  With things looking more under control, I also dropped in dry paint from the three individual colours in places.  To avoid hard edges, I also needed to glaze over the sunset too, and I think I unfortunately lost a little of the light in the painting when I did this.

The land masses and sea were pretty straightforward.  The sea is made do a couple of layers each of the blue and of viridian, which together give a good sea colour.  I put on a couple of layers of greens and oranges quite loosely, mixed for: my three primaries and these worked out well.  I added the Arctic ice cap in white gouache and some clouds with titanium white.  There are some twirly patterns in the oceans that started as titanium white before being replaced with kitchen paper marks when the final layer of viridian was still wet.

For the icy ring I started with random mounting shadow marks with ll three primaries and their associated secondaries.  I fiddled with the ring a lot, adding more colour and using both whites, before identifying a three step plan to get to a point I'd be happy with.  What I did was to (i) soften things using the titanium white trick, painting over a watery glaze of titanium white then dabbing it off, (ii) unifying the ring with a watery glaze of the blue all over, and (iii) once that was dry, adding some snow in places with the white gouache.  And that was me done.

What I've ended up with is something interesting and worth putting in the shop window, even if there are things that I think I could have done better.  I think it's the sunset that bugs me the most: I wanted to see a band of bright yellow in there and for there to be a lighter, skyer blue between the sunset and the night sky.  Instead, the shape of that orange area makes this one look like the underside of a jellyfish when you catch it out of the corner of your eye.  Maybe I'll pretend that was deliberate.

Joe Walsh

Today's painting is a portrait of Joe Walsh of The Eagles, someone who in his heyday was probably even more fun at parties than Frank Bough.  Because my source photo was made up of so few simple shapes, Joe was always a prime candidate for a triple portrait.

I went for a traffic light portrait, so the first layer of colour was transparent yellow on the left and in the middle and rose dore on the right. Then the second layer was cerulean blue in the left and Winsor red in the middle and on the right.  And the third layer was French ultra fine in all three portraits.

As usual, there was some tinkering at the end, trying to find a likeness.  For ideas about where to tinker, I went to my value plan on the Notanizer app and slid the controls up and down.  These would add or take way washes in various places and I'd adjust my existing washes wherever I thought cha fez would improve the likeness.  I wasn't a slave to the app: the app was an assistant and I made the final choices.  The golden rule when searching for a likeness, though, is that wherever I make a change to one painting, I make the same change to the other two.

As well as searching for a likeness, I looked for differences between my three portraits and made corrections.  And I put a dark French ultramarine shape and to the left of Joe's head in all three portraits to separate him from the background.

Finally I spattered the second layer colours in the empty triangle in the bottom left and French ultramarine in the empty triangle and in the background behind Joe's heads.  And that was me done.

It's a decent job, this one.  The likeness is there but it's not a photographic likeness (and I can't believe that I'm already aspiring to photographic likenesses).  And although the three portraits are very similar, there are tiny differences between them that suggest these are portraits painted at three different times with Joe in three different moods.  Joe's up for sale.

"The most terrifying thing that ever happened to me was that Keith Moon decided he liked me."