The Urban Sketcher, Marc Taro Holmes - Book Review

I thought it was about time I read up on urban sketching.  Even if I'd not been given those markers for Christmas, I was planning on heading out at some point to do some sketching with a roller ball and painting in with watercolour later.   So I followed the recommendation of the great Teoh Yi Chie of Parka Blogs and started with this book.  It's a 144 page paperback but, with the last 14 pages devoted to a personal gallery with no commentary against the sketches, it feels more like one of those 128 pagers.

The book is divided into three chapters which, at first sight, are all about sketching with pencil, pen & ink and watercolour.  But this is just to lull the reader off guard as this is really a course on urban sketching that applies to any medium (including markers).  There are plenty of demos and exercises there too.  The demos are important as there are a couple of three-step processes that Marc describes that benefit from worked examples.  Let's go through the three chapters individually.

First there's the chapter on pencil.  The main content in this chapter is on sighting/measuring/angling, use of shadows and composition.  All of this is relevant to whatever medium you are using, not just to pencil.  The stuff on leading the eye through a composition is, unlike that in so many other books, well explained.

The second chapter is on pen and ink.  It starts by describing a "three pass" approach to sketching.  The first step is a pencil drawing, the second the ink outlining and the third the spot blacks to add shadow and interest.  Then the rest of the chapter has some really good advice on sketching people.  It covers separately people sitting still, people moving around but repetitively (eg musicians who keep returning to the same poses) and people walking in the street who are only in your sight for a few seconds.  Again, this is all relevant to other mediums.  There's very little on perspective in this chapter, which was a surprise.  I don't mind that as I got an A at O Level in Engineering Drawing but others might need more help, in which case Parka Blogs recommend a book by Paul Heaston.  There's also one by Stephanie Bower in the Urban Sketching Handbook Series the that will be less detailed.

Finally there's the chapter on watercolours.  It describes techniques like charging washes, spattering, dry brushing and edge pulling (which is like Jean Haines lite).  It describes another three step approach, the tea-milk-honey approach.  You start with a pale watery underpainting, then a layer of thicker paint on top, then finally a layer of really thick paint.  I thought it was interesting that Marc, unlike Joseph Stoddard in his book, doesn’t like to ink over lines before adding watercolour.  I veer more towards Joe here but we'll see.  This chapter is more medium-specific than the others but I don't mind that as I do fancy doing some watercolour urban sketching.

I liked this book.  The drawing side seems a step further on than Betty Edwards and it brings together elements from Bert Dodson and all my watercolour books and turns them into something new and fresh by applying them to urban sketching.  It's a good introduction to urban sketching but feels a little bit light on content.  There's also not that much inspirational looking artwork in there.  Still, it was definitely worth the money and gets a comfortable three palettes.

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Winsor & Newton Promarkers

These beasts were waiting for me on Christmas morning.  They're all Winsor & Newton Promarkers with a chisel head at one end and a pointy one at the other.  There's the 12 marker "Set 1" at the back, which came with the blender pen at the front thrown in.  And there's a set of six flesh tones and one of six neutral tones at the front (because I'm an artist, not a connoisseur of colouring books).  And a really cool Winsor & Newton carrying case.  There are two duplicated colours (black and one of the greys) but that's not a problem.

I'm looking forward to giving them a go, with some day trips out to draw buildings or, if it's too cold, to draw people from the comfort of a coffee shop.  I've ordered an A5 Strathmore Bristol smooth pad and some A4 Winsor & Newton bleedproof marker paper.  I'll experiment with both but I've already seen the W&N paper and it's really thin like printer paper so I suspect that the Strathmore pad may end up as the long term solution,

Nathan

This is the result of one of the exercises in Keys To Drawing by Bert Dodson.  It's a portrait of one of my kids in the style of Henri Matisse.  I need to do more drawings like this.

Keys To Drawing, Bert Dodson - Book Review

I've made it to the end of Bert's book at last.  At 224 pages long, it's huge.

The first five chapters were fantastic.  They're on contour drawing, "artistic handwriting", proportions, light & shade and depth.  There are then a couple of chapters on texture and composition that didn't especially rock my boat (and, to be honest, I've not yet found a treatise on composition that really chimes for me).  And finally there's a chapter on creativity that feels like it doesn't really belong here and that reminds me of the bit at the end of some novels where they treat you to the first chapter of the author's next book.

There are loads of exercises throughout the book, along with interesting checklists that you can look through afterwards to evaluate your drawing (Did you draw blindfold in places?  Did you talk to yourself while drawing?).  I originally went into this book planning to do every single exercise (which I did for the Betty Edwards Book) but there were just too many of them and many of them required live models) so I didn't follow through with this plan and, after a while, ended up just reading the book.

Look, why don't I stop beating around the bush and just compare and contrast this to the Betty Edwards book?  OK.  Let's do it.  I'm glad I read Betty's book first.  I thought her book was a better starting point for someone with no confidence in their drawing.  It felt more like a study course than a book because there were few enough exercises to keep me on board and because there was a strong sense that the exercises were building up to a final big project that was the self portrait.  Bert, on the either hand, freely admits that his chapters can be read in any order, so it feels less like a course.  On the other hand, Bert seems to go into more detail and I will keep coming back to his book, whereas I doubt I'll ever reread Betty's.

My recommendation is that everybody buys both books but goes through Betty's book first, doing every exercise.  Bert's book then provides extra detail and is something to keep on the shelf to consult in future.  Bert is a book; Betty is an experience.  Both score five palettes.

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Summer 2019 Poll Results

Here are the results of the latest poll.  Hidden Village came out equal top.  Otherwise no big surprises really.

People are still welcome to vote at https://poll.app.do/summer-2019-painting-poll

Summer 2019 Poll

The nights are fair drawin' in and I don't think I'll be out in the garden painting much more this year, so I think it's time for another painting poll.

If anybody has a couple of minutes free (honestly, that's all it takes) I'd be so grateful if they could click on the link below and select up to 10 favourites from the 23 paintings that I've produced since the last poll.  The results will eventually be published on this website.

Thanks in advance.  Here's the link:

https://poll.app.do/summer-2019-painting-poll

Something Different For Christmas?

It's just over ten weeks to Christmas.  If you wanted to buy something different, have you thought about a painting?  If you press "For Sale"on the list of labels on the third line of the page, you get to see the blog posts for all of the paintings that I have up for sale.

All of the paintings are priced at just £30 each, or £50 for two.  Postage on top of that if we can't arrange a handover.  For a single 12*9 framed painting, that's an extra £6.50 - I don't know how much it is for multiple or smaller paintings.

The vast majority of the paintings are 12 inches by 9 and framed.  There are just a handful of exceptions.  First, there are these ones, which are smaller.  I suspect the 8.5 * 11s will end up 10* 8 once they've been framed.  And I've not found a frame yet for the 9 * 9, and the price is based on the assumption that I can find one.

And then there are these ones.  They've all been painted on crackle pasted boards and are being sold unframed.  They're not suited to being framed behind glass, so will probably need a professional framer to glue them into some sort of frame.  Price is still £30 as the raw materials are more expensive for these.

And, just because I feel like it, here's a selection of the plain, simple, framed 11 * 9 watercolours that are up for sale at time of writing.

Tempted?  There's no "add to basket" to click on here.  Just contact me using the "contact me" box in the right hand margin of the website if you see something that you think would make a banging Christmas gift.

Zoltan Szabo's 70 Favourite Watercolor Techniques - Book Review

Another book review.  Today it's Zoltan Szabo's 70 Favourite Watercolor (sic) Techniques.  I bought this a couple of days ago after spotting that it was out of stock at Amazon and that it was written back in 1995.  This could have been my last chance to buy it, so I went for it.  It's 144 pages long and is a paperback but (like that Jane Betteridge book) a resilient paperback with a thick, glossy, folded over cover that shouldn't get dog-eared.

As you can imagine, the book is one big collection of interesting watercolour techniques.  And I was quite pleasantly surprised to find that there were plenty of new, interesting techniques there.  Off the top of my head, there were ways to use a palette knife, the crazy idea of curtain glazes and "charging a wash" which is like wet into wet but more watery into wet.  Lots of interesting stuff.  Just like with the Jeanne Dobie Book, I felt like I should have been taking notes, although I didn't find this book to be quite as dense with new ideas as Jeanne's.

There's a chapter on the ten rules of reflections that is almost worth the price of admission on its own.  The stuff about what gets reflected on the near side of a wave and what gets reflected on the far side was nothing short of excellent.  The sort of thing I'm expecting to see in that James Gurney Colour And Light Book when it eventually ends up in my collection.

There's inspiration to be found in Zoltan's artwork too.  His landscapes have lots of neutral colours in them but they're the sort of vibrant greys that Jeanne Dobie talks about rather than the lifeless earth colours that I've seen in Ron Ranson and Richard Taylor books.  And he even has an abstract side to some of his work.

The worst thing about this book is probably the writing style.  Maybe it was translated from a foreign language by someone without any writing skills.  Or maybe Szabo was a poor writer.  In any case, I probably learned more from looking at paintings and at photos of techniques being used than I did from the text.  He also referred quite often to glazing without explaining what it was (thanks Jeanne Dobie for telling us in your book!) and I did get a bit tired of being told every single colour that was used at every single step.

There were some step-by-step demonstrations at the end of the book that suffered from having too few steps.  Quite often, there were so many things happening in the first step that it wasn’t clear which bit of the painting the text was talking about.

Anyway, despite the bad writing, I learned enough from this book for it to be worth a fourth palette.

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Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain, Betty Edwards - Book Review

I was hopeless at drawing just two weeks ago but you'll have seen in my last couple of posts that this has changed and it's all down to this book.  The difference it has made is absolutely shocking.  I'm finding that it also makes me see the world through new eyes, which has to be good news for my painting.

The book is a training course, with exercises.  It's important that anybody reading the book does all the exercises and takes them all seriously.  At the end, you find you can draw and will probably never need to open the book again.  It does look good as a trophy book on the shelf though.

Among all the pseudoscience and exercises, there are really only four lessons in the book.  The first is on perceiving edges and drawing what you see on the "picture plane".  The second is on the familiar subject of negative drawing: drawing the spaces between things rather than the things themselves.  Then the third lesson is on understanding perspective and being able to draw what you see using a pencil at arms length to get the distances and angles correct.  And finally the fourth lesson is on light and shade.  There was a strange chapter that came after this on using the intuitive right side of the brain to solve problems away from the drawing board; there is some truth to this but I thought the "look for the edges and spaces in your business problem" connection was pushing it.

Overall, this book is a miracle that changes me and gets an easy five palettes.  I've not read the equally highly praised Terry Dodson book on Keys To Drawing, so can't yet compare the two.

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Father And Son

That review of Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain is coming soon, I promise!

Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain - Progress Update

I still have one book from my birthday left to read and review.  It's Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain by Betty Edwards.

I'm about 40% of the way through the book and a full review will follow at some point but I thought I'd share these drawings.  The one on the left is a drawing of my hand that Betty asked me to do at the start of the book just four days ago. The other two are drawings of the same hand that I did today.

Absolutely staggering!

DNA

And here's the second of the day.  This is all out abstract.  I cracklepasted a board a couple of days ago (with watercolour ground applied to the non-pasted bits) and stuck a satsuma net bag into the paste, just like I did for Stormy Abstract.  This time, though, the bag was placed down the diagonal of the panting and I was careful to include the end of the bag where all the strands are brought together.  It came out well.

My plan was to make the central band red or violet and the corners green or yellow - complimentary colours and all that.  With plans to use a number of different colours, this wasn't going to be painted in a simple key.  I started by using acrylic inks bring out the cracks.  Indigo, brick red and a bit of gold.  I stayed away from sepia - this painting was only going to be based on primaries.

Then onto the painting.  I was switching backwards and forward between the band and the corners, so I didn't do this in the same order as described.  The corners started with a glaze of Indian yellow, followed by a glaze of French ultramarine.  The middle band was already looking a bit blue/violet from the inks so I started by painting it red.  I used quinacridone magenta, rose dore and (for the first Time in a while) cadmium red to get a bit of variety.  In places I painted French ultramarine over the top to get some purpley bits.

And then we get to the tinkering.  I thought the transition between the band and the corners was a bit too abrupt, so used some quinacridone magenta to try to link the two together.  But then the corners started to look a bit muddy, so I added in some transparent yellow to make them greener again.  Eventually got to something I was happy with.

And then I thought the painting was a bit dull and needed a bit of bright yellow to bring it out of the hole it had dug for itself.  I decided to paint some of the islands and valleys in the crackle paste in a warm yellow colour.  I started doing this with Indian yellow but found it was too transparent and didn't brighten the painting enough.  So then I painted over that first attempt with cadmium yellow, which is opaque, so worked.  These yellow bits look like some sort of strange writing or spider legs.

Finally, I wanted to brighten up the green corners, so spattered on some more cadmium yellow, trying to spatter it away from the central band and at a right angle to it.

And that's how I got to this painting.  My oldest son told me which way around it should hang (I was also thinking landscape format but the other way round).  When pressed to tell me what it looked like, he told me it reminded him of Peter Parker's DNA in a weird scene in the first Sam Raimi Spider-Man film, so that's where its name came from.  But it can be anything you want it to be.

I'm pleased with this one.  If there's anything that could be improved, I guess the colours could be brighter but that's being picky.

Schneesturm

Two paintings today, both on cracklepasted board and both with the help of acrylic inks to bring out the cracks.  This is the first.

This one started with quite a boring application of crackle paste, looking like a zigzagging mountain skyline.  Even then, the peak on the right is a bit too childishly pointy.  Oh well.

After the paste had been given a couple of days to dry, I tried using acrylic inks and granulation medium to fill in the cracks.  Ink colours were sepia, indigo and a bit of gold waterfall green.  It's difficult to see any remnants of those last two still there though.

Anyway, on to painting.  I don't claim to have done this one in a particular key, with more than one yellow playing a key role.  The sky was painted first in Indian yellow, left to dry, painted over in quinacridone magenta, left to dry and then painted over in French ultramarine.  But it didn’t look as if it was going to come out in the great colour that I created in Key Street Florida, so I interfered and used a towel to blot out some of bits.

Next up the mountain on the right.  This was painted in French ultramarine and burnt sienna, two colours that mix to a nice grey.  I managed to get the value of this bit right for once, pale and faded.

And then there was the mountain on the left.  I started with thicker versions of the French ultramarine and burnt sienna but wasn't satisfied.  So I threw in some Indian yellow for a bit of light near the top, some transparent yellow for a bit of greenery at the bottom and quinacridone magenta in a few places for variety.  I may even have added in some rose dore.

At the end, I still felt the painting had something missing, so added in some titanium white snow splatters and stopped there.

Overall, I think this works.  The colours in the mountains are good and the cracks add a lot of character.  The snow adds something too, although in the foreground it looks like snow has landed on a camera lens rather than floating through the sky.  The worst bit is probably the low point on the skyline in the middle, where the mountain on the right is nestled inside the one on the left rather than being behind it.  And I guess I could be accused of not pushing myself with this painting - I've played it a bit safe.

Light And Shade In Watercolour, Hazel Soan - Book Review

I feel so guilty for saying this, because I do like all her other books in my collection, but this is a clunker from Hazel.

I was hoping that this book would all be about highlights and shadows and maybe atmospherics.  Something like the James Gurney Book that's my wishlist but a bit more geared to impressionistic painting than to realistic (which I understand to be James' focus).  But it's not.  These areas get some coverage but Hazel's Book is almost entirely about values.  The book's been misleadingly titled in my view.

Still, values are always something I could learn more about.   Can the book teach me anything in this area?  Unfortunately the answer is no.  I know that it's useful to do a pencil sketch beforehand to plan the values.  And I know values are more important than colours.  And that a contract between light and dark is good.  I could go on forever.  This is all stuff that I already know about.  And the book's very repetitious, going over the same points again and again.  It's divided into eight or nine chapters but there's very little distinction between them.

As usual, the artwork in the book is great and inspiring.  But with nothing very useful in the text, it's not as inspiring the artwork in her other books.  Also, unlike that of Tom Hoffmann and Jeanne Dobie in their books, Hazel's artwork is actually too complex to work as examples of great use of values.  To illustrate simple points, you need simple examples, and that's something Hazel doesn't have.  For example, she shows us a huge painting of four cowboys on horses and only talks about what she's done with the shirt that one of them is wearing!  I'll point out once again that I'd still like to see a Hazel Soan book on impressionistic colouring - that's where Hazel's paintings would illustrate the points perfectly.

She's going to hate me for this but I have to be honest and I'm only going to give this book two palettes.

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Making Color Sing, Jeanne Dobie - Book Review

160 pages, paperback.

So what's in this book then?  Well, the first 100 pages are about colour.  What to have in your palette, some colour mixing ideas, using hot and cold colours, complimentary colours and glazing techniques.  The bit on colours in the palette is a bit out of date - there are more transparent blues these days than cobalt and nobody uses alizarin crimson.  So Hazel Soan's Watercolour Rainbow still rules there.  But the rest is....   Let me come back to that later.

Because then the remaining 60 pages are on something else: values and shape-based composition.  It's all still kind of colour related but feels less colour-focused than the first 100 pages.  Still good though.

Most art instruction books tend to have, what, six to ten chapters?  And you read through them and pick up the odd interesting tip here and there.  Maybe there's one chapter you don't learn from but another where you learn something new on every page.  Making Color Sing isn't like those books.  It has 31 chapters and each chapter is effectively one huge tip.  And these are all tips that you want to put into action on your next painting.   It feels like a relentless barrage of learning - the sort of book where you realise half way through that you probably should have been taking notes.  And as well as those 31 huge tips, there are plenty of other useful nuggets within the chapters.  I've had to read it all a second time just to take it all in before I write this review.

This book is so good that it's got me wondering whether I should downgrade some of the five palette ratings that I've given other books.  I found it to be amazing, well worth investing in.  One of the very best books out there.  Just buy it!

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Key Street, Florida

First things first.  This painting was inspired by a photo by Harvey Jones that I saw on the BBC website.  He has a Flickr account at https://www.flickr.com/photos/148416622@N07/ and a website at harveyjonesphotographs.com.  Talented photographer.

Ok, what did I want to do today?  Well, I'm almost through my second read of Making Colour Sing by Jeanne Dobie (review coming soon) and wanted to try out a couple of her ideas.  The first was atmospheric glazes.  You put down an all over yellow glaze, let it dry, do the same with red, let it dry, do the same with blue, let it dry.  And you end up with amazing colours that you can only get this way and would never get by mixing colours in the palette or on the page.

The colours all need to be transparent, non-staining and ideally based on a single pigment for atmospheric glazing to work.  This pretty well restricted me to a purple warm key: Indian yellow, quinacridone magenta and French ultramarine.  Maybe I need to replace rose dore with (non staining) quinacridone red as my warm red if this becomes a regular thing.  So I laid down the three glazing coats after protecting the figure, plank, etc with masking fluid.

The second tip I took from Jeanne was to mix my own greys from the three primaries, so I've only used three colours in the whole painting.  The idea was to use complimentary greys: a yellowish grey against the purple and a blueish one against the orange.

How did it all work out then?  Well, the glazing was a big success.  My technique was different to Jeanne's.  She mixes loads of paint in a paper cup so she can load up a brush and not keep refilling it. And she glazes over with clinical accuracy, like someone cutting the lawn in Wembley stadium.  I didn’t use a paper cup, so had to keep refilling my brush.  And I found myself repeatedly brushing from left to right and right t left, like I was painting a wall.  I also didn’t worry about missing the odd spot due to the texture of the paper, whereas Jeanne insists on covering every spot.  But the result was fantastic.  I've graduated it a bit, with more yellow at the top and more blue at the bottom.  You can't see where the horizon is, but honestly who cares?

The colours in the silhouette were less successful.  I struggled to get the vibrant greys that I wanted.  I've ended with a brown at the bottom, a plain grey at the top and a bit too abrupt a transition between the two.

But I'm pleased with the result.  The background really does sing and make this one a keeper.  It's up for sale.

How To Draw Animals, Jack Hamm - Book Review

It's another Jack Hamm book, a 120-page paperback about drawing animals.

Just like the Jack Hamm book on people and faces, this isn't a book to sit down and read.  It's a reference book to consult as and when I want to draw animals.  But I think this book will be more useful to me than the other.  Whatever animal I want to draw or paint, I can look it up in the index of this book and it will point me towards all the pages throughout the book where that animal makes an appearance.  This even applies to animals like badgers, who only have a single picture on a "here are lots of other animals" page.

There's a general introduction on drawing animals, before we get on to how to draw specific animals.  The cat and horse family get the biggest page count, with bears, elephants and the dog family also getting extended coverage.  For most animals, there's lots of useful information on all the little lumps, divots and creases that make that animal unique.  In places there are simple "start with a square and divide it up like this" techniques that I quite like in moderation.

Overall, it's a useful reference book.  If feels like it should get 3.5 palettes.  I'm going to be mean and round it down to 3.

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Stormy Abstract

And here's my second effort of the day.  Another with a specially prepared crackle paste surface.  This time, the special guest in the surface was one of those net bags that satsumas come in from the supermarket.  After adding crackle paste and watercolour ground to the board (this time without dividing them up with a straight line), I pushed the netting into the paste at the bottom, being careful to include a stretched bit of netting in the middle at the bottom.  After the paste had dried, I did manage to remove all the netting, although I had to use tweezers to remove some of the tiny strands.  And I went over the bottom of the paper with watercolour ground afterwards, just in case there were any places where there was no longer any paste on the board.

The plan was again to go for an orange cool colour scheme: Indian yellow and cadmium red in the sky and the rest of the painting to be in blues and greens (using Prussian blue, viridian and Indian yellow).  There is also some burnt sienna and a little burnt umber in the bottom of the painting.  First things first, though.  I dug out the waterfall green acrylic ink and tried to use it to colour in all the cracks, whether caused by the paste or the netting.  Then I did the watercolour painting.  And then I tried to paint the netting cracks in titanium white.  That didn't really work, so I tried acrylic inks again.  There's a lot of red earth ink on the upper left, indigo ink on the right and indigo and sepia ink in the netting cracks.  And finally after lots of trial and error, you can see that I discovered that the best way to show up the netting cracks is by using inks after doing the watercolour painting.  I finished off with some titanium white spatters at the top (which don't show up well) and an attempt at colouring in some of the individual islands surrounded by netting cracks (which does seem to have worked).

I'm really happy with this one.  One of the things I like about it is that I still don't know what it is.  I could have added a boat on the horizon and ended up with a painting of stormy seas.  Or I could have added a cabin or a stag and ended up with a painting of a load of rocks left at one at one end of a long ago melted glacier or at the bottom of a volcano.  But I thought I'd leave it ambiguous.  It helps that my weird choice of colours doesn't help - none of these possible interpretations have been coloured "correctly".

Oh, and the crackle pasting and satsuma netting have both really worked out well.  And not having a straight line dividing the board between paste and ground  is a no brainier in future.  This is an experiment that's worth repeating.

The Hills Are Alive

I think it must have been four days ago when I prepared a couple of crackle paste surfaces for painting.  I started painting on them yesterday but had to give up when it started raining.  I've managed to finish both off today, and here's the first of them.

As well as crackle pasting the bottom two thirds of the board and watercolour grounding the top third, I stuck down some "skeleton leaves" in the paste.  These are strange leafy things that they sell in arts and crafts shops.  I was hoping to be able to pull them out of the paste after it had dried but no such luck - I ended up ripping pieces of them off instead.  Oh well.

Painting-wise, the idea was to do this one in orange warm, starting with the sky in Indian yellow and cadmium red and introducing some French ultramarine in the hills.  Because I ended up using so much quinacridone magenta in the hills, some may argue that the painting is in purple warm.  I'm sticking with my original assessment just for the way the sky stands out.  Anyway, colours in the hills are Indian yellow, French ultramarine, quinacridone magenta and a bit of raw sienna.  I found that the first three of these worked really vibrantly together on the crackle paste and produced lovely greys and browns when they mixed on the paper.

Something wasn’t, quite right though.  Maybe the way my crackled and non-crackled areas were almost perfectly divided by a straight line one third of the way down made the painting look boring even before I started.  So I resorted again to adding acrylic inks and granulation medium.  Most  of the inks were indigo, sepia and red earth, although I admit I did add a little green.

But it still looked boring, so I tried adding birds in the sky.  They didn’t work, so I quickly wetted them out and instead added the tree and figures.  The bottom of the figures didn't look right, so I dabbed them out with kitchen paper,  which didn't work, so I made it look a if they were behind the hill, or behind a wall instead.  And I tinkered some more with the inks

Did it work out though?  As usual, there are successes and failures in there.  Let's start with the bad stuff.  The two people in there don't look right.  The skeleton leaves don't really add anything.  There's the sense that the hill on the right has been overworked.  And, from a distance, there's a red triangle in the bottom right that doesn't harmonise with the rest of the hill.  But I think there are some really encouraging bits about this painting.  The colour of the sky.  The energy added by the orange vs blue complimentary colours.  The hills on the left of the painting, with really nice grey shades and the use of the ridges in the crackle paste to separate colours.  And the whole impressionist colour scheme - skies and hills don't come in these colours.  This is a brave painting.

Yeah, this one definitely has its merits.  It was the first of these crackle pasted paintings to sell and is now on a wall somewhere up in Scotland.

Bramble's

Today's job was to prepare a couple of experimental crackle paste surfaces to use later in the week but I found myself pining to do some painting, and this is the result.  It was a last minute decision to decide to do some painting, so I hadn't planned what I was going to do.  In that situation, I should really have started from an abstract and tried to develop it into something real.  But, no, I looked through my collection of painting ideas and went with a dog called Bramble going for a walk where there were some brambles.  Bramble's owner makes a living from teaching grammar and punctuation to grown up business people, so if there are people that think the name of the painting shouldn’t have an apostrophe, that's half funny.

I thought I'd try using up some of the pthalo blue that I still have hanging around.  And the painting is in green cool, so transparent yellow and quinacridone magenta also appear.  Most of the painting was done in the blue and yellow, and raw sienna for the path but I found it was looking way too bright and sickly, even with the strip of fog through the middle.  So I put in some burnt umber and Prussian blue in places.  Then I added some red - quinacridone magenta in the tree on the left and in some other places, and a bit of cadmium red in the bush in the bottom right.  The dog was the usual wet into wet effort: Prussian blue into quinacridone magenta into transparent yellow.

After all this, everything was looking better but all a bit boring, and still a bit too sunny.  I wanted some moisture in the air (to make the fog fit in better) so added loads of big drips of water in an attempt to get some interesting cauliflowers going.  I added some salt too - big chunks and granulated.

And what have you got?  At the end of the day?  What have you got?  To take away?

A pretty middling painting, to be honest.  It has good points and bad points but they're not extremely good or extremely bad.  Good points are the tree trunk on the left, the looseness in the foggy area and the red vs green and yellow vs purple complimentary contrasts.  Bad points?  Well, the salt did some weird things.  It's formed fairy rings and attached itself so firmly to the paper that it won't come off.  The dog doesn’t look like a dog, let alone like Bramble.  Maybe it's a cat.  I think this one will grow on me though.

Actually, it's not grown on me.  This one's been cup up and is being used as collage material.

Colour Keys

When I talk about my choices of colours in paintings, I seem to refer quite often to colour keys, which nobody has ever heard of.  Well, nobody's ever heard of colour keys because they're my own invention and I've never explained what they are.  I say I invented them but they've always been there, just like gravity and America were always there before Newton and Trump invented them.

Music is written in keys.  Compositions written in the same key have something in common that I can't quite put my finger on but it's definitely there.  And I imagine someone writing a new piece thinks long and hard about what key to write it in before staring to write.  I do the same thing when I'm painting.

A painting key is a set of three primaries (red, yellow and blue) that will provide most of the colour in a painting.  In choosing my three primaries, the first thing I think about is which of the three secondary colours (green, purple or orange) I want to see most of.  This helps me choose my first two primaries: the two closest, non-earthy secondary colours on either side.  With the third primary, I have a choice of a warm or cool version - I refer to the resulting colour keys as warm or cool respectively.   At times, it may be appropriate for this third colour to be an earth colour.  Opaque cobalt, cadmiummy colours don't belong in the key though - they're just extra bonuses in the final palette.

This leaves me with six keys:

1. Green warm consists of a cool blue, cool yellow and warm red e.g. Prussian blue, transparent yellow and rose dore (or burnt sienna or light red).

2. Green cool consists of a cool blue, cool yellow and cool red e.g. Prussian blue, transparent yellow and quinacridone magenta.

3. Purple warm consists of a cool red, warm blue and warm yellow e.g. quinacridone magenta, French ultramarine and Indian yellow.

4.  Purple cool consists of a cool red, warm blue and cool yellow e.g. quinacridone magenta, French ultramarine and transparent yellow (or raw sienna).

5. Orange warm consists of a warm yellow, warm red and warm blue e.g. Indian yellow, rose dore and French ultramarine.

6. Orange cool consists of a warm yellow, warm red and cool blue e.g. Indian yellow, rose dore and Prussian blue.

And there is my gift to the watercolour community: colour keys.  And I'm sure everybody has worked out by now that my favourite keys are green cool and the two purple keys.

Now What Are You Barking At?

And here's my latest Jane Betteridge inspired painting on an unusual surface.  It's my first go using crackle paste.  I bought an acrylic canvas board from The Works (dead cheap, was it three for £3?).  I painted on some crackle paste (golden medium crackle paste to be exact) over the bottom two thirds or so, although I left gaps).  Then I painted on watercolour ground in all the bits without crackle paste.  It takes a couple of days to dry.  Jean says that you don't need to flatten the paste out and that it does it itself as it dries.  She's wrong.  I ended up with a landscaped surface but I'm game for anything.  I could see lots of crackles on the surface but quite small ones.  I need to experiment with laying the paste on more thickly.

Today's triad of primaries were rose dore, Indian yellow and French ultramarine (brought to you in the key of orange warm).  They made up the sky, which came out really well - something to do with painting on watercolour ground rather than my skills with the brush.  In the rockface they were joined by burnt sienna, which worked well with the French ultramarine in the previous painting.  And then I laid on the acrylic inks and granulation medium.  I used all seven of my colours (but shouldn't have used the waterfall green, which doesn't really belong here) and they've pretty well taken over the bottom of the painting.  I should have learned from a previous failure with inks on gesso - inks and granulation medium only really work well on plain watercolour paper.  Because the inks weren't doing what I wanted them to, I used too much of them (and dabbed some off, then added more) and the bottom of the painting is no longer really a watercolour but hey ho.  I added the trees, initially using sepia and indigo inktense sticks but dropping in a little bit of burnt sienna inktense stick later.  And some waterfall green ink in an attempt to distract from the bits of waterfall green still sitting around in the painting.  I added in the dog walker (I've found people like to see dog walkers in my paintings) using a grey mixed from my three primaries and dropped in some wet into wet primaries for a bit of interest.  And finally, because the trees on the left were looking sinister and because the dog was showing such an interest in them, I added in some shadowy grey figures.  Maybe they're rabbits or hares.  Maybe something more sinister.  Don't ask me - I'm only the artist.  And I didn’t add any spatters for once, although I did add some salt, which doesn't seem to work on inks.

Overall, I think it works but (as usual) it isn’t perfect.  The cracks came out really well and the paint enjoyed running into them.  So much so that I didn’t need to use inks and should have stuck to watercolour.  The rockface could be accused of being too muddy, but I expect there are lots of hidden accidental images in there that people could spot if they stared long enough.  The spots of waterfall green are a bit distracting.  On the other hand, the addition of figures and the naming of the painting take the interest away from the rockface and onto the top third of the painting which I think is pretty good.  Gold ink never shows up in these paintings as anything more than glittery spots, but these add to the magical mood, suggesting that the dog could be barking at absolutely anything.  This one's up for sale.

Mount Rushmore

Now this is more like it!  A painting on an experimental surface that worked.  The faces were all torn out of the Mail On Sunday dated 11 August 2019 (next door let me have their paper).  I wanted it to be people that I could identify (not just members of the public) and I was choosy about the size of the heads and the direction they were looking.  In the end I finished up with, from left to right Harry Maguire (Man Utd but that's just unfortunate), Ed Sheehan (he was in Game Of Thrones, you know), Rachel Riley (from Countdown) and Andrew Bailey (announced as new Governor of the Bank Of England, 20 December 2019).  I glued the faces onto card and painted over with watercolour ground, as before.  I had two problems with the preparation.  First there's an ugly bit above Ed's head where there's some rogue glue.  And second I found the ink on the newspaper leaked a bit into the ground as I was painting it on, making the background a bit dirty looking before I started painting.  Maybe if I do something similar to this again I should tear stuff out of the TV guide instead.

So that was the prep.  What about the painting?  The sky is made of French ultramarine, quinacridone magenta and Indian yellow.  Just like with the last painting, I found the surface didn't behave like watercolour paper: there are some hard edges and cauliflowering in there.  Most of the middle ground rocks are made up of French ultramarine and burnt sienna, which work well together an produce a great grey.  In places I added some sepia for cracks and shadows.  And then the foreground is made of viridian, French ultramarine and Indian yellow.  I also used some salt in the rock face - the table salt produced  some interesting textures below Harry and Andrew.

Do I like it?  Hell yes!  The colours are great in the sky, the rock face and the foreground.  And I made a great job of choosing the faces, with their sizes and angles combining together into a great composition.  Harry, in particular has a smile that lights up the painting, and the sky draws this out by pointing towards him.  This one's a big success and is up for sale.

Blue Skye

After reading that Jane Betteridge book, I thought it was time to start painting on some unusual surfaces.  First up was painting on a map.  I bought a ridiculously cheap book of U.K. road maps from The Works to provide me with backgrounds.  I tore out the page with a map of Skye, glued it onto mount card using 3M photo mount spray adhesive, allowed it to dry, then painted over it with Daniel Smith transparent watercolour ground.  After leaving it a couple of days to dry, I ended up with something I could paint on.

Having restricted myself to portrait format, the best idea I could come up with was a mountain climber with a foot on the Cullins and a hand resting on the Northern tip of the island.

I painted out the figure first using raw sienna, planning to drop in quinacridone magenta and then French ultramarine wet into wet - the same way that I've seen Hazel Soan paint elephants.  What I found was that the wet into wet didn’t behave the same way as it does on watercolour paper, which was a shame.  So there was a lot of layering and water spraying involved in trying to get the painting to work.  I also added some big salt crystals, which also didn’t behave like they do on paper, riddling my climber with holes.  I used titanium white and sepia to try to add highlights and shadow to the climber.  I painted in some hills with French ultramarine and a bit of quinacridone magenta and did some spattering with my three primaries just for the hell of it, allowing it to run in places.

And I’m sure I don't need to tell you that this is a failure.  The figure drawing (especially the raised left leg) is poor - most of it was freehand because pencilling an outline against the map background was difficult.  Wet into wet and salt techniques didn't work well on this surface (maybe I didn't make the watercolour ground thick enough).  I think the spattering and the places I allowed it to run worked out well though and are worth repeating next time I do something similar.

Drawing The Head & Figure, Jack Hamm - Book Review

And now for something completely different.  A book that can't be read.  This isn't a book that you can sit down and read cover to cover because it's not a book.  It's a manual.  I've had a damn good go but reading this is like reading a car manual.  It's not just that the book is dense with tips and information (which it is).  There are dense books that you can read cover to cover (like Making Colour Sing, which I want to read a second time before I review it) and end up wishing you'd taken notes on, but this isn't one of them.  Nobody reads a car manual and ends up wishing they'd made notes.

Is it any good though?  Well, there's so much information there that some of it has to be useful.  It's just that it's not a book to put to one side having learned something from it.  It's a book to dig out for help with particular things when you need it.  When I want to paint knees, I'll go straight to the bit in this book on knees, find what I need, then set off.  It means I don't get know which bits of this book will be the most useful, although I suspect it will be the bits on the face (there's some great stuff on drawing eyes).

But what if I wanted to paint a full body portrait?  Would this book help?  This is where I think it falls short.  The information throughout the book is so specific that I suspect my resulting painting would be an ugly amalgamation of beautiful hands, eyes, ears, etc that didn’t all fit together.

I also have the Jack Hamm book on painting animals waiting to be reviewed.  I suspect I'll like that book more because when I want to draw elephants I'll look up the bit on elephants.  Unless I want to paint a whole zoo I won't have the problems that I can envisage painting a whole human body using this book.  It's also possible that, once I've read Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain, I'll feel more confident at the macro level and that this book really helps at the micro level, but we'll see.

Time to sum my thoughts on what I forgot to mention earlier is a 120 page paperback.  I don't regret adding this book to my wishlist and I'm glad to have it as a reference.  But it's very much a manual with lots of advice on specifics and, having read it, I'm not yet feeling confident that I'm ready to paint or draw a full figure portrait.  It gets three palettes.

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Dynamic Watercolours, Jane Betteridge - Book Review

This one's a 144 page paperback and is absolutely packed with ideas.  While it's a paperback, it feels more resilient than other paparbacks, with the covers being a couple of inches too wide and folded inwards, meaning that it won't end up with scruffy corners.  The first 10% is the usual stuff on basic materials and is mercifully brief.  The last 10% is the usual closing bit on forging your own path and is mercifully brief (although the idea about producing a series of paintings is interesting).   But the 80% in the middle is where the interesting stuff is.  In theory half of the 80% is about the surface and half about what goes on it but the distinction wasn’t obvious in places.  But who cares?  There were some great ideas there.

Some were ideas I already knew about and have used.  Salt, cling film, acrylic inks, granulation fluid.  Even though I knew about these techniques, there's still new stuff there for me, like exactly when to add the salt to the painting (which is different for chunky salt and table salt).

There was stuff in there that I don't see myself using.  Gold leaf, gilding flakes, bronzing powder, contour relief.  Bit of a common metallic theme going through these.

And there was stuff I'm itching to try.  I want to try out crackle paste and use acrylic inks to fill the cracks.  I want to stick road maps, takeaway menus, maths papers, cut up rejected paintings, Sun newspaper clippings and faces torn out of the TV guide all onto card, cover them with watercolour ground and paint over them.  I want to try out irridescent/pearlescent medium.  I might try out skeleton leaves.  Or gauze.  I'm going to be spending a lot at Ken Bromley.  Or on Amazon, which is more expensive, but I do have an Amazon gift balance sitting there waiting.

Another thing about this book is that it includes four demonstrations.  These illustrate a lot of the techniques really helpfully, giving me more to take away than (for example) the inspiration that I get from looking at Ann Blockley paintings.  In particular, it helps to see the brands of the special products Jane uses.  The demos (and examples of completed paintings) also show how to keep things simple and how make impressionistically imaginative use of colours.

It's a good book but not food enough for that fourth palette.  This one gets three.

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Shell Ginger

I thought I'd have a ago at some Jean Haines style painting today by painting a shell ginger flower.  The flowers are white on the outside and yellow and red in the middle.  Take a photo from the right angle and the flowers look like they're laughing at you, with two teeth showing.  I'm not sure anyone would recognise this as shell ginger though.  Some people probably think it's a bird.

Colours today were rose dore, Prussian blue, both yellows (transparent and Indian, because I wanted some green and some orange), viridian green, burnt umber and a bit of titanium white.  Viridian is making its debut.  It's the first time I've ever used a green from a tube.  I though I'd give it a go as it has a great turquoisey hue that I would struggle to get from blues and yellows.  I expect it will replace cerulean blue in my palette the next time it's cleaned out.

The Jean Haines influence is there in the energetic background with the diagonal stripes, the undefined white and orange buds on the far left and in the middle respectively and the soft edges on the right hand side of the main flower (which could be softer).  The white flower has ended up impressionistically grey, which would be good if it wasn’t so dark.  In fact, the main flower itself is the worst thing about the painting as the rest of it looks great.  The greens in the background are really good with the the supposedly cool transparent yellow looking really bright and sunny and the approximately complimentary reddy orange contrasting well against them.  The twigs have come out well too, probably because I was trying to hold the paintbrush at the far end rather than the end nearest the paper.  I guess I could have left more white showing: that's a pretty common theme with me.

This one has been cut up to use as collage material.

All Roads Lead To Lady Churchill's Rose Garden

This post was written on 30 July 2019 but is only being released now that the program has aired.

Now, this is more like it.  Not that I was ever asked to make a choice but this was my entry for the wildcard competition.  It's obviously the same view as my other painting and still includes the leafy canopy and the shadow on the ground.

It's also still in the key of triadic left, so the main three colours are again Prussian blue, Indian yellow and quinacridone magenta.  There's also some cadmium red, cadmium yellow and cerulean blue, though, stippled in in the tree on the left, the leafy canopy and the plants against the wall.  I needed to use some bright opaques to make the colours stand out in what was looking quite a dark, muddy painting.

Anyway, first things first.  You'll see that I painted this on a map of the area.  I glued it down onto cardboard and put on two or three coats of watercolour ground in advance of the recording, hoping that I might impress the judges with my unorthodoxy.  I found it quite tricky to paint on this surface, needing a lot of pigment to make colours show but then finding that the painting was quite dark.  The sky, background trees and walls are all darker than the should be.  It meant that I had to outline the wall in white gel pen at the end to make it stand out against the trees, but this white line got some good feedback from other wildcards.

The leafy canopy and shadow on the floor look better here but are still not perfect.  In particular, it's hard to distinguish the canopy on the left from the tree behind it.

It was only on the day that I decided to try to incorporate the roads on the map into the painting.  I first spotted that the M25 would make quite a good background tree line.  Then, later on, I painted the tree on the left with a trunk along one of those blue lines that indicate there's a bit of country that's covered both on this page of the road atlas and the page before.  And then there's a shadow that fills up the M23 bypass around Crawley and I made some of the foreground shadows cover the North to South roads in Sussex.  These are things that you have to look closely to spot, but they're there.

And then there's the star of the show.  All those Sussex roads that seem to be guiding the viewer upwards towards the gate.  And the A264 which runs East to West along the bottom of the wall on the right and between Crawley and the gate escalates it to another level, still pointing at the gate but contrasting the East/West road against the North/Souths, which is something that textbooks tell us to do.  And it was a good move to leave the inside of the gate white rather than painting what's behind it.  Everything points to the white space.  If any of this was deliberate I'd be a genius.  In reality it's a lucky accident.  The road grid on this page of the road atlas turned out to be the perfect backdrop to the painting - I couldn't have done this with a map of Milton Keynes, all grids and roundabouts.

Other wildcards commented that they liked the colours in this one.  It's another positive reinforcement for my 2020 three colour paintings, even if these aren’t the greatest colours that I've ever drawn out of a triadic left key.

I'm looking at the painting again now.  There are also roads in there that look like twigs on branches or cracks in the wall.  And the bends in the roads in the foreground make the hillside look bumpy and three-dimensional.  A student of general relativity would call those roads geodesics - on a bumpy surface the shortest distance between two routes will twist and turn a bit.  It's interesting.  It was up for sale for a while but has been taken down after one of my shop window purges.

Lady Churchill's Rose Garden, Chartwell

This post was written on 30 July 2019 but is only being released now that the program has aired.

I've had an amazing day today as a wildcard at Landscape Artist of The Year 2020 at Chartwell, Sir Winston Churchill's former home, new Westerham in Kent.  The first couple of hours painting were quite quiet and focused but after that, when some people had finished or fancied a break, they started "walking the room" and that's when the day became something special.  Every single one of those wild cards was positive and encouraging to all the others.  It was an amazing experience.  Everybody must have come away at the end having both learned something and had their confidence boosted.

Anyway, we were shown an area in which we all had to set up shop (appropriately socially distanced).  It was an interesting choice because this area had two separate views: one looking out across a very green valley with loads of trees and one looking towards the wall of Lady Churchill's rose garden.  I chose to paint the latter and the best location for me to paint the view from turned out to be under a tree, which was a big bonus on a hot, sweltering day.

With four hours in theory to paint (in reality six if you didn't take a break) I thought I'd run off two paintings.  If after the first couple of hours I was looking up against it, I'd have abandoned one of them and concentrated in the other.  But this didn't turn out to be a problem: I got both done in three hours.

This is the worst of my two paintings, and the one that I hid away when the judges started circulating.  It’s in the key of triadic left (Prussian blue, Indian yellow, quinacridone magenta) with no other colours used.  The idea was to make it as much about the leafy canopy and the shadows on the floor as about the wall.  But the canopy and shadow don't work, the wall looks like it's in a distorted wraparound perspective like How The West Was Won, the triangular shadow on the wall is too lonely and the plants against the wall in the right are two-dimensional.  Maybe the perspective problem is to do with the bottom of the wall on the far right, which should slope upwards towards a vanishing point, but which I've made slope downwards because that's the way the ground sloped.  Schoolboy error.

There's nothing good about this one.  I won't even put it up for sale.  Let's move on.

Jean Haines' Atmospheric Watercolours - Book Review

It's back to the watery world of Jean Haines with this chunky 176-page whopper.

This book is very much focussed on technique rather than on producing finished paintings.  Techniques covered include colourful underpaintings, negative painting, use of salt and clingfilm, picking detail out of abstracts, creating sunburst effects, leaving out the detail and (needless to say) Jean's watery paint runs.

But this book includes lots of demos so why am I saying it's about technique rather than about producing finished paintings?  Well, that's because many of the demos are exercises.  And because Jean says that if any of these exercises turn out to be finished paintings it means you've not experimented enough.  You're painting for the bin, not for the wall!  Even so, I reckon someone sheepishly following these exercises would end up with some frameable works at the end.

I noticed a lot of woolly motivational stuff in this book.  Not enough to detract from the real content but enough to make me mark up Paint Yourself Calm and Paint Yourself Positive as not interested in my Amazon recommendations.

Just as with The Essence Of Watercolour the other day, I found myself unintentionally inspired by some of the creative, impressionistic use of colour in the paintings in the book and would like to see the author write a book on this subject.  It may well be that Jean's already done this with Colour and Light In Watercolour - a book already sitting on my wishlist.

Finally, I should compare this book to the other Jean Haines book that I've read.  I said in my review of Atmospheric Flowers In Watercolour that it was more about style than substance. Well that's certainly the case with this book, which is all about explaining Jean's techniques.  In comparison, Atmospheric Flowers is less technique-oriented.  This book would be a better starting point for learning about Jean's wishywashy style, with Atmospheric Flowers as more of an extension into flowers.  I learned more about Jean's technique reading this book after having read Atmospheric Flowers whereas if I'd read this book first, all the extra knowledge  I'd have gained from Atmospheric Flowers would have been about flowers rather than technique.

We're looking at a solid four palettes here.

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The Essence Of Watercolour, Hazel Soan - Book Review

Next up is The Essence Of Watercolour by Hazel Soan.  It's a 128 page paperback.

This was a really quick read.  I got through it in one evening.  There are chapters on colours, wet into wet, brush strokes, values, light and shadow, correcting errors, simplification and learning to see.  All of the chapters are full of useful tips and, while there are some insights that will make a difference to my work, a lot of it was stuff that I already knew.  A lot of it felt a bit shallow and introductory.  I'm wondering whether this book is made up of eight introductions that will be covered more deeply in eight more Hazel Soan books (especially given that she's already written two of those on colour and light and shade). But unlike (say) Expressive Watercolours by Joseph Stoddard, the lack of a chapter on materials makes it clear that this isn't a book for beginners.

This doesn't sound great so far and you're probably wondering (spoiler alert) why this book gets four palettes rather than three.  Well, there are three reasons:

- Hazel Soan is a great author and exudes so much passion in her writing that you want to go straight outside and paint.

- While a lot of the tips in the book weren't new to me, it wouldn’t be right for me to mark the book down for this.  If I'd read it a year ago, I'd be raving about how much it had taught me.  And about how packed the book was with tips - there's almost something on every page.

- And, most of all, there's more to the book than tips.  The paintings in the book that are used to illustrate Hazel's tips do more than that.  They inspire me to go out and pant impressionistically with weird choices of colours.  There are pictures in there, for example, of lion cubs with all sorts of blues, reds and greens in their fur.  They're there to illustrate why to use transparent colours in one place and how to paint wet into wet in another but I pick up different lessons from them.

So this gets four palettes.  Until Hazel Soan writes the book I really want to see with lots of demos on impressionistic paintings of animals with weird colour choices, I'll just have to keep flicking through this book for inspiration.  And searching out that YouTube video of her painting elephants.

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Birthday Book Stash

I got all these nine new art instruction books for my birthday.  It may take some time but I'll definitely be reading them all and posting reviews of them here.  Some of the books will be so intense that I'll need to read them more than once before I can review them: I can already tell you that Making Color Sing will be one of those.  Hopefully they'll also all make a difference to my work.

Expressive Painting has already been reviewed and had some interesting content on painting night scenes, which I used in A Miserable Night In Torquay.

A Miserable Night In Torquay

I still have three new books sitting on the shelf and it would be very easy for me to stop painting for a month while I read them all.  But then I wouldn't get as much out of the books as I would if I painted in between and tried out some of the new techniques I've been reading about.  So, first up I thought that, after reading Joseph Stoddard's book on Expressive Painting, I really needed to paint a rainy night scene while the lessons were still in my head.

I picked Torquay's most famous hotel as my subject with the "stretch objective" of making it look welcoming.  I started by sketching it out in pencil, then drawing over the pencil with a cheap waterproof rollerball.  I then plonked on an underpainting with some white space in the middle, surrounded by Indian yellow, surrounded by quinacridone magenta, surrounded by French ultramarine.  And then I went over the underpainting a second time - as I said in the book review, Stoddard likes to lay it on thick.

And then the rest was tinkering, using my three primaries plus burnt sienna, sepia and titanium white.  So I added trees and foliage, shadows on the building, people, etc.  And I coloured in the roof, chimneys, external features and some of the windows.  And you can see how I've splattered some stars and added a sign.

There's so much that works about this one.  Stoddard's ideas about nighttime painting are brilliant.  I should try this again at some point.  I'm pleased with how I have some of the shadows working on the building.  And, for the first time in a while, I'm really happy with the trees and foliage - adding a bit of red worked out well, as did choosing carefully where to add the yellow to bring out the light.

What don't I like?  Well, the reflections in the road aren't working yet.  And the people in the foreground don't harmonise with the rest of the painting, despite being painted in French ultramarine and quinacridone magenta.  Maybe I needed to add in some of the yellow too, and maybe not make the people monotone.  But the biggest problem with the painting is the signpost.  With the hotel in the background being in focus and the people in the middleground being more blurry, the sign should definitely not be in focus.  Oh well.  When I come to frame this one, I'll be cropping out the signpost, even if it means losing the tree.

This one's for sale provided I can get hold of a 9 inch square frame.