Snow In The Mountains

And here's the second snowy painting of the day.

Brought to you by the colours cobalt blue, quinacridone magenta, raw sienna and burnt umber.  I'm pretty sure there was no Payne's grey on this one.

I'm happy enough with it. The sky is good.  So are the mountains in the background - not too heavy on the paint.  The foreground I'm less happy with.  I wanted to use the two earth colours to show a bit of foliage through the snow but the colours look as if they don't belong there.  As if they're notes in the wrong key.  Maybe if I'd left more white showing in the foreground it would have been better.  Or just stopped before applying the earth colours, even if the scene would have ended up looking a bit empty.  Only good bit about the foliage is how well the quinacridone magenta sits with the two earth colours, adding a bit of fire.

Still, this one has been framed and is up for sale.

Rubbish Snow Painting

There's been a bit of snow overnight so I thought I'd have a go at doing some snow painting.  In fact I did two paintings at the same time.  This is the first of them.

Colours used are Payne's grey, cobalt blue, raw sienna, burnt umber and titanium white.  No red anywhere.

And it's pretty horrible.  The values are all over the place, with the raw sienna in the foreground being far too heavy compared to the snowy banks behind it.  And those snowy banks have been obverworked.  Too much blue and grey and not enough white left behind.

Best bit about it is the pair of silhouettes at the top of the hill.  The grey used there is a mix of burnt umber and cobalt blue (in an attempt to make it consistent with the rest of the foreground) and I think that works.  And their shape is OK, even though the little one somehow changed from a dog to a toddler.  Finally, the silhouettes are located at a focal point, 2/3rds across and 2/3rds down but this is down to some clever cropping.

This was more popular than I expectedly it to be in the Q1 2019 poll.  But, still, nah, it's in the reject pile.

Valdeinfierno

I got the idea for this one from a photo I saw on Facebook of three people hiking through Valdeinfierno.  A bit of googling reveals it to be somewhere in Los Alcornocales National Park in Spain and, looking at all the photos, looks like a great source of painting inspiration.

Colours today were lemon yellow, light red and Prussian blue in the top left (trying to go for cooler colours) and cadmium yellow, quinacridone magenta, light red, burnt umber and French ultramarine in the foreground (warmer colours).  There's also some raw sienna in places.  I've used gesso and salt for special effects.

As usual, there are successes and failures in the painting.  The top left looks like a normal watercolour painting and shows that I can apply a light touch if I try hard.  The colours on the big tree came out well.  I came up with four different colours for the trunk and applied them left to right before blending them together.  And the gesso worked really well - I managed to get a good texture when I applied it today.

What didn't work well?  Well, the shadows for a start.  Far right guy and middle guy have their shadows pointing in different directions.  And the tree shadow is in the wrong place and screams BLUE too loudly.  In fact it screams BLUE so loudly that the shadow doesn't look like shadow and instead looks like a random high concentration of one foreground colour.  I've probably spent too long on the foreground, making it muddy in places.  And the foreground is just a wee bit too heavy compared to the top left background.  I wanted a bit of contrast between them but not this much.

I framed this one but only after taking scissors to it, trimming away a lot of the junk on the right and converting it to portrait format.  It was donated to a local school as a raffle prize.

Facebook

I was feeling up for a challenge today, so I decided I'd do a painting that was a set of twelve random vignettes and that I'd ask friends on Facebook to choose the subjects.  They came back with a moon landing, a successful Brexit, my dog, a fart, waves, cheese, an elephant and a transsexual Scotsman playing the bagpipes while eloping to England with his violin playing boyfriend.  That still left me needing four ideas, so I picked one myself (the time-independent Schrodinger wave equation) and then looked down my Facebook newsfeed for ideas and found people talking about asparagus, goldfinches and Ukrainian architecture.  So that was me set.

At a high level, I like what came out at the end.  Everything all a bit random, just like a Facebook newsfeed.  It reminds me of all the jumbled conversations you tend to get in the background between tracks in a Pink Floyd album (or on Is This The World We Really Want by Roger Waters, which is the absolute mashers).  It's nicely balanced, without one side being heavier than the other other or with particular colours clumped together.

The painting only took two and a half hours.  That's not counting planning, preparation and clearing up - I'm playing by Jamie Oliver fifteen minute rules here.  And it uses an unheard of fourteen different colours: my usual twelve plus cadmium red and a bit of phthalo blue.

At a micro level, the vignettes are of varying degrees of quality.  Going from left to right and top to bottom:
- the dog is better than expected.  I don't do portraits, human or animal, but this one's vaguely recognisable.
- the Ukrainian doorway also qualifies as not too bad.  I did well to not add too much detail.
- the goldfinch was a big success.
- I don't like the moon landing.  Nothing went right when I was painting in the figure that I'd masked out.
- I think the Schrodinger equation works, not that you'd really call it a painting.
- the wave turned out really well.  Very pleased with that and cerulean blue worked for me for once.
- the cheese-inspired abstract piece didn't work out.  The Prussian blue spread out too much.
- the elephant was a winner.  I shamelessly copied Hazel Soan's elephant technique by laying down raw sienna, dabbing in a cool red, dabbing in blue, leaving it to dry and adding in shadows.  I couldn’t have painted the elephant from scratch like she does though.  I had a few stabs at a pencil outline until I got it right whereas she can go straight in with the initial yellow with no outline
- the Scotsman with the bagpipes worked.  I left out some of the detail in the picture my friend had in his head.
- the fart was accompanied by its goldfish dealer.  I think it worked out OK on this small scale.
- the asparagus was awful.  Too ambitious.  It brings everything down a bit.
- the successful Brexit isn't too bad.  It uses the hipster artistic technique of tearing the paper into two pieces.  I'm happy with it on this small scale but I'd never make a cartographer.

Maybe I'll attempt this experiment again another time.  But for now it's being cut up to be used as collage material.  It's as if this was always its destiny.

Colourful Sky

This was based on a photo of the Aurora Borealis where the lights were all in green.  I didn't manage to get the greens right and the sky looks more like it's made of clouds of intergalactic matter than of Northern Lights.  So this one will just be called Colourful Sky and I'll save up Aurora Borealis and Northern Lights until I capture them properly.

Today's colours were French ultramarine, Prussian blue (the answer to a University Challenge question last night), light red, quinacridone magenta, cadmium yellow and titanium white (only for the stars).  No raw sienna or burnt umber today.  Instead I managed to get some decent earthy colours in the foreground by mixing three primaries.

And I'm happy with the result.  Things didn’t go according to plan in a couple of places but in both cases I was happy with how it all turned out.  I've already mentioned how the sky didn’t look like the Northern Lights - I'm happy with how it turned out though.  The other problem was that the sky was supposed to gone further down the page with some cadmium yellow and light red colours at the bottom.  Instead, there was a sharp line in the sky that looked like a horizon.  So I went over that line again with some light red and created a hill in the background that looks really good.  And I still have some quite bright cadmium yellow in places contrasting with the trees.

And compositionally, I think this worked out well.  The midpoint of the foreground trees is about 2/3rds of the way from left to right and 2/3rds of the way down, so lies on one of the four hotspots.  And both the foreground (sloping up from left to right) and whatever it is in the sky (sloping down from left to right) guide the eye to that point.  All by the book, not that any of this was deliberate.

This one Is framed and up for sale.  I'm not feeling the imposter syndrome today.

First Gesso

Today's painting follows hot on the heels of yesterday's, mainly because I spread a load of gesso on a watercolour sheet to dry overnight.  It's my first experiment with gesso and, although there are some interesting effects in places (like the very top left of the painting and the left side of the tree) I think I need a bit more practice with chemically enhanced painting.  I also used some salt in the background and tissue paper in the foreground.

For once, the foreground and background are distinct, although this is more down to my choices of blues than to how thickly I applied the paint.  Colours today were Prussian blue and light red (background), French ultramarine and quinacridone magenta (foreground) and cadmium yellow (everywhere).  There are also little bits of raw sienna and burnt umber.  No Payne's grey today.

I’m pleased with the foreground.  The choice of colours and the use of tissue paper both worked out well.  The structure of the tree is a bit naff, even if there are some good gesso-created textures near the bottom.  Purple trees are starting to become a bit of an Artistic Actuary cliche but they to work well against today's choice of background colours.  The background has great colours but is a bit too stripy.

This one wasn't popular in the Q1 2019 poll.  It's been cut up to be used as collage material.

SIAS Newsletter November 2018

And here's another one.  This is called SIAS Newsletter November 2018 after the email that included the stock photo this was based on.  It's getting too difficult to come up with names.

Colours today were cobalt blue (the coldest looking blue on my palette), Prussian Blue (for the greens), Payne's grey, burnt umber, raw sienna, light red, a dash of quinacridone magenta in the sky and titanium white (which, in a break from my normal habits, I allowed to wet into wet with other colours).  I used a bit of granulation fluid, for the first time, in the hill in the foreground.  The birds were added afterwards, in pen, after everything had been put away: I thought the painting needed an extra bit of interest, however tiny.

Overall I think this is OK and worth framing.  The sky is generally good.  The light red, which was added to trees and foreground only to make the colours more interesting, worked out well.  And the scraped out foliage in the foreground came out really well, looking as if one side of each scraped line is in shadow.  I think the granulation fluid may be responsible for that effect.

Bad points are the bottom right bit of sky (a bit monochrome) and the green trees which have an artificial looking minty colour about them.  Maybe I needen't have bothered with any green in there.  I'm making the error of sticking too closely to the original photo.  I'm also probably being a bit too heavy with the background paints.  They could do with a lighter touch.  With the background that heavy, I had to be really heavy with the foreground, especially with that row of trees.  Oh well, live and learn.  This one has been cut up to be used as collage material.

Flowers In Alexandria

My first attempt at an impressionistic flower after reading that Jean Haines book and I think it’s a decent start.  I could still be looser - the leaves are a bit too well defined.  Pleased with the bees though (even if they're a bit green): they balance the composition enough that the flowers don't look off centre.

Colours today were quinacridone magenta, French ultramarine, Prussian blue, cadmium yellow, Payne's grey and burnt umber.  The usual crowd of favourites but with Prussian blue coming in for the greens.

This one was up for sale at one point but has been taken down now - I've done too many better paintings.