Bledlow Poppy

Well, I had a go at rescuing what was left after those two experiments.

I painted over the sky, the trees and the orange background fields using the same colours as before.

I painted in the poppy using cadmium red (the eleventh colour so far), rose dore and (just for the hell of it) some shadowy French ultramarine.  I added some wet into wet sepia in the middle - I can confirm that sepia really doesn't run everywhere when used wet into wet, so it’s place in my palette is justified.

And then I tried lots of ways of tidying up the sepia ink.  I painted all over the foreground using the same colours as before.  Didn't work.  I tried using the opaque cadmium yellow (twelfth colour) to mask it out.  Didn’t like it and wiped most of it off.  I added some extra sepia grasses.  Whatever.  I poured on granulation medium. Didn't work.  Tried spreading granulation medium with a sponge.  Didn't work but I accidentally smeared off a bit of poppy and that looked good.  A lucky accident at last.  And then I wet all the sepia ink, added some huge salt crystals, poured over lots of table salt and left it to dry.  Scraped off all the salt.  It's not really worked.

Oh, and while the salt was drying, I spattered over some titanium white (thirteenth colour), cadmium red and French ultramarine because I had nothing to lose.

The colours in my palette weren't used are cerulean blue, cobalt blue, Payne's grey and light red.  Four plus thirteen makes seventeen but there are only sixteen pans in my palette.  Remember that rose dore isn't in my palette yet.

The plus points coming out of this one are the poppy, the orange field and rose dore starting to show its true colours.  The painting itself is rubbish and will never sell.  I'm starting to think, though, about gathering together all my worst paintings, tearing out the best bits and reassembling them into a best-of-the-worst collage ensemble.

Edit (May 2020) I'm now doing just that.

Failed Experiment Part 2

So, after that failed experiment, I thought I'd experiment some more.  Let's face it, I had nothing to lose.

So I had some crumpled aluminium foil laying around.  I found enough of it to cover the painting and stuck it all down on a board (it was windy that day).  I then put some paint on the board: rose dore and Indian yellow where the background field was, some Indian yellow just below (to shine through the top branches), some French ultramarine around the band of bluebells and then French ultramarine, transparent yellow, burnt umber, burnt sienna and sepia (tenth colour) everywhere else.  I know there was already too much sepia there but I thought a bit more of it in the background might have made the excess sepia ink harmonise a bit with the rest of the painting.  And then I dropped on more garden foliage, placed the painting face down on it and weighed it all down with a broken paving slab.

And here's the result, after I've removed the masking fluid from where the poppy is going to be.  It's not that different to what I started with, with a little bit more foliage showing in a couple of places.  Nothing much else.  If I'm going to do this trick of painting the foil first again, I need to use much more paint.

I'm not optimistic about being able to rescue this one but at least I can get a bit of practice in on the poppy.

Failed Experiment Part 1

Today's painting was an experiment that went really badly.

I sketched out a composition first.  A bit of sky, a field in the background and a poppy in the foreground in front of lots of brambles.  The poppy has been masked out and the (blue coloured) masking fluid is still there.

I used a lot of colours in this one.  Nine watercolours plus an ink.  The sky was in French ultramarine with a bit of quinacridone magenta and raw sienna.  The background trees were in French ultramarine and transparent yellow.  And the background field was (the still under trial for a place in the palette) rose dore and Indian yellow.  I let the trees, sky and field bleed a bit into each other but then let them dry before moving on to the brambles.

But then for the foreground brambles, there's French ultramarine, transparent yellow, burnt umber, burnt sienna, sepia and a bit of rose dore near the poppy.  I tried to keep some unmixed blue near the top to look like bluebells.  And then I went with some Ann Blockley style experimentation.  While the paint was still wet, I dropped on some garden cuttings and leaves, then covered it all in cellophane and taped it up tightly.  Finally, I made holes near the bottom of the biggest stalks and poured in some sepia ink.  I then left it to dry overnight.

And here's the result.  Not great, is it?  Looking back at my Ann Blockley book, I think I should have applied thicker paint to the brambles and weighed it all down with something heavy as it dried.  It's also clear that I poured in too much of the sepia ink.  Oh well, lessons learned.

There are some successes here though.  Rose dore gave a good account of itself when used to mix an orange and may well replace light red in my palette when that colour runs dry.  Better to have a genuine transparent warm (orangey) red that looks a like a primary than a semi-opaque warm earthy red that doesn't add much to a palette that already includes burnt sienna.  The idea of the orange field (which is nothing like the field in the photo that inspired this one) was to contrast against all the greens in the rest of the painting).  I need to try out orange background fields more often.  Thye're effective.  The other success is something that doesn’t show up in the photo, but the foliage has left some foliage shaped contours in the paper surface which will still be there even if the images of the foliage are painted over.  Interesting.

This painting hasn't been completely abandoned yet.  I'm having one more go at those brambles with a different experimental technique.

Broken

It's been brewing for a while but I finally went to the shops yesterday to buy a transparent warm (orangey) red as a potential replacement for the semi-opaque light red currently sitting in my palette.  There was no quinacridone red on the shelves, so I went for the other possibility on my list: rose dore.  But what to test it out on though?  I didn’t fancy painting red/orange flowers or a red/orange landscape, so I thought I'd go for an abstract.

I started by dividing the page into six non-regular quadrilaterals with masking tape.  Then I painted some wavy lines over the paper with masking fluid as a way to link the six pictures together.  On a separate piece of paper I planned which primary trials to use in each subpainting.  I used all six transparent primaries (transparent yellow, Indian yellow, French ultramarine, Prussian blue, quinacridone magenta and rose dore) in six non-identical combinations with each colour appearing in three places.

And then I painted.  Each sub-painting started with one layer, then a dry-on dry second layer.  It wasn't until the third layer was applied that I started thinking properly about what to paint.  After laying on a dry-on-dry third layer, I came back to each painting and, in places did some wet-into-wet using all three colours.  Clingfilm, aluminium foil and salt were used in variously places to add texture.  As a last step, I added some borders around each sub-painting with sepia, again trying to bring everything together.  Finally the tape and masking fluid were removed and what you see is what I ended up with.

I'm calling it Broken.  It looks like a painting with a message, so I'm giving it a name that sounds as if it really does have a message.  Which it doesn't.

What do I like about this one?  The way it's been irregularly divided up and the way the masking fluid lines divide it up in a contrastingly different way.  The first two layers in the middle top sub-painting (before the yellow layer) and the top right painting (before the red).  The hieroglyphics that the clingfilm added to the cloud space in the top-right sub-painting.  And whatever it is in the foreground of the bottom right sub-painting (which saved it).  There's nothing I hate about this one, for a change.  Everything that's bad about it will probably look OK through at last one person's eyes.

For rose dore, though, the future doesn't look great.  It's in the top left, bottom left and bottom right subpaintings.  I found it to not be very bold, often getting talked over by the blues and yellows.  And when layered with either of the blues, it didn't make purples - it made mud.  Once I've used up the 5ml tube I bought (probably in delicate flower paintings), I won't be buying it again.  It was a good day for light red and quinacridone red.

And this one's been sold to another actuary.

I'm on Instagram!

A friend who's a full time artist told me the other day that I really needed to set up an Instagram account and put loads of hashtags against my paintings if I really wanted to generate a bit of traffic on  this website, so I'm giving it a go.

If you've come here via Instagram, welcome to the website.  I hope the visit turns out to be worthwhile for you and that you keep coming back.

Denali National Park

I thought it was about time I did something more conventional.  Nothing abstract, no acrylic inks, no salt.  Just a plain simple landscape.  And I had a scene of an Alaskan National Park sitting in my painting ideas folder, so I went for it and here it is.

The main triad of primaries today were transparent yellow, Prussian blue and quinacridone magenta.  The first two were chosen because there was going to be a lot of green in the painting.  Quinacridone magenta always seems to get into my paintings.  It's a cool (purple) red but it's my only truly transparent red.  I really need to find a warm transparent red at some point, maybe as a replacement for light red, which is struggling to justify its place in my palette, what with burnt sienna sitting next to it.  There's also some burnt umber and raw sienna in there.

I've used two ideas from the Gordon MacKenzie book here.  The first is the atmospheric fog.  The second is the alternating gradation: the sky and foreground are darker on the left and the middle ground is darker on the right.  I think both turned out OK.  And throwing some red into the sky also turned out well.

I'm happy with this overall, although there are things that could be improved on.  There are some sharp edges in the sky, for example.  And, on the mountains that are furthest away, the (low value, yellow) burnt umber stands out too sharply against the Prussian blue washes underneath it.

This one has been given away as a birthday present to a high powered research scientist in Los Angeles.

Keep Painting, Gordon MacKenzie - Book Review

This one is 144 pages long and the first thing I notice is that it doesn’t feel like other art instruction hardbacks.  The cover is warm and matty rather than cold and glossy.  It doesn't feel like fingermarks will show up on it but it does feel as if I won't be able to wipe wine off if I spill some on it.  And the pages inside are also matt rather than glossy.  I probably prefer the look of glossy pages but I still find the change refreshing.

The idea of the book is to generate ideas for artists who are feeling that their work has started to get a bit samey and has stopped improving.  It covers a number of areas and could claim to be targeting itself more at breadth than at depth, which is not necessarily a bad thing.  Throughout the book, there are lots of examples of paintings that illustrate the ideas discussed.  Sometimes the paintings are shown step by step, which I don't always like, but in this case the steps were useful in illustrating points.  I just don't like it when the steps are there to be copied by the reader.  Unless I'm reading a cookery book.  Let's talk briefly about the areas covered.

There's a chapter on composition.  There's some interesting stuff on colour schemes and contrasts but I expect this will be covered in much more depth when I buy a book on colour.  There's a good point made about adding a bit of detail in the centre of interest of a painting - something that I'm too often guilty of neglecting.  And there's some stuff on guiding the eye around a painting that I still don't get after reading both Roberts and MacKenzie.  Oh well.

Then there's a chapter on gradations and reversals.  This is really good.  There are lots of ideas about using gradations, with simplified diagrams of "models" for how to use them in composition.  There's also something on negative painting which will be covered in more detail by a Linda Kemp book that's on my wishlist.

Then there are a couple of chapters on mingling colours, passages and atmospherics.  These are right up my street and have given me lots of ideas.  In particular, there's some good stuff on how to include fog in landscapes, although the author may have included too many step by step illustrations of this - repetition isn't the same as depth.

Then there's a chapter on adding simplified "wee people" to paintings.  It's similar to what I've seen in Hazel Soan and Frank Clarke books but does include techniques that I've not seen in their books and is definitely useful.

There's a chapter on working from photographs.  I thought this was going to be like the Geoff Kersey book but not as deep.  I was wrong.  Whereas Geoff (being a realistic painter) talked a lot about what to leave out of paintings, Gordon talked about ideas like changing the colour scheme, tilting the photo, flipping photos, changing atmosphere/season,...  Lots to think about.

And there was an introductory chapter that wasn’t much more than a load of encouraging words and a closing chapter on teaching other artists that felt out of place, but I can forgive those.

Overall, this was definitely a worthwhile purchase and is a book that I'll continue to consult for years.  I'm only giving it four palettes though.  And that's because I'm giving too many books five palettes, so need to start cracking down on books that aren’t perfect.  What cost this book a fifth star is the superfluous first and last chapters, too many step by step examples in places, the path into a painting not being brilliantly explained and the artist's style being too different to mine, lacking a bit of vibrancy.  I feel really fickle and cruel but I'm only giving this four palettes.

🎨🎨🎨🎨

Sparkly Tree

After four paintings in a row based on the tried and trusted abstract silhouette style, I thought it was time for something different.  I was in the mood to experiment and I've learned a lot from this one.

I started with an underpainting using three primaries: French ultramarine, quinacridone magenta and transparent yellow.  Rather than just leaving it to dry, though, I covered it in some crinkled up aluminium foil and rested a paving slab on it while it dried.  The sky looked as normal (it was probably already dry before the foil was added) but the foreground had an interesting spotty texture.

Next, I put in a tree using acrylic inks and granulation medium.  I used all of my ink colours except waterfall green for this.  At times, the inks were behaving even worse than normal and I used kitchen paper to dab some bits dry and to smear the ink in places - that worked well.  The leaves in the tree were added by flicking inks onto the paper using a palette knife; this worked out quite well, adding a lot of energy to the painting.  As the tree dried, I saw that there was a hint of a woman trapped inside the tree, which I really liked.  The small branch on the left of the tree pointing downwards was an attempt to make the woman clearer by adding a branch that looked like a second arm.

Then I added some cadmium red spatters in the field and some grasses along the bottom using various inks.  At this stage I should have stopped, but I felt the painting was unbalanced with a big tree on the left and nothing on the right.  So I added some middle ground trees on the right.  But then they needed a hill to sit on, so I covered up most of the foreground (and the texture effects from the aluminium foil) with more inks.

But then the tree wasn't distinct enough against the background.  What could I do?  All that was left in my armoury was the waterfall green ink.  I added some of this to the tree in an attempt to brighten it up against the background.  But the ink didn't run.  It just sat there, so I brushed it over the tree.  But it was too opaque, so I dabbed as much of it off as I could.  And what I ended up with was the glittery tree that you see here.  If you look at it at a certain angle, the tree sparkles with light.  But the woman trapped in the tree is gone.  Maybe I only imagined her.

So I learned a lot from doing this one, but was it any good?  Well, there's a lot of energy in the leaves.  A the colours of the underpainting are good - the purple in the sky and the yellow in the background offer good contrasts against the rest of the painting.  Is the sparkliness of the tree a success though?  I'm not sure.  The painting is definitely muddy on the bottom half and I'm finding it hard to separate the sparkliness from the muddiness.

This one was picked out by my kid brother as a housewarming present.