Hidden Village

This one's taken me a couple of days.  After reading Ann Blockley's Watercolour Workshop, I thought I'd have a go at painting a random abstract, then trying to draw a little reality out of it, and this is what I ended up with.

I started yesterday with some random vaguely diagonal stripes of blue, violet, yellow and orange.  To do this I used pthalo blue, quinacridone magenta (only in the violet), rose dore and Indian yellow.  I then spattered on a little bit of sepia and painted on some geometrical shapes in sepia.  According to Hazel Soan, sepia doesn’t spread too much when applied wet into wet, so that's why I chose it.  Then I added some clingfilm to the top half and crinkled it up.  And added one of those net bags that lemons come in to the bottom half and weighed it down with bricks.

After it had dried, this is what I ended up with.  I can see some red and green buildings in there.

When I looked at it upside down, I could see a church on a hill:

What to do?  Well, I had a ponder overnight and decided to go with the buildings.  The plan was to use opaque colours (sepia, cadmium yellow, cadmium red, cobalt blue) to negatively paint around the buildings and to bring them out.  The only opaque I ended up using for the negative painting was sepia.  I also used sepia and the transparent colours to add some windows, doors and shadows.  And some sepia to convert some of the blob stuff in the sky into birds.

There were some bits on the road at the bottom that I didn't like, so I added some Terry Harrison rocks at the bottom.  I first painted them using burnt umber and raw sienna.  Then I added a really thick layer of French ultramarine and burnt umber on top and scraped it away using an old credit card.  For once Terry's rocks came out OK for me.  It’s not up for sale though.

In the end it's OK I guess.  The buildings at the bottom are a bit too dark for my tastes and I should have just left them green.  The rocks, while they came out OK, stick out a bit as not being as abstract as the rest of the painting.  On the other hand the birds look good and the clingfilm and the geometrical shapes in sepia have resulted in some good background trees.  It might all look better cropped down a bit on all four sides.  We'll see.  

And I learned something about colours on this one.  Pthalo blue is putting in a really strong case to be promoted to a spot in my 16-pan palette.  Maybe at the expense of cerulean blue or maybe even (whisper it) in place of Prussian blue.  Even then, cerulean blue is under strong pressure from turquoisey colours like viridian.  The other colour discovery is that cadmium yellow is looking way too strong compared to other colours on my palette.  One little bit of it on the paper was enough to convince me to restrict the opaques to sepia today.  I do need to keep thinking about what to do with my palette.

Ann Blockley's Watercolour Workshop - Book Review

I saw this one the other day in a bookshop in Bluewater and it looked so good, I decided I couldn't wait until my birthday.  I had to have it.

This is my second Ann Blockley Book.  The first, Experimental Landscapes In Watercolour, was full of amazing paintings with explanations of how Ann had managed to achieve the textures in them.  It was inspirational and scored an easy four palettes.  This book is different, and I think it's even better.  This book, you see, includes seven demonstrations.  I'm not one for the hand holding step-by-step instructions that you see in beginners' books but these aren't step by step instructions: they really are demonstrations.  There's a subtle difference in the wording: it's all about "this is what I did next" rather that "do this next".  And after feeling inspired by Ann's other book, I found it really useful to see step-by-step photos of how she produces these paintings.

I found the book to be choc full of useful tips.  It was good to read these tips within the main text of the book - somehow this makes me want to experiment more than when Ann talks about her methods within the commentaries to paintings.  I now want to try out negative painting.  I want to use wacky colours in the landscape just because they look good.  I want to use clingfilm and those net bags that satsumas come in.  I want to buy some watercolour pencils.

But, above all, I want to find hints of reality within the abstraction.  The last chapter in the book is the finest.  Ann shows us how she can throw loads of abstract colour and texture on a page, leave it to dry and then turn the resulting abstract painting into something closer to reality.  This can mean cropping and rotating the painting and adding extra colour (maybe via negative painting) to draw out whatever she's seen hiding in there.

At one point I dropped this down to four palettes, thinking I was making it too easy for books to get five palettes.  But I've had another rethink.  This book is worthy of five palettes.

🎨🎨🎨🎨🎨

Last Days Of Summer

Another quite traditional looking painting today.  I was watching a YouTube video this morning where Gordon MacKenzie was showing how to paint trees and foliage using torn up sponges.  I felt inspired to give it a go myself.  I didn't have the any of the cellulose sponges that Gordon recommended; instead I tore up an old bathroom sponge and used that.  The sponge was used for the leaves on the tree and the foliage along the horizon.  The main trunk of the tree was wiped out using kitchen roll.

This painting is the first that I've done on the more expensive cotton paper.  It does feel a little bit more expensive, although I wouldn’t like to say whether I'd have noticed if I'd not already known.  The paper is also "extra white" which should make my paintings more dazzling with my extensively use of transparent colours.  I think this is already the case on this one.

I only used four colours today.  Prussian blue and Indian yellow were my blue and yellow.  Rose dore and burnt sienna served as my reds in the sky and in the tree/foreground respectively.  Any grey in the sky was made from rose dore and Prussian blue.  Rose dore is really starting to show its worth and will definitely replace light red in my palette when its well runs dry.  Even then, I'll still have light red in a tube for the odd guest appearance.

I think this came out reasonably well overall and I'm putting it up for sale.  The tree is pretty good, although I think it would have benefited from more gaps in the foliage allowing the sky to shine through.  I like the sky too, with the Indian yellow on extra white paper giving some shine, especially over on the left where there's something shining through the clouds.  The foreground has come out OK.  I can see the benefits of using three transparent colours: if one or two of them had been opaque, it would have all turned to mud.  And the salt crystals that I sprinkled on have grown into something interesting too.  All in all a decent job.

This looks absolutely cracking in a frame and was the second one to be sold to my former boss in Sussex.