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.

🎨🎨🎨

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.

🎨🎨🎨