Landscape Artist Of The Year 2021

I've had an amazing day today as a wildcard at Landscape Artist of The Year at a mystery location.  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.

I wasn't the winning wildcard, so won't be crowned Landscape Artist Of The Year 2020.  But I didn’t disgrace myself and am happy wth the painting I finished up with.  Not so happy with the other painting I did on the day and that I hid away.  The program is expected to air in January 2021, at which point I'll publish the two posts I've already written on those two paintings and reveal the paintings themselves and the location at which they were created.

If anybody reading this was at the event today (30 July 2020) then please do speak up in the comments and say hello.  And if you're feeling brave, have a guess at which wildcard I was.

The Rose & Crown, Hartlip

First the news.  I will be heading along to filming of Landscape Artist Of The Year in a couple of days as a wildcard entry.  That's why I've been getting all this outdoor practice in lately rather than doing my usual thing and starting from a photo.  I need to keep the location a secret and I may well end up signing documents that mean I can't show off my painting(s) or talk about how I got on.  So don't expect a full report.

So I'm out and about around the village again today and thought I'd paint my local, the Rose & Crown in Hartlip.  A cracking pub.

It's been painted in the key of orange cool, so there's Indian yellow and Prussian blue there but I fancied experimenting a bit, so I'm using burnt sienna Rather than rose dore as the warm red.  It gave a cracking orange in the sky but I found it a struggle to get a good neutral from these three colours - all the greys just looked green.  At the end, after removing masking fluid from the windows, I glazed the pub and foreground with a neutral colour to tone down the whites that were showing.  And when I got home and has access to all my colours, I used cadmium red, cerulean blue and cadmium yellow (all opaques) straight from the tube to add some colourful flowers to the baskets - the painting needed something like that to contrast with what was looking a bit gloomy in places.

From a distance, the pub is the right sort of colour, and the sky looks good apart from where some burnt sienna has run into it around the chimneys.  There's a good sunny feeling to it too, thanks to the Indian yellow in the palette and the big shadow that I've added.  The greenery at the back is a maybe bit too green - the burnt sienna doesn't tame it down as much as I'd like.

Overall though I'm not entirely happy with this one.  If I come up with something like this a LAOTY, I'll feel like I've blown an opportunity.  There's something about it that makes the pub look like quite a wobbly structure and there's that feeling that everything looks a bit too "drawn and coloured in."  Although that may jus be my style and something at need to get used to.

Still, it has a certain something about it, and it's been sold to a couple running a local business.  It may even end up on the wall for all their customers to see, in which case I'll be well chuffed.

Life Drawing For Artists, Chris Legaspi - Book Review

This is a 176-page paperback and one of three books on figure drawing that I got for my birthday.  I tell you, those other two are going to struggle to achieve the heights of this one.

This book is really good.  It makes something that I thought was complicated simple and accessible.  At the centre of things is a process of sorts and lots of examples of the process in practice.  Every, model, pose and time limit is different and it really helps to see lots of examples on this book of the thoughts that should be going through an artist's head when faced with all these different challenges.  Just giving us the process or the process with a single example wouldn't work - it needs al those examples.

There's also a lot of stuff in there on the landmarks to look for on the torso, neck and head and on the muscles and bones that will typically show up.  But somehow Chris make this all simple and never boring.  It doesn't read like a biology textbook.

I'll tell you something else that's good.  The diagrams.  There are countless examples in the book where Chris starts from a photo of a model and draws all sorts of gesture and rhythm lines over it or highlights particular bones and muscles.  Often he'll use the same photo several times, highlighting different things on it.

Someone wanting to get into drawing should still start with Betty Edwards or Bert Dodson but this should be the next book on their reading if they want to get into figure drawing.  I may come back to this review and have more to say after reading those other two figure drawing books but, for now, this gets a comfortable four palettes.

🎨🎨🎨🎨

Stephen Hawking Reading The Guardian

Ok.  Time to try out the inktense pencils properly.  I had two gos at doing a painting of a young Stephen Hawking reading The Guardian.  The idea behind these wasn't to produce nice finished paintings but just to get a feel for using these pencils.

The one on the right was the first one I did.  I just drew in lines and hoped that they'd run after I added a bit of water.  They didn't so I brushed some water over instead But the lines themselves proved a bit resilient and were still showing when I hoped they'd have faded away a bit.

So, second time around (on the left) I just shaded areas in with the pencils.  This came out looking better, a bit like a watercolour.  The diagonal stripes added a bit of energy, which was good.  The accidental man bun was obviously bad.  Also not great was how my pencil guide lines are showing.  I think next time I need to remove the guide lines before adding water.  And either add some lines afterwards or just harden some ink edges.  I might need to think carefully about subject matter too - go for flowers or nudes?  And style-wise, maybe go for the Jean Haines wishy washy look, which these pencils seem well suited to.

These paintings are obviously for the bin but they do say that if you want to improve, you need to paint for the bin, not the wall.

Inktense Pencil Swatching

It's looking grim outside, so I thought I'd try out those inktense pencils.  It's hard to make a mess with these, so I think I’m OK with them in the kitchen.  I've done a load of swatches which are just drying off and will be put through the laminator later.

It's looking like an interesting set of colours.  There are clearly warm and cool versions of the primaries, which is a great start.  A lot of these colours are looking like old friends under assumed names.  Fuchsia looks like quinacridone magenta, iris blue is looking a bit cerulean, bright blue is looking ultramariney, indigo is looking like Payne's grey (and the W&N indigo and Payne's grey do use the same pigments but in different proportions), sea blue is looking Prussian, teal green looks like viridian, mustard could be raw sienna, baked earth could be burnt sienna and willow will probably look like burnt umber if it's laid on a bit more thickly.  Where it falls down slightly is that, with indigo, bark, charcoal grey and ink black all in the set, it may look a bit heavy on the neutrals.  And the greens (with the exception of the dirty looking leaf green) all look artificial and would need other colours mixed in if used in a realistic painting.

In doing these swatches, the ink felt like very well behaved watercolour, and that's given me an idea about what I might do with these pencils.  I don't like well behaved watery media - they just show up my weaknesses.  So I'm going to need to introduce some randomness.  What I plan to do is some drawings (maybe of people, maybe of buildings) using several different colours.  Drawn with lines, maybe also some shading.  Then I'll either spray water on them or flick water on them or just put them outside in the rain if it's coming down at the right speed.  And then I'll tip the paper around or brush some of the ink around or maybe do some more spraying or paint on just enough lines to bring back the subject if it's disappeared.  I’m not sure yet.  But there has to be some randomness there - I won't be watering down all the pencil marks on the paper.

Painting Expressive Landscape, Carole Robson - Book Review

On the face of it, this is a very similar book to the Jane Betteridge in my collection.  It has artwork like that in the Ann Blockley books but includes a few step by step demonstrations rather than showing us paintings, making a few comments on how the were created and relying on inspiration to make an improvement to our artwork.  But there is a difference between Carole's book and Jane's.  Whereas Jane's book was weighted more towards products that might enhance my paintings than to wacky techniques, Carole goes the other way and talks more about techniques than products.  I quite liked this.  I also liked that she talked about abstract painting too, although I could have done without all the discussion of digital art.

The demonstrations in the book might be the weakest bit.  The paintings that resulted from them may well be the three worst paintings in the book for a start.  And I don't like it when the commentary is a series of instructions rather than talking about "this is what I did".  The demonstrations all had 30+ steps; with this many steps I could have done with seeing some photos of how the paintings as a whole were coming together rather than a series of closeups of little bits of the paintings.

Where Carole talks about wacky products, I found it a bit annoying that she didn't mention particular brands (which Jane Betteridge did do).  This isn’t just about making sure I buy the best brand - it's also a check that I'm actually buying the right product!

At the end, Carole moans about how she's only been able to "scratch the surface" of what she's been talking about.  Hmmmm.  If anybody should be moaning about this, it's the readers.  The book is only 128 pages long and could easily have been extended out to 160 pages, leaving everybody happier.

Most of this review has been a series of moans, so you'll be surprised to hear that it's still getting three palettes.  The book was actually a pleasure to read, with Carole's passion coming through wherever she showed off her paintings.  The paintings themselves (the three demos excepted) were all colourful, vibrant and in many cases really unusual.  They were genuinely inspiring.  And the whole book felt very shiny.  I'm not sure if this is down to the shiny paper used or to the choice of photos - all the photos of paints and equipment leapt off the page - a real contrast to those books where you get drawings of palettes and brushes.

Positive, inspiring, three palettes.

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Palette Cleaning And Setup

Actually, my sister messed up and ended up buying me two of those Winsor & Newton Professional 24 half pan palettes.  So I've thrown away my plastic 16 pan palette and cut down my 16 pan squad to 12 and moved them to one of the two new tins.  So now I have two palettes.

At the top is my 24 half-pan experimental squad.  23 of those colours came in the half pans and you can see (top row, third from left) where I've substituted transparent yellow for the fugitive aureolin.  Next to it I have all the spare half pans from the other tin - they fit very nicely into what used to be a tub of Daniel Smith watercolour ground.

And at the bottom is my first team squad of twelve.  Top row left to right is burnt sienna, burnt umber, raw sienna, titanium white, viridian, Payne's grey.  Bottom row left to right are the big six primaries quinacridone magenta, rose dore, Indian yellow, transparent yellow, Prussian blue, French ultramarine.  Dropped from the squad are the rarely used opaques: cadmium red, cadmium yellow, sepia and whichever of cerulean blue and cobalt I would finally have settled on.  The opaques, along with light red and that Daler Rowley tube of pthalo blue are still in tubes in that takeaway carton, along with spare tubes for the other 12.

When I look at the 12, it's pretty clear that the colour struggling hardest to justify its place is the titanium white, as I have some white gel pens that might be better at adding highlights.  But rather than being under pressure from any of the opaques (where I would want all four in a palette and couldn't choose between them if I had to pick one) It's more likely to lose its place to a crazy orange or purple from the experimental squad.  But we'll see.

Also today, I scrubbed the mixing wells in both tins with toothpaste so that paint doesn't puddle up in them.  Just experimenting before and after tells me that this works brilliantly.  I still prefer to mix in porcelain wells but the tin wells will be useful if I need to pack light or paint standing up.

And I've cleaned up my existing squad.  The burnt number may have been showing some mould so I played safe and threw it all out and replaced it.  And for all the full pans, I wiped off any messy paint on the outsides with a damp cloth and they now look much cleaner.

It feels good having two nice, new, clean tins.  I'm ready to get painting.

En Plein Air Watercolor, Ron Stocke - Book Review

With all this painting I'm currently doing out and around the villages, I thought I'd start my birthday reading with this book.  It's 128 pages long.

It covers everything that you'd expect: setting up, composition, perspective, drawing, painting, colour and values.  While it was never especially deep in any of those areas, there were definitely some interesting tips in there that I've not seen in other places and that will be useful to me.

There are four worked examples in the book.  These are at the level that suits me: not too many steps and written in a "this is what I did" style rather than "do this, do that".  These may be the highlight of the book. The big lesson from them is in Ron's technique of laying down colourful underpaintings before he even thinks about doing any proper "colouring in" (my words, definitely not Ron's) painting.  The blue underpainting that features on the bigger painting of which the book cover shows only a small detail is a moment of genius that makes me want to paint people under awnings.

Overall, this scores two palettes.  I learned stuff from it but not enough to justify that third star.

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Birthday Stash 3 of 3: New Books

Two more books just arrived in the post.  That makes eight in my birthday stash and there may be a ninth on the way in a couple of weeks but I thought I'd share the good news now.  A good selection there, notably including the James Gurney book that I keep hearing about.  And three books on figure drawing, which may become a thing this year, especially with those inktense pencils.

It will take me a good while but I'll be reading all these books, taking copious notes and posting reviews on this blog.

Birthday Stash 2 of 3: 24 Winsor & Newton Professional Halfpans

More birthday stash.  This was from my kid sister.  A tin with 24 watercolour half pans.  I've talked in a previous post about how I wouldn't buy a set like this for someone just starting but I'm an experienced artist these days, which is a bit different.  So did it hit the mark?

First up, it was a big relief to see that these were professional quality paints and not from Winsor & Newton's cheaper, student-quality Cotman range.

And they're pans rather than tubes.  While I use tubes, I'm happy I got a set of pans rather than tubes because I can top up pans with tube paint when they're empty.  If it's a box of tubes, you're presumably expected to squeeze out bits of paint onto a palette like an oil painter.  I don't like doing that - too much paint ends up getting thrown away.

They're half pans rather than full pans.  That makes things a bit more fiddly with big brushes.  Maybe I'll only do smaller paintings with this set.  And when the paints run out I should be able to replace the 24 empty half pans with 12 empty full pans with my favourite colours (From my 16 I'd probably leave out the opaques: cadmium red, cadmium yellow, sepia and whichever of cobalt and cerulean blue is currently occupying the opaque blue slot).  On the other hand, the thing about having smaller pans is that there's room to fit a bigger range of colours in the tin, so let's look through them.  This is make or break time.

- Winsor yellow is a semi-transparent warm yellow.  I'd be using this in place of Indian yellow.  Being only semi-transparent  means it won't ever displace the Indian but I'm happy to use this for now.

- Aureolin is a transparent cool yellow.  The W&N website gives this an A permanence rating but I hear so many bad stories about aureolin turning from yellow to grey in the months and years afterwards that I don't want to take a chance with it.  I'm going to chuck it away and fill the half pan with transparent yellow from the tube.

- Lemon yellow is an opaque cool (greeny) yellow.  I did use this colour for ages before replacing it with transparent yellow, another cool yellow but (obviously)  a transparent one.  But I don't mind having this colour there.  In my normal palette I have cadmium yellow as my opaque yellow for the odd bit of spattering.  So lemon will cover for cadmium.  Lemon is a cool yellow whereas cadmium is warm but that's not a problem given how little I use opaque yellows.

- Winsor orange is a semi-opaque, single-pigment orange that's apparently a "good mixer".  I've never used orange paint before, instead always mixing it from red and yellow.  It will be interesting to try this colour out.

- Winsor red is a semi-transparent, single-pigment warm red.  It looks quite vibrant, like a cadmium red.  My normal transparent warm red is rose dore, which is expensive, dual-pigment and a bit lacking in oomph at times.  I'm looking forward to trying out the Winsor red.

- Permanent alizarin crimson is a cool transparent red and very similar to the quinacridone magenta that I use.  I did use alizarin crimson for a while but switched after hearing so many bad stories about it’s lack of durability.  I've heard that these problems have been solved (hence the word permanent in the name) but I'm very happy with quinacridone magenta and won't be switching back.  Happy to use the alizarin until it runs out though.

- Permanent rose is another cool, transparent red but is more pinky than purpley.  It will be interesting to give this one a go.

- Winsor violet is a transparent violet.  Just as with the orange, I've never used violet paint, preferring to mix it from primaries.  But I’m looking forward to trying this one out.

- French ultramarine is already my warm, transparent blue of choice.  Glad to see it in there.

- And Prussian blue is my cool, transparent blue of choice.  Another old friend.

- Winsor blue (green shade) is another cool, transparent blue.  Other manufacturers make this same colour and call it pthalo blue.  I even have a tube of Daler-Rowney pthalo that I occasionally use.  It's a colour that I'd be happy to buy and use if I needed some Prussian blue and there wasn’t any in the shops.

- Cerulean blue is a cool, semi-opaque blue.  It's one that is probably in my top 16 (pushing out cobalt blue) for its amazing granulation ability.  Happy to see that one here.

- Viridian is a transparent green that's already in my 16 colour palette.  The only secondary colour I've ever used, it's a turquoisey colour that would be really difficult to mix.  And it's single pigment, so hardly surprising really.

- Olive green and permanent sap green are both transparent, multi-pigment greens.  These are probably the two most popular greens out there.  I've never used them (unless you count alcohol inks)  because I prefer to mix greens and these, being multi pigment colours, just look ready-made to me.  Buying these would be like buying pre-peeled potatoes.  Looking forward to giving these a go but I'll be dropping in some the primaries rather than using them off the peg,

- Yellow ochre is a semi-opaque earthy yellow.  In the days when I didn’t understand the difference between transparent and opaque paints, I saw this as interchangeable with raw sienna.  But now I only use raw sienna.  I'll use this yellow ochre though.  Just need to be careful with mixing.

- Raw sienna.  There you go.  A transparent, earthy yellow that's a must for any palette with 10+ colours.

- Burnt sienna.  Another big favourite.  A transparent, earthy red/brown that's a must for any palette with 10+ colours.

- Burnt umber.  Oh yes.  Keep them coming.  A transparent, earthy brown that's a must for any palette with 10+ colours.

- Raw umber.  A transparent, earthy colour that I've not used before.  Looks yellow/brown.  Should be interesting.

- Indigo.  An opaque and very dark blue.  I've used indigo acrylic ink and liked it.  I think Jean Lurssen, whose work I really enjoy on YouTube, may use indigo watercolour.  Another colour that I'm looking forward to giving a go.

- Payne's grey.  Another old favourite and one of my 16.  Glad to see it here.

- Chinese white.  This is a semi-opaque white.  The white which I use is titanium white, which is opaque and can be used for adding highlights, although it's not so opaque that it doesn't need several applications to be able to cover up what's underneath.  I've only very rarely used white for anything else (the fog in that Hateful Eight painting springs to mind as the exception).  I'm going to leave this Chinese white in there but don't expect it to see much action if it's less opaque than the titanium so may end up only being used in foggy mixes.  If it's the last pan left when everything else has gone, I'll throw it away.

- Ivory black.  I've never used black and wasn't planning on starting.  It's far better to mix exciting, energetic blacks from three transparent primaries.  On the other hand I hear that ivory black is a granulator, so might add some interesting textures.  I'm going to leave this one in there for now and try experimenting with it (maybe on scrap paper first).

So all I'll be changing in this palette is the aureolin, which I'll be replacing with transparent yellow.  In terms of squad structure, this is a remarkably well balanced squad of 24.  If anything I'd replace the black with something else - maybe cadmium red for an opaque red?  The quality of the colours (let's forget aureolin for now) is good with 18 of the 24 being single pigment colours and 16 of 24 being transparent or semi-transparent.  They must have been deliberate decisions.  It may also have been a deliberate decision to make 13 of the 24 staining colours, making this a good set for trying out some multiple layer glazing.

But do the colours suit me?  Once aureolin has been substituted, obviously.  Actually, they do.  There are warm and cool transparent (or at least semi-transparent) primaries, all my favourite earthy colours, viridian green and Payne's grey.  Any of my most important colours (I’m thinking of my six transparent primaries) that are not in here have capable substitutes.  And then the rest of the colours are like a catalogue of all the different colours that I'd like to experiment with at some point but am not brave enough to invest in.  Greens, an orange, a purple, a pthalo blue, raw umber, indigo, a granulating Black.  It's like a tasting menu or a variety pack of different malts or gins.  But one where the box it came in is something that you'd use for years afterwards.

Conclusion: great present.  I'm really happy with this.  I wouldn't recommend a big set like this to a beginner though - check out my separate post on that.

Birthday Stash 1 of 3: Inktense Pencils

It was my birthday yesterday, and there was some stuff in my stash that I need to show off here.

First up is this set of inktense pencils, which my oldest bought for me.  I've used inktense blocks a bit in the past but only in white and in earthy colours to add to watercolour paintings.  So I know I can draw with them or draw then wet them or wet them then draw with them.  But this is a wide range of vibrant colours, so I'm going to try doing some painting using only these pencils.

I also got the Bill Buchman Expressive Figure Drawing book in my stash (more on books in another post) and, just flicking through, I already have the idea of drawing figures with all sorts of coloured pencils, then brushing them over with water and letting the ink form all sorts of shadows but I need to do some reading first.  I'll probably be doing this on A5 watercolour paper rather than going the full 9 by 12.  Definitely looking forward to that.

A lot of thought went into this.  Cracking present.

Archway Into St Michael's & All Saints Church, Hartlip

Another bit of plein air painting and this time it's my local church in Hartlip.

Just like last time, it's in the key of purple cool, made up of transparent yellow, French ultramarine and quinacridone magenta.  I wanted the ultramarine for its granulation properties and the magenta cr that purple tree.

There's a great archway leading from the churchyard into some orchards, so I sat in orchard and found a view in which the church was framed by the archway.  This is a great composition for a photo  or for a film but not for a painting unless the artist can decide whether the church or the archway is the star.  I went for both and ended up with a painting that doesn't seem to know what it's doing.

I went for my (recent) usual approach of graduated washed for the church and the archway but somehow they don't seem as energetic as they have done in other paintings.  I dropped in some salt and some drops of water in an attempt to make the archway look old; this has worked well in a couple of places but would have been better all over the archway.

I didn't have a plan for the foreground this side of the archway, so ended up throwing down random colour and trying to inject some energy with some sharp upward strokes.  I also added some spattering with my three primaries. Overall the foreground is probably OK but maybe some spattering with opaques might have been better.

The sky was already looking good (ultramarine and magenta is a winner) but looks even better now after some yellow spatters ended up in the sky and had to be brushed into it.

The bit I'm least happy with is the middle ground: the church, the trees and the grounds.  They're all in too dark a value for a start, not contrasting enough against the archway.  And none of the colours are really right.

I thought this was of my worst paintings for a while.  But then I sold it when the paint was barely dry to one of the ladies in the village.  She told me she's already familiar with my work from seeing my portrait of Clive still on display at the MB Farms farm shop.  Anyway, the proceeds of this sale were all passed straight on to the church itself.  That seems like the right thing to do with a church painting.

Stockbury Church

Time for a new experience.  To get some practice in (just in case I make it on to Landscape Artist Of The Year as a wildcard) I thought I'd better have a go at painting on location rather than starting from a photo reference.  And at working against the clock.  This local church seemed like a good place to start.

The colours today were quinacridone magenta, French ultramarine and transparent yellow (nothing else), so it's in the key of purple cool.  The motivation behind this was that I wanted to include some greenery.  Transparent yellow makes for good greens and the best triads with transparent yellow also include French ultramarine.  Quinacridone magenta gets the nod over rose dore as I needed a bit of red to mute those greens and with rose dore being made of two pigments, it has more chance of turning everything to mud.

The colours are great in this one.  I especially like the background trees, where I used a stick I found on the floor to scrape out those tree shapes.  I get the feeling this is the first green I've used for a long time (skin tones excepted).  The shadows on the church worked well, actually making the day look sunnier.  The texture on the tower was also good.   This was done using a Terry Harrison foliage brush and, without it, that tower was looking like a single Lego brick.  The perspective wasn’t great in a couple of places but that's why I need to keep practicing.

The whole thing took two hours, so I'd have no problem on LAOTY.  In fact I'd probably have time to run off two paintings in four hours.

So, good day at the office.  This one was sold two years later to someone wanting a painting of this church to give as a gift to a couple who had married in this church and moved to France.  The proceeds were all handed over to Stockbury church.

And I'm Thumper!

Today's subject is Thumper from Diamonds Are Forever, played by actress Trina Parks.  In this shot, Trina adopts what must be one of the greatest poses in cinematic history and one that's crying out to be painted.

It's in the key of triadic right (transparent yellow, French ultramarine and rose dore) for no other reason than that these three colours are all overdue an outing, with the triadic left combo being used quite a lot lately.  They work well together, which I already knew, but the granulation of that French ultramarine looks really good.  As well as those three colours, there's some titanium white in the fingernails and eyes.

This one is only 8 inches by 6 as I fancied panting something smaller today.  I found that I'd already used the first page of my 8 by 6 pad for testing colours and whether the brush was clean (see pic below) and thought I'd have a go at painting over those tests and incorporating them into the picture.

The original testing hasn’t come through on the final painting, even with me only using transparent colours.  Maybe I'd have been better off adopting a lighter touch and negatively painting some yellow flowers.  It's just that I wasn't in the mood for that.

The painting turned out to be an interesting little workout.  The energy of the pose has come through well and the three colours have produces some interesting background and skin tones.  The face is by far the worst bit.  I had several goes at it before settling on what we have here.  It's a shame the face is in the middle of the picture, everything else is so good that I'd have been tempted to crop it out if Trina had been standing up straight.  But, then again, I wouldn't have painted her in a pose like that.

Thumper did go up for sale at one point but has been taken down now and put in the rubbish pile.  I need to be more choosy about what to put in the shop window.

Christ's College, Cambridge

I've still not given up hope of being invited into Sky Landscape Artist Of The Year as a wildcard, so with that competition likely to be focused on drawing buildings (I've applied to be on a program based in Westerham where the house where Winston Churchill used to live seems like the most obvious subject matter) I thought I'd paint a building.

I'm back to my old hunting ground of Christ's College, Cambridge But  this time I'm drawing one of the more attractive parts of the college rather than the ugliest.

I wanted to do a painting using just three colours, just to see how these could liven up what's quite a monotone frontage apart from the main gate itself.  The three colours are  Prussian blue, Indian yellow and quinacridone magenta, so it's in my favourite key of of triadic left.  It's probably sounding like I can throw away all the other 13 colours in my palette but they will make a comeback at some point.  This triad was chosen because I wanted the most shiny of my two yellows (Indian) because of all the gold on the main date decorations and the cooler red (quinacridone magenta) because I wanted some purple in the sky.  And in my experimenters earlier this year, I found that Prussian blue makes a better threesome with these two than French ultramarine does.

Anyway, I took my time with this one, putting down a half decent drawing in rollerball and letting each coat of paint dry before starting on the next.  The drawing was generally good but is let down by   what's just inside the door, where the lines along the floor and top and bottom of the notice boards aren't pointing at the correct vanishing point.  The other negative is the people on the page net.  They definitely needed to be added - the painting looked empty without them.  But they’re not really right. Maybe the painting would benefit from a little cropping.

On the other hand, look at the positives.  The colours along the front wall, pavement and road have so much variety, energy and in them.  For the wall, I mixed up a neutral colour that was in the right ball park, painted a bit with that and then kept painting more bits but adding a bit of extra yellow, blue or red to the mix.  For the road and pavement, I painted them in. Extralegal colour first with not as much colour gradation, then charged in some extra colour in places.  If I do make it to Sky LAOTY as a wildcard then I need to remember to not try to mix up the colours I see in front of me but to mix them up like this.  Do something like this and I'll be in with a shout of being the winning wildcard.  There's no imposter syndrome left inside me.

 Viewed from a distance without my glasses on, this looks amazing.  This one went up for sale and was sold to a graduate of this fine educational institution.

Lancashire Sunset

Today's painting was inspired by a photo by a guy called Brandon Lee Keefe of a sunset from St Peter's Church in Hersham.  I say inspired rather than based on because I had to add some land on the horizon where my sea and sky kept blending together.

It's in my favourite key of triadic left, with the main three colours being Prussian blue, Indian yellow and quinacridone magenta.  At one point I tried some sepia for those shadowy grooves in the foreground but didn't like how it ended up, so washed most of it away.  There may be some residual sepia in there but apart from that, this is a three colour painting.

In many ways, the painting looks good but I know it could have been much better.  The sky was much brighter at one point but I went over it too many times.  The problem was that pair of  that strange marks in the top right corner.  I tried to disguise them as birds but the birds were too big and too distracting.  I tried to wash them out but with Prussian blue being a stainer, that didn't work, so I found myself having to redo lots of the sky darker than before.  And you can see how that's resulted in a hard edge in the bottom right of the sky.

The sea's also muddier than intended on the right of the painting.   I was a bit impatient today, starting on the foreground too soon and finding it bleeding into the sea.  I was too lazy to grab some kitchen roll so just brushed the bleeds into the sea, resulting in something looking a bit muddy.  I had the same problem with sea and sky but added some land on the horizon to cover up my problems.

Actually, while I remember, I was probably impatient because I was painting this sitting on the floor, getting some practice in just in case I make it onto Landscape Artist Of The Year as a wildcard.  It's not that comfortable.

And then there's the foreground.  It doesn't blaze with light as much as I wanted to and there's not as much red, yellow and blue showing within the neutral rocky colour as I wanted.  Those grooves also look weird in a "what the hell are they?" way but I was expecting that to be the case.  It's just a shame that there's not enough dazzling colour in the rest of the painting to distract from them.

Overall, if you'd not seen Brandon's photo and/or not known what I wanted this painting to look like, then I guess this is a passable painting.  It might look even better if it was cropped off on the right so that the sun is about one third of the way across the painting from left to right.  Anyway, when I look at it, I dream about what could have been.  This painting is in the private collection of a Scottish art collector.