Saturday 27 February 2021

I See A Red Door And I Want It Painted Black


Where do I start with this one?  Well, I’ve been thinking of doing something like this all week, dividing the paper up and doing lots of little paintings.  Some of those little paintings were planned in advance, others just came to me on the day.

I make it 23 colours that were used in this one: French ultramarine, Winsor blue (green shade), cerulean blue, Prussian blue, Winsor violet, quinacridone magenta, permanent rose, permanent alizarin crimson, Winsor red, rose dore, Winsor orange, Indian yellow, Winsor yellow, transparent yellow, lemon yellow, sap green, olive green, green, raw sienna, burnt sienna, burnt umber, sepia and ivory black.  So this is definitely not in a particular colour key.

I start by dividing up the paper mathematically.  There are points on the top, left and right edges from which lines radiate that divide up those edges according to the golden ratio.  The points on the sides send out lines at 45, 90 and 135 degrees.  The point on the top edge sends out lines at 30, 60, 90, 120 and 150 degrees.  I also added a couple of circles centred on points where lines crossed to break up some of the bigger shapes.  Then, finally, I erased edges in a handful of places to make some of the shapes mor interesting.

I can't remember what was used where but there are a few little bits worthy of comment:

- the leopard spots were something I'd planned in advance.  The background was Indian yellow at the top and Winsor orange at the bottom.  The two were barely distinguishable, so I added some Winsor red at the bottom, which worked really well.  Those yellows and oranges need to take centre stage in another painting at some point.  The spots were added with sepia which, being opaque, doesn't spread out of control when used wet into wet.

- there's a space pic in the top right, using my well established methods.  The background was black with a bit of Prussian blue to make it not look too dead.

- there are three panels with the tops of trees.  This was a chance to use a technique I recently discovered on YouTube, where you spatter or spray on some drips of water, drop colour into the drips and join them together.  For this painting, I just dabbed on those water drips.  It's worked really well though.

- there's a nice panel with cerulean blue, permanent rose, Winsor violet and salt, taking inspiration from The Happiest Days Of Our lives from last year.

- the bottom left panel was a bit of a fail.  It started as an attempt to draw the back of an elephant, using the Hazel Soan techniques that I've talked about before.  It didn't work out on this occasion though - I think it works best with whole elephants rather than closeups.

- the two blue/green panels on the right were an attempt at a waterfall.  They've ended up as something else now.  And the two panels to the right of them attempt to channel that downward motion.

- the PacMan shape was deliberately chosen as flesh colour and the sector within it as lip colour.

- there are three pure black panels.  Two of them look like a woman's figure.  This seemed like the right thing to do after painting the PacMan head.  I was happy to have this black looking dead.

- the white arrow on the red background was the last panel to be added.  I wanted something man-made rather than natural.  Putting an arrow in there raises all sorts of questions in the viewer's head, which is a good thing.

There were three objectives in the choices of sub paintings:

- to distinguish the top from the bottom.  Grass at the bottom, sky at the top, etc.  Apart from the semicircular sunset which is a bit too low, bringing me on to the third objective...

- to create jarring contrasts, both in terms of colour clashes and in contrasting the natural world against the human world.

And what have I ended up with?  Something that looks great and that may or may not have hidden messages.  It feels like there's something there that's taking over the world.  Is it the human race?  Or is it women in black dresses?  Or women in leopard skin coats?  Or is the world being taken over by black?  And, if it is, what is black supposed to signify?  I wish I knew the answers to all this.

The title for this one is from Paint It Black by the Rolling Stones.   A song that mentions doors painted black, girls dresses on their summer clothes, looking into the setting sun, flowers, green seas turning a deeper blue, the sun blotted out from the sky,...  

This one was sold within an hour of going up on Facebook.  To someone who likes to paint his walls black!

Sunday 21 February 2021

The Old Man Of Tarsuinn

Today's subject is the Old Man of Tarsuinn, another rocky formation but this time closer to home on the Isle of Arran.

Looking through my swatch cards, I decided on Indian yellow, French ultramarine and Winsor red as my three primaries, so this is in the key of orange warm.  Not a key that would have immediately sprung to mind but I liked the look of the neutrals and the dull green.  It just proves the value of creating those 27 postcard swatches.  Raw sienna, burnt sienna and viridian all play support roles.

The sky was painted using French ultramarine, raw sienna, burnt sienna and viridian and came out looking amazing.  This is looking like being a great year for skies for me.  The days of painting dark clouds in Payne's grey are long gone. 

And then there's the rest of the painting.  There are five main shapes in there, painted with varying degrees of success:

- I nailed the distant mountain on the left first time.  Good value, good colour.  Job done.

- The bluey green hill to the right of it isn't bad.  It took a while for me to get the value right on this one, having to apply a couple of glazes over my first coat.

- The foreground hill on the left suffers both from being a boring shape and from being overworked.  It took me too many attempts to get this right and the resulting colours are starting to get muddy.  If I was still using the opaque cadmium yellow rather than Indian, that hill would have looked far worse.

- The foreground hill on the right suffers from similar problems.  It's supposed to be closer to the viewer than the one on the left (hence the darker value) but looks like it's at the same distance but with a similar value.  A bit jarring.

- And then there's the rocks.  I like how the neutral colour varies over the rocks, with all the different colours within it taking turns to step forward.  The shadows suffered for a long time from being too dark compared to the rocks but a finishing glaze of grey (made from French ultramarine and burnt sienna) seems to have darkened the lighter rocks enough for them to look consistent with the shadow while not losing their great colours.

The worst thing about this painting is a compositional error.  I should have left out the rock in the middle at the bottom.  Without this rock, it would have been more clear to the viewer that the hills in the bottom left was set further back from the the rocks and hill in the bottom right.  But the rock has ended up looking like a badly painted path separating two sides of the same hill.  When it comes to fitting this painting into an A4 aperture and losing an inch off height, I'll be losing as much as I can from the bottom.

Overall, though, I like this one.  It's up for sale.

Saturday 20 February 2021

The Hoodoo Watch

The weather was good enough today to spend a bit of time painting properly in the garden.  The subject matter is a set of hoodoos.  These are weird geological formations.  I don't know where the ones I based the painting on are but I strongly suspect they may be somewhere in Utah.

I wanted to project a bit of heat so had already decided to use my two warm reds; rose dore and Winsor red.  I wanted to use a warm yellow too, so was thinking of Indian yellow but was open to the idea of raw sienna for its earthiness  For the blue, I wasn't fussed but was tempted by cerulean blue for its granulation properties.  But after sifting through the postcard swatches I did back on 30 January, I decided to go with raw sienna as my yellow (even if it's a cool yellow) and French ultramarine as my blue.  These seemed to give the most appropriate neutral mixes for this subject matter.  So this painting is in the key of triadic right.

After the initial sketch, I painted in the sky.  There's quite a large sky expanse so keeping it simple wasn't an option.  I used raw sienna and burnt sienna in the clouds to get some interesting colours in there.  There's an interesting bit of colour low down on the right where the burnt sienna shows through unmixed.

And then we get to the desert and the rocks.  I was well disciplined today, working in glazes and not being impatient.  I started with an all over glaze of an orange made from rose dore and raw sienna.  When this was dry, I went for a coolish neutral mix over the far mountains,  and when this was dry I started on the hoodoos.  The right hand sides were a bright orange made from raw sienna and rose dore.  Then to the left of that was an orange with more Winsor red in it.  And on the left in the shadows were neutral mixes of three primaries, with lots of variation - the bits where the Winsor red shows through look great.

As for the desert and the shadows behind the hoodoos, I had a great time.  As well as my four primaries I used viridian in places in an attempt to get a dark shadowy colour.  Normally, with so much messing around, I'd have ended up with mud but these coloured really behaved well together.  Late on, I ended up glazing over everything except the sky and hoodoos with a watery neutral mix veering towards raw sienna, which helped bring everything together.

And I added cracks and extra shadows to the rocks with various different neutral mixes.  When I first set out, I was expecting cracks wet into wet using sepia (which doesn't spread out of control) but this turned out not to be necessary, with me being patient enough to let earlier coats dry.

And I do like the final result.  The colours might not match the raw material and the rock shapes may have changed a bit but who cares?  The bright orange on the sunny sides is exactly what I wanted and the way it complements the blue in the sky is something I'd not thought about but that works well.  The largest of the hoodoos has ended up looking like the sort of alien that kept invading Earth in films and comics of the 1950s but here all it's doing is standing there, watching.  What's it watching?  Who knows?  Or is it just a crazy rock formation?  This painting raises questions and that's why I like it.  It's up for sale.

Sunday 14 February 2021

A Six Colour Palette and the Mind The Gap Approach to Colour Theory

Yesterday's painting got quite messy and I found that, when I removed the painting from my watercolour block, some of the paint or ink had leaked through onto the sheet below it.  I didn't want to  waste the paper so thought I'd spend a pleasant Sunday afternoon doing some relaxing swatching that I'd been thinking about for a while.

This swatching focuses on a six colour palette and the secondary colours I can create from it.  I had three objectives in this exercise:

- to demonstrate the merits of a minimal palette

- to explore whether this particular set of six works well together (in particular the choice of burnt sienna as the warm red)

- to introduce my simplistic "mind the gap" approach to colour theory.

So first up, let's talk about the six colours.  Five of them were always going to be gimmes:

- French ultramarine as the warm blue

- Prussian blue as the cool blue

- Indian yellow as the warm yellow

- Transparent yellow as the cool yellow

- Quinacridone magenta as the cool red

The sixth colour is the most contentious.  Single pigment, warm, transparent reds just don't seem to exist.  I have rose dore and Winsor red in my palette but neither are perfect.  So, instead, I've picked burnt sienna as the wildcard.  It's warm and transparent, has reddish tones and adds some much needed earthiness to the palette that would be missing if I picked one of those other two warm reds.

And that's going to be the last time I use the words warm or cool in this post.  On one condition.  And that's that the six colours are arranged in a ring (or rectangle, whatever) on the palette in the particular order above.  All the warm/cool considerations have been taken care of by putting the colours in the right order.

And now, here comes the mind the gap colour theory.  We all know that (at least in theory) red and yellow make orange, blue and yellow make green and blue make purple.  But with two of each primary to choose from, that gives four possible combinations for each secondary colour, right?  So how should I choose between them?  This is where the mind the gap colour theory comes in:

- the brightest, most vibrant secondaries rend to be produced by adjacent primaries

- primaries with two other primaries between then will produce pretty dull looking secondaries, maybe even neutrals

- primaries with one primary between them are somewhere in between.  They won’t produce the zingy secondaries that adjacent primaries do, but they can produce more interesting, muted secondaries.  Or even interesting neutrals.  They can be a bit unpredictable actually.

I quite like those secondaries in the third bullet, which is why I like paintings painted in what I call the triadic colour keys.  These are sets of three primaries where no two are adjacent - take a look at the photo at the top of this article and you should be able to identify two such sets.

Anyway, let's go on to specifics, starting with the greens.

This already presents great evidence for the mind the gap theory.  The adjacent combination at the top is bright, maybe too bright.  The two apart combination at the bottom is a neutral looking colour, barely green.  And the two one apart combinations seem to tread a more interesting middle ground.  It's worth mentioning that dropping a little of one of the reds into any of these greens can mute down the zinginess to something more respectable (I'm thinking of that adjacent combination in particular).

For purples, the adjacent combination is the zingiest and the two apart combination a neutral with no traces of purple (albeit a very interesting looking neutral).  The one apart combinations are very different to each other though.  On the left we have a sensible muted purple but on the right we have a neutral.  This neutral is one to commit to memory, a combination of French ultramarine and burnt sienna.  One that would be in every watercolour artist's top three mixtures.  Anyway, as well as providing backup to the mind the gap theory (I did say that single gap combinations could be unpredictable), there's an important lesson here that burnt sienna doesn't make purples.
And finally, here are the oranges.  All much of a muchness apart from that one on the left.  The one at the bottom does look quite neutral.  It's really those two burnt sienna combinations that don't produce oranges as vibrant as I'd like.  Maybe if I'd chosen a warm primary red rather than a warm earthy red, this chart and the purple chart would have illustrated my mind the gap theory better.

I'll stop there.  I hope this has demonstrated what is achieveable with only six colours and the working of the mind the gap approach to colour theory.

I think if I was stuck with only these six colours, my paintings  would generally use four colours: both reds and one each of the blues and yellows (with the choices of blue and yellow depending on what I was painting).  A four colour combination like that would cover most bases.  Its weakness is its lack of a pillar box red colour or mix, so I'd probably add...  no.  I'll stop there.  This is how palettes should evolve, starting with a core of favourites and expanding to cover any weaknesses.

Saturday 13 February 2021

Life On Venus


I needed to do some painting this week.  I enjoy doing portraits with markers and figure drawing with inktense pencils but painting is my bread and butter and I don't want to go too long without posting some paintings up on this blog.

So today was a painting day.  I wanted to paint outside too, so needed a plan that wouldn't take too long (it's cold out there) and didn't involve having to clear too much snow off the decking furniture.  So a conventional painting was out of the question.  Instead I thought I'd try out an idea by Sri Valle that I'd seen on YouTube.  What she did was to start by making the paper very wet, squeezing out some random colours direct from the tube onto the paper and smearing it all out in a bandy sort of way with a palette knife.  She then dropped on what might have been liquid watercolour and tipped the paper around and added the odd watermark.  It looked good.

So I got the paper wet and squeezed on four colours: quinacridone magenta, cerulean blue, Indian yelllow and viridian.  So this was in the key of triadic left.  I wanted cerulean blue for granulation and quinacridone magenta because I wanted some purple in the sky.  Of my selection of yellows, the Indian seemed to fit in better with that blue and red.  And I smeared it all out with a palette knife.  Things didn't seem to go as well as they did on the YouTube video, probably because it was so cold outside, but it wasn’t a complete disaster.  I also chucked on some salt and snow just for the hell of it.  There's a circle in the sky in the middle, just above the horizon: this wasn't deliberate - it was just a bubble that has somehow appeared in the paint.

After leaving the watercolours to dry, I added the foreground using acrylic inks and granulation medium.  I used all my usual ink colours and kept adding more ink until I reached something I was happy with.  I got some decent horizon hills quite quickly, so most of this reworking was  below that hill line.  Like the watercolours, the inks weren't at their best in such low temperatures but you live and learn.  At times, I would do some scraping of the inks using the palette knife - I didn't use any brushes in creating this painting.

I've decided this looks like Venusian landscape.  Hot, volcanic and with a lot of orange in the sky.  The name of the painting is the name of a song by The Tornados.  I've no idea who they are/were.  The painting also has this weird thing where it looks like a landscape from a distance but not closer up, where it seems to fall to pieces.

I'm not sure why I originally put this one up for sale.  It's not very good.  One for the bin really.

Tuesday 9 February 2021

Best Of The Wildcards

I wanted to push that Spider-Man drawing down the list and it's still another five days to the weekend, so I thought I'd do something different and highlight my favourite two paintings by other wildcards from my day at Landscape Artist of the year.


First, though, here's what the judges picked as their winning wildcard entry.  It was by Louise Gillard.  There's lots of moaning on Facebook about the judges on LAOTY and how they like to pick out paintings with unique takes on scenes rather than straightforward paintings that try to reproduce what's in front of the artist.  Those people must have been looking the other way when the wildcard winner was announced because this is the sort of painting that they seem to be clamouring for.  Obviously it's a good painting but I have more eclectic tastes.  Let's look at my two favourites.

This is Anna Gannon and her drawing was made using only colour pencils.  Look at those colours, those gradations and the shapes of the bits of overhanging tree!  An amazing piece of work!  Anna did this sitting on a picnic blanket not far away from me working at a camping table - we were the only two wildcards on the day without easels.


But this was my favourite on the day.  It's by Faye Bridgwater, a professional artist (yes - I was up against professionals!).  It's 140 separate little vignettes of scenes around Chartwell.  An absolutely bonkers and unique idea.  I had a chat with Faye on one of my walkabouts and she was staring at those 150 squares trying to spot any that she'd not drawn in.  I think I found three or four.  I think Faye's eyesight was trashed by then after staring at this work for four hours.

These works are inspiring and make me want more than ever to compete again and come up with a better piece of artwork last year.

Saturday 6 February 2021

Tom Holland

Before I talk about this one, a big hello to anyone that's here for the first time after seeing my brief appearance on Landscape Artist Of The Year.  I'm guessing this portrait will leave you disapointed.  The thing is, Intend ti do my watercolour painting outside (because I'm messy) and while it's cold and I'm stuck indoors, I keep busy with figure drawing using inktense pencils (which I seem to be OK at most of the time) and portrait drawing using markers (where I struggle with likenesses but occasionally get interesting interpretations with personality).  If you want to see my watercolours or landscapes, click on the appropriate label at the top of the screen.  If you want to see what I have up for sale, there are links down the right of the page if you’re using a PC or tablet.

Anyway, back to the drawing.  Continuing the Avengers collection, this is Tom Holland who plays Spider-Man.  Rather than putting Spider-Man colours into the skintones, I went for a Steve Ditko style split head with radiating spider-sense lines.  One of the benefits of this approach was that I could start by drawing a whole Tom Holland head, then choose the worst looking half to draw the Spider-Man mask over.

This still isn't great and may not make it into the final collection.  The right of the head is the right shape but the eyepiece should be wrapped around the heads and starting to disappear at the edge.  A bad mistake.

This is another of those that isn't worth putting in the shop window as an individual work but that could end up as part of an Avengers collection.  If I do go down the Avengers route, I need to think about who else should be in the collection.  I'd be going for a set of eight, so there are three vacancies in the team.  There's no Captain America, or Thor in there yet but Doctor Strange, Hawkeye and the old (Michael Douglas as Hank Pym) Ant Man could all be interesting.  There are going to be some disappointed superheroes out there.

Elizabeth Olsen


I'm back onto putting my Avengers team together.  Next up is Elizabeth Olsen as the Scarlet Witch.  The Avengers aren't the Avengers without a female member.

Just like with everyone else in the team so far, there are character-related colours in the skintones.  Today it's red and pink.  The red robes along the top of the forehead and down the sides and some of the red marks on the wall at the back and in the hair are meant to hint at the headgear that the Scarlet Witch used to wear (and probably continues to wear) in the comics.  I'm still not sure whether it's too subtle or not subtle enough.

It's one of the better likenesses in the Avengers collection so far (not that that's saying much) and fits in with the rest of the collection.  I should have quit earlier though - at one point the shape of the head was much better and there was a genuine likeness there.  For now, though, she's not for sale.

Wednesday 3 February 2021

Landscape Artist Of The Year


 The program's over.  Nice that I got a big soundbite talking about how I was going to be painting on a map.  It's a shame that they only announced a wildcard winner after coming up with a shortlist in all the previous episodes.  But when TSS started talking first about shadows and mood and then later about painting a view towards this door in the wall, it was as if he was talking about me.

There are two longer posts talking about my day at Chartwell.  Even though I've only just released these posts, they appear way down the blog on July 30th 2020, the day I wrote them.

Monday 1 February 2021

Landscape Artist Of The Year

I'll be in this week's Landscape Artist Of The Year as a wildcard.  Sky Arts is free to view and is available via both Freeview and Freesat.  I don't know how much people will see of me though.  Just putting this out there.

<Edit: I did get some screen time.  It's series 6 episode 4 and, at times of writing, can be viewed at https://www.sky.com/watch/title/series/35cf63bb-7b11-4af7-830c-35b6ccfbedd7/landscape-artist-of-the-year-2016/episodes/season-6/episode-4 >