Hartlip Church In Oil Pastel

More practice drawing with the oil pastels today.  As I've got landscape colours, I thought I'd better have a go at a landscape, this time using Scrooge The Profit's rule of three on all my colours rather than letting some just stand on their own.

And you know what?  I'm getting better at these.  I like those colours in the wall of the church - the oil pastels seem to positively encourage impressionistic colours, which is absolutely fine by me.  And those trees on the left and right!  I'd have struggled doing trees like this in watercolour but they're so simple to do in oil pastel!  The greenage along the bottom isn't as good though - maybe I should only use finger smears for people and man made structures and leave trees and hedges dabby.  The worst bit about this one, though, is the main church roof.  It needed a bit more colour variety and maybe could have been a bit darker to contrast less against the smaller roof.

So I like the impressionistic colours and decent trees that I get from pastels.  Another thing I'm liking is that I don't need to get a pencil drawing down first.  I can do a rough outline in pastel and then paint over it, correcting myself later if something's not right.  Just like people on Portrait Artist Of The Year.  I never used to be able to understand how they could just lay down an outline in paint at the beginning.  But I do understand now.

This one was auctioned off at a Hartlip Church tea and cake afternoon, fetching a good price and with all the proceeds donated to the church.  The first time one of my paintings has been auctioned.  Maybe next time I'll step outside while the auction is going on though, avoid the tension.

Painting Animals In Watercolour, Liz Chaderton - Book Review

Another birthday book.  This is a 112 page long paperback.  So slightly short on pages but also small in other ways, being only about 7 inches by 9.  It's hard to take a book that size 100% seriously.

But what lacks in size, it makes up for in content.  The information in this book is crammed in really tightly, with barely any room to breathe between tips.  It's like the notes I make on all these books - all fish and no batter.

My guess is that only about half of this book is actually related to painting animals, with there being a lot of stuff in there that's just about using watercolours.  That just-about-watercolours stuff is tightly packed in, as I say, but most of it is stuff that I already knew from other books.  On the other hand, there's the odd animal-related tip dropped into those bits of the book, so you can't just skim through it.

The half of the book that is actually about painting animals does have lots of really useful tips.  It's more about general things like eyes and legs than about specific animals (for which Liz points us towards the Tim Pond book that's on my wishlist) and I think that's what's needed.  Generalities rather than specifics.  There are demos in the book of paintings of a hare, stag, cat dog and ram.  These are the sorts of demo that I like.  All of them being genuine demonstrations rather than lists of instructions about how to copy the painting and all having only a small number of steps rather than detailing every brushstroke.

All the paintings in the book (including the demos) are inspirational.  Liz has a loose style, similar to that of Jean Haines but a lot less watery.

It's a solid three palettes from me.  This feels like a very good foundation to painting animals in watercolour but it's only a foundation and I was left wanting to know more about painting animals while feeling stuffed from making my way through such a lot of non-animal specific padding.  Remember three palettes is a decent score and means that the book was worth buying.

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Logical Right Eye

 And so straight on to the right eye.  The same techniques as I used for the left eye.  Whereas with watercolours and to a lesser extent inktense pencils, I like to restrict the  number of colours used, with oil pastels, I'm going to be throwing everything in.

During the painting of this one, one of my pastels snapped in half.  It felt like a rite of passage and that at that point I became a proper pasteller.  If feels like I've made a huge amount of progress today.

Being a self portrait, this isn't for sale.  But what should I do with these two eye paintings?  Maybe I could use the eyes in something similar to I Am The Eye In The Sky, taping them behind a sheet of glass and painting on the other side, leaving gaps for the eyes to look through.  Or could they be the first two elements of a set of paintings to be cut up and collaged together into a self portrait?

<Edit: it's May 2023 and this eye has indeed just been incorporated into Looking At You.>

Artistic Left Eye

It seems the best way to learn how to use oil pastels is to watch videos on YouTube.  Today I watched Scrooge The Profit describing the rule of three, which is that any area of colour in a pastel painting should have at least three colours mixed together.  This is the sort of thing that Fisher should have been telling us in his book rather than talking about melting pastels in frying pans.  And then I watched BlackBean CMS drawing a couple of eyes.  Two great videos that are well worth seeking out if you're a new pasteller.

After watching those videos I had to have a go at drawing my own eyes.  I started with my left eye.  As this eye is connected to the right side of the brain, this is my artistic eye, yes?

Anyway, I drew the eye down lightly and roughly in pastel, then added some darks in sap green.  After that, I just kept adding more colour on top of what was already there, thinking all the time about what colours needed adding where to improve the painting (something I learned from the BlackBean CMS video.

Once I was happy with all the pastel, I finished it off by scraping textural lines out with a scalpel (revealing colours that were underneath - wow!) and smearing things out with a finger in places, generally around the edges rather than in the eye, which I wanted to be focused.

And the end product is amazing.  It actually looks like an oil painting with textures, impressionistic colours and all.  Obviously there's lots of green there but that's because I have the landscape colour selection.

This isn't going up for sale - it's a self portrait and nobody wants one of my eyes staring at them from the wall.

Create Perfect Paintings, Nancy Reyner - Book Review

Now this is more like it.  This is a 144 page hardback that I've been after for a while and that I was very glad to see appear at the door over the weekend.

I already knew that this was about composition but Frank Webb's book on that subject is amazing and scored five palettes.  So what was it about this one that made me want it?  It's that it's organised differently, describing a method of critiquing my own paintings (or someone else's).  The critiquing methodology ("the viewing game") is described as a ten step process and a bit of structuring is never a bad thing.

Anyway, the book kicks off with about 30 pages of scene setting.  Nancy talks about how it's trying to establish terminology that will be used throughout the book but there are also lots of compositional principles in there.  It's a very good start to the book - this was all important stuff that the rest of the book feeds off.

Then we have about 20 pages on "the play phase".  I thought this might be about pre-painting exercises (the sort of thing Jean Haines likes writing about) but this is Nancy's term for actually doing the painting.  I found most of this section to be a bit unfocused, but there were some useful nuggets in there.

And then we get to the main course.  50 pages on a ten step process on how to critique a painting.  There are ten separate steps and within each step, Nancy lists common issues, gives examples of paintings that would pass or fail the tests and gives a list of questions to be asked.  This is outstanding.  All very specific and detailed.  It was worth getting the book just for this section.  For watercolour I might need to be doing some of this critiquing while I paint as problems will be difficult to correct but for oil pastels (and maybe markers and/or inktense pencils) I really can do this at the end of the play phase and then try to correct the work.

There are a couple of chapters after this with miscellaneous tips.  The high spot in there was four pages describing a really simple critique shortcut that can be followed mid-painting (as opposed to the full ten point plan that requires stopping painting, taking a deep breath and readjusting).  It's a simple four step process that seems really obvious, but if it's that obvious why isn’t everybody doing it already?  I think it's genius.  The rest of those final two chapters, though, didn't really teach me much.  Ten pages on how to mix (oil) colours was way over the top and a wee bit condescending.

Anyway, the final rating.  It's a great book, a fine complement to Webb's Dynamic Compisition.  It gets five stars from me on Amazon but I don't think it quite makes it into the galactico class, so I'm giving it four palettes, an excellent score.

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Beginner's Guide To Painting With Oil Pastels, Tim Fisher - Book Review

Here's the first of my post-birthday book reviews.  This was a (slightly thin) 96 page paperback.  The wife bought me it along with the Sennelier pastels and loads of non-arty stuff (that Stevie Ray Vaughan CD was amazing).  The people in the shop told her that decent books on pastels are hard to find and that YouTube might represent the best learning opportunity.  Still, I think it's best start with a book, so I'm glad she got me this.

All the value for me with this one was in the first 35 pages.  There was some interesting background on materials.  Sennelier are the softest and best pastels out there and were developed in response to a direct request from Picasso, which I found amazing.  We then talk about tools (and I've been straight out to buy a scalpel and some colour shapers) before going on to talk about the types of mark that can be made with pastels and a number of tricks and special effects that can be used.  These are all illustrated with some quite short demonstrations.  It was a bit odd that the first demo of drawing a red pepper came before the bits on mark making but I could cope with this.

But then we get onto the bad stuff.  The rest of the book is taken up with longer demonstrations.  There were so many things wrong here but I'm going to have a go at listing them:

- six demonstrations was too many

- the demonstrations were too long, with too many steps (the six of them took up 50 pages)

- the demonstrations were too prescriptive.  Not just too much "do this, do that", which you know I can't stand, but really prescriptive.  Step one isn't just to draw any old view of a harbour with houses.  It has to be exactly the same scene as in the demo because step 16 of 49 tells us to fill in all the houses in the middle row in white except for the fourth along which has to be luminous yellow.

- there are actually bits that are not prescriptive enough.  Rather than telling us to "fill in this area in light grey" he needs to tell us how to fill it in.  Colour it all in holding the pastel like a pencil?  Dab in spots? Gently slide the pastel sideways over the paper?  Tim seems to have forgotten this is a beginners' book.

- too many of the demonstrations were mixed media.  I don't want or need that in a beginners' book.

- for some of the demos we're supposed to dig out a plank of wood from somewhere and prime it.  Who wants to do that?  It's a beginners' book, I expect to just be able to do everything on paper.

- in one example, we're told to cut off slices of pastel, melt them on the hot surface of something that looks like an upturned iron, drip a paintbrush in it and spatter it over the paper.  Come on Tim.  Why are you talking about stuff like this in a beginners' book?  It belongs in the sort of pastel book that's the equivalent of an Ann Blockley watercolour book.

- there are no lessons for me in the demos.  I have so many questions.  Do we do background first then foreground?  If I put in the sky first, do I need to leave gaps for hills and buildings or can I paint over the sky?  Do I do light colours first then dark, or the other way round?  Do I work top to bottom or all over (judging from the demos, I need to constantly be jumping round the painting like I'm spinning plates)?  The answers to these questions just aren't there.  It's like having a really bad school teacher who does stuff on the blackboard and won't answer any questions.

So, honestly, I'm not impressed.  This was supposed to be a book for beginners but it doesn't answer the questions that I, as a beginner, need answers to.  I don't like those prescriptive demos but, looking through Amazon reviews, there are lots of people that do.  I don't think that even those people would like this book though.  It feels ungrateful as this was a birthday present three days ago but I'm only giving this book one palette.

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Oil Pastel Testing

I learned a lesson from my first time using watercolours, markers and inktense pencils.  And that lesson was not to attempt a masterpiece first time.  My first go with any sort of media always results in something pretty poor, so don't even try to make it good.  Just great it as an experiment, trying to find out how the new media works.  Just go in and see what happens.

First, though, yesterday's job was to buy some more gear.  I got some colour spreaders, which look like brushes but have rubber on the end and are great for pushing and blending the paint when I'm at too small a scale to be able to use my fingers.  And then I bought what I thought was a retractable scalpel but which turned out to have no blades.  The blades will be arriving in the post later today.  My pastel box had six spare slots which I've turned into three extra long slots to store two colour spreaders and the scalpel.  It was hard to find colour spreaders that were short enough to fit but I eventually found some at The Works.  Nothing beats the feeling of not being able to find something in specialist shops but the finding it at The Works at a ridiculously low price.

Anyway, my first experiment was a landscape scene in Hartlip.  I put the scene down first in pencil.  Didn't bother rubbing stuff out and correcting the drawing because I've learned my lesson.  I picked this scene because it would be a good workout for all the greens in the collection.  It was only when I was looking at the sky in this afterwards that I realised I needed to bite the bullet and start tearing paper off the pastels so that I can use then on their sides to paint big areas like the sky.  Scribbling then smearing doesn't really work.  It also became clear that for landscapes like this I need to work on bigger paper: this is six inches by nine, the size of an iPad.  Oil pastels don't have the sharp points I need to add detail on something this small.

Next up, I thought I'd try a portrait, even though the selection of colours I have was chosen for landscapes.  This just means that any portraits I draw will be colourful and impressionistic, probably with a definite hint of green.  I picked out a photo of Sam Allardyce that I've drawn before and that's fairly easy to get a likeness of.  It's not a great likeness today but that's because I was working quickly and not correcting errors.  I found that I enjoyed this one.  When it came to smoothing and mixing colours with my fingers, I was trying to follow Big Sam's facial creases in some places and trying to create 3D effects in others.  It's interesting that my initial pencil marks left grooves that show up on the final painting - that's both something to be aware of and avoid and something to take advantage of (by, for example, marking in grasses with a cocktail stick before painting).

Then I tried out some figure drawing, using a Kristina Marie pose that I drew not too long ago.  I was a bit inspired, to be honest, by some figure drawing by Bill Buchman that I'd seen on YouTube.  But I'll need much bigger pieces of paper to work on if I'm to copy what Bill did.  Anyway, with the pastels, I just did what I do with the inktense pencils, starting in the darker areas, moving into lighter ones, adding reds and blues in interesting places and then finishing it off and trying to turn it three dimensional, albeit with the finger rather than with water brushes.  I'm pretty sure at won't be doing more figure drawing with the pastels - figure drawing is way too much fun with inktense pencils.

So, interesting experiment.  The portrait and figure look better than the landscape but I suspect landscapes is where my pastels are heading once I've finished the pad I have.  I don't rule out the occasional portrait though, especially if I find any green looking subjects.  I'm looking forward to those scalpel blades arriving so I can try some scraping out techniques - these will be great for window frames.

None of these experiments are for sale, obviously.

Oil Pastels!

It's my birthday and the front page headline on stash news is that I’m going to be trying out oil pastels.  The wife bought me a set of 24 Sennelier oil pastels (quite possibly the best ones out there) and my oldest bought me this Schminke box to keep them in.  I mean, if you're going to use oil pastels, you need a wooden box to keep them in, don't you?

I've already had a go at splitting the colours into, what's the word, those on the outside of the colour wheel and earthy/neutral colours, so that I could organise them in the box and start swatching.  One tiny frustration with these pastels is that they only have numbers on them, not colour names.  Not only that, but the colour chart that came with the pastels (that I used to find the names of the colours) wasn't even in numerical order!  But I got there in the end.  Here are the swatches:

There's a nice split there between outer ring colours and earthies/neutrals.  The neutrals look like they'd be good for portrait drawing, although I've not decided yet what I'm going to be doing with these.  On the outer ring colours, there are a couple of garish greens (the cinnabars) that could only be used in realistic colour schemes for things like shop signs but that I could quite easily use in an abstract or a colourful impressionistic drawing.  Still, I might have swapped out a green for a blue if I were at Sennelier choosing how to put the set together.  I might even have looked for a way to add an extra red or an orange.  Still, great set and I do have six empty spots in that box.

In other news, I do have three new books so far (including one on pastels - smart move there) and maybe more on the way.  Rather than list them here, I'll just let them make their way through to book reviews.

Cliffside Tree, Queendown Warren

I've been meaning for a couple of weeks to head out and do some plein air painting.  After a thunderstorm yesterday, the weather felt cooler and cleaner today, so I thought I'd take the plunge.  I headed for Queendown Warren, a local nature reserve.  The Warren has an open side looking out over a valley and a shady side that's all forested.  After a long walk around the open side and back through the shady side looking for a view to paint, I ended up on the shady side quite close to the car.  There's a huge chalky cliff face in the middle of the woods and I found myself drawn to a tree that was on the edge of the cliff and growing out almost horizontally.

I started by drawing the cliff edge and tree in pencil, including loads of different branches making interesting shapes and winding around each other in places.  Then I soaked the paper and put in an underpainting.  The painting was French ultramarine at the top (sky), then green as some transparent yellow was mixed in, then yellow (transparent on the right but Indian on the left where I wanted some warmth), back to green again and then more neutral at the bottom with quinacridone magenta added to the mix.  I tried to make the upper ground above the cliff a bit more magenta than the green visible in front of the cliff.  I spattered in some burnt sienna and raw sienna, then marked in some vague fuzzy background branches with the two browns.  Some burnt sienna landed in the sky and actually looked quite good when I turned it into dark streaks.  So there were six colours in this one.  The key is probably purple cool, as transparent yellow ended up appearing far more than Indian.

When the underpainting had dried, it became clear that I'd made a mistake as my pencil sketch lines were almost invisible.  I'd just have to do the best I could with what I had.  Maybe next time I need to do the underpainting first then do the pencil sketch on top of it.

So, anyway, I painted in the branches using my main three primaries - French ultramarine, quinacridone magenta and transparent yellow.  I variegated the neutral colour, making some branches look more blue/red/green/orange then others.  I also put in more random smaller branches.  For the foreground, I veered towards red in the neutral colour but also tried to include some green.  I tried to flick up some grassy textures in places with a Terry Harrison brush.

Next, I added some foliage to the trees by dabbing on some dry French ultramarine and transparent yellow, again with a Terry Harrison brush, yellow on the upper side of clumps and blue on the lower side.  I also dabbed in some a Indian yellow in the top left where I wanted more warmth.  And I ran a wet brush through the dabs in an attempt to give them some branches to stick to.

When all this was done, I ended up with something that didn't hang together.  The foliage was too dark compared to the trees behind it.  I needed a sauce to bring the meal together.  So this was a job for a final glaze.  I thought about a yellowy green glaze but instead decided on a gradated glaze: blue at the top, then green, then yellow, then orange. So this is what I did.

With these rescue glazes, they can either turn rubbish into something acceptable or a different sort of rubbish.  It seems the perfect risk to me: you can win but you can't lose.  On this occasion I think the painting was still rubbish after the glaze.  Maybe it would have helped if I'd applied the glaze carefully - you can see where I've not "caught the bead" properly as I've worked my way down and ended up with some ugly horizontal stripes.  On the other hand, there's an interesting suggestion of fog at the bottom of the cliff and around the roots of the tree.

In the end, the glaze hasn't done enough to save this one, so it won't be going in the shop window.  Everything about this painting looks rushed.  Maybe it's because I chose a view that I could only see standing up but spent most of the painting sitting down.

A Desert Episode

In that last painting, Six Ways To Look At The Moon, I was so pleased with how the bottom left subpainting turned out that I thought I'd have a go at painting something similar but full sized.  So I marked out a border with masking tape, then tore off several random bits of tape and stuck them down.  There was something there looking like a palm tree, so I deliberately added the piece of tape that I guess you'd call the top half of the trunk.  I also added a couple of "islands" near the bottom - horizontal bits of tape with the straight side along the bottom.  Otherwise, all the tape is pretty random but with an eye towards composition.  Not too many close together but not evenly spread.  A couple of strips that are not quite parallel.  That sort of thing.

Then I spattered over a load of masking fluid.  I didn't want to just make the original subpainting bigger without adding anything extra.

The idea was to stop there and carry on tomorrow but I was on a roll.  So I wet the paper and randomly added French ultramarine, quinacridone magenta, Indian yellow and transparent yellow.  The paper had buckled a bit, so I tried to dab out the most liquid bits.  I found myself doing a few more unnecessary dabs for a bit of interest.  And then I let it dry, throwing on salt whenever any bits of the coed optimal salvage levels of dryness.  Of the what!  Damn that autocorrect!

And here's the final result.  The best bits about it are the interesting salt effects.  In particular there's some interesting granulation in the purple in the bottom left, with the red and blue separating in places.  Where I'm less than 100% happy, it's in where the colours haven't run together as much as I'd have liked.  Indian yellow in particular seems loathe to run into other colours and maybe needed some encouragement with the brush.  Mind you, the blue and red have no excuse for not running into the Indian yellow.  There's no right way to hang this one.  I think it looks better this way round (something to do with having so many horizontal shapes) even if that vertical shape looms nothing like a palm tree.  But is it any good?  I'm not convinced.  This one isn't going up for sale.

Needless to say, the name for this one is shared with an Algernon Blackwood short story.

Six Ways To Look At The Moon

I'm a bit short of ideas for watercolours at the moment.  Maybe I need to wander around the village again but only if I'm prepared to put in some effort and prepare value plans for all the resulting paintings.  Anyway, that's not for today.  Today is an abstract day.  I'm going to do a painting made up of six subpaintings and in those six, I'm going to show off lots of exciting colours and textures.  I've used lots of colours from my 24 half-pan palette.

I started by masking out the borders of the six paintings with masking tape.  It was all done very accurately, with enough white margin round the edge for a little bit to so how once framed and three equally sized columns.  Even the diagonal stripe goes from 1/3rd of the way down the left to 2/3rds of the way down the right.  Now let's go through the six in order.

First up was bottom left.  I randomly tore up and stuck down the masking tape that resulted in those white shapes.  I then thoroughly wet the paper and painted on French ultramarine, permanent alizarin crimson (or was it permanent rose?) and Winsor yellow.  Because the Winsor yellow wasn’t producing great greens and was lacking a bit of oomph, I went over it with transparent yellow in places.  I watched it dry, scattering on salt when I thought it was at the right state of dryness.  Finally, off came the tape.

Next it was the painting in bottom right.  I painted in some random stripes, a circle and three thin lines connecting the circle to the edges in masking fluid.  Then the bottom triangle was painted with sap green and olive green, the right triangle with Winsor violet and  the rest mainly in Winsor orange but with a bit of Winsor yellow in top left and permanent alizarin crimson (or, again, was it permanent rose?)  in the bottom right.  I dropped some of the neighbouring colour in places to keep things interesting and added a bit of salt.  I removed the masking fluid at the end.

Middle top was a variant in an old idea.  I spattered on masking fluid to start with (and removed it from any other subpaintings it had trespassed on to). Then I thoroughly wet the area and painted in some bi5s of Winsor yellow, French ultramarine and one of the reds (it's looking like Winsor red).  While it was still wet, I dabbed Winsor blue (green shade) into any white gaps, then dabbed Payne's grey on top of the Winsor blue and inside any coloured shapes that we’re looking too big and needing breaking up.  No salt on this one; once it was dry I just rubbed off the masking fluid.

The fourth subpainting was the one in the top left.  Because the one beneath it was already pretty colourful, I started with a neutral underpainting mixed from Winsor red, Prussian blue and transparent yellow.  I dropped in those same three colours in places looking for some interesting variegation, making it quite thick in places so that, as a final step, I could do some scraping with a credit card to make it look rocky.  I also scraped out some grassy looking things with a sharp corner that I'd cut into the card with a pair of scissors.

Next, top right.  I wanted to create a sunset with French ultramarine, permanent rose and Winsor yellow but the red and yellow, being transparent colours, kept running into each other.  So I dabbed it all dry,  then repeated the exercise but with (opaque) cadmiums for the red and yellow.  At the same time, I also darkened the sky at the top with Payne's grey.   This didn't work either - maybe the paper doesn't need to be Bridget Woods wet for sunsets.  Anyway, with the sky turning into a two-tome blue and orange, I reached for the distraction of special effects and taped some bubble wrap down on it.  After it was left to dry, I just needed to add some foreground, so I put in the violet triangle to link it to the subpainting below and added a hill, mainly in Winsor blue (green shade) but also with a little violet in it.  Finally, I added some birds using titanium white, almost straight from the tube.

And then the last subpainting was the bottom middle.  I was running out if ideas at this point, to be honest,  so I started by connecting it to neighbouring paintings.  The Payne’s grey and Winsor blue (green shade) triangle in the top left reproduces the colours above it and connects to the line representing one side of the mountain in the top right.  Then there were continuations of the masking fluid lines from the painting on the right and I started this subpainting by continuing the "roots of the tree", for want of a better term, from the subpainting on the left.  Then it felt right to add a Winsor yellow (trunk) going from middle top to bottom right.  After that, I just filled in all the gaps with Winsor yellow, Winsor orange, permanent rose, Winsor violet andFrench ultramarine.  As a finishing touch, I dabbed in some spots with Winsor blue (green shade) just when everything was at the state of dryness where the spots would go fuzzy but not spread too far.

And that's when I stopped and removed any remaining masking tape or fluid. What to make of it? Let's start top left and go clockwise.

- the rocky one is just about OK.  The grasses came out really well and are what makes this subpainting.

- the spacey one is great.  Because the biggest white spots are nearest the edge, it looks like it's exploding.

- the sunset over the hills is pretty good.  The contrast between blue and orange is good.  The birds definitely add something.  And the bubble wrap pattern just raises so many questions.

- bottom right is one of the weaker subpaintings.  It's like a starry background with no stars.  The colours don't vibrate enough and the Winsor orange seems to have had the life kicked out of it.

- bottom middle is just about OK.  It does the difficult job of bringing everything together but gets no credit for it, instead being repeatedly compared to other subpaintings and coming second most of the time.

- finally, there's bottom left.  When I drop down random primaries and leave them to get on with things while I take a lunch break, this is what I want to see when I get back.  All those greens, purples, oranges.  It's great.  And the masking tape has left some mysterious shapes.

As a whole, I think this one works.  As well as the odd line connecting subpaintings together, there are just enough colours that neighbouring shapes have in commons or them to look like a single team but also still as six individuals.  It was snapped up quickly by a Scottish collector.

The title of the painting is the trickiest part.  I couldn't find any Algernon Blackwood stories with six in the name, so googled around for anything starting "six ways to…" and found at least two pages talking about six ways to look at the moon.  That seemed to suit the painting. But if anyone asks me what one of the individual paintings has to do with the moon, I won't have a clue.  Whichever of the six they're pointing at.

JenB, Sitting

It's absolutely roasting outside.  I promise never again to claim it's too cold outside to paint.  But this weather!  Too hot, too sweaty and too fast drying.  But after two days off I need to do something, so it's out with the inktense pencils.  Today's model is JenB for the fourth time.  My paintings of Jen tend to come out OK but without ever catching the "real Jen".  Let's see how I get on today.

Rather than going minimalistic today, I fancied going all out on colour.  I even decided to avoid the dark neutrals (in which I include indigo) I thought I'd go colourful using some of my more successful colours: violet, fuchsia, iris blue, chilli red, mustard and leaf green.  There's almost a whole rainbow there.

I started by pencilling in some of the chair with violet and shading violet in the darkest shadows.  After that, I used fuchsia on the lighter shadows, then the red and blue on any remaining darker bits with red on the areas that looked warmest and blue on those that looked coolest.  Then I added the green in the places that looked most flesh toned (!) and mustard on the highlights.  And after that, I tinkered a lot, using some colours over the top of others in places.  This painting was more about having fun than trying to create a masterpiece.

And after wetting, what I have isn't a masterpiece.  It's definitely an explosion of colour but it's not a realistic looking figure.  There's something stiff and rectangular about it.  This one's not going up for sale.

Balanced Rock, Big Bend National Park, Texas

I was feeling a bit short of ideas so I googled for precarious rocks again and found this one in Texas. It looks a cracker with its interesting sky shape in the middle and I do enjoy putting a bit of colour into the rocks in this sort of scene.

For colours today, I went for French ultramarine, Winsor red and transparent yellow.  It's in the key of triadic right.  Triadic keys seem to work out really well for me, so I deliberately chose one of those.  Winsor red and transparent yellow were due for an outing - of my nine primaries it's now only Prussian blue that hasn't been used this week.  Also appearing are cadmium yellow (an opaque colour in the flora) and viridian (a little in the sky and a lot with the red in the blackest shadows).

After drawing in some rough outlines, I gave myself a head start on textures by spattering on some masking fluid.  After letting the fluid dry and before doing any painting, I wiped off any blobs that were too big or in the sky or too near the edge or too densely populated or in areas that I expected to be in shadow.  I still ended up with some in the shadow though.

As usual the first paint down was the sky.  I did a bit better today and I think it was because I waited for the paper to start bowing a bit but then settle down before applying any paint.  It could be argued that I put the paint on slightly too thick but I'm starting to think that's my style.  Anyway, the sky worked.  However the painting turned out, that sky would be a highlight.

Then it was the rocks.  As usual, I started with a neutral colour all over, with bits of the three primaries randomly dropped in where I thought they might work.  After that, a case of working over the underpainting and trying to bring out shapes and shadows.  There were lot of dark shadows using a mix of the red and green, lots of painting hard edges along the tops of rocks and bleeding the paint downwards and lots of dry on dry strokes with the brush held horizontally and skimming along, using the tooth of the paper to create texture.  There was a lot of fiddling about and (touch wood) it looks as if I'm getting better at knowing when to stop.

So anyway I stopped.  Looking at the painting the rocks were generally slightly green tinged but suffering from not looking unified.  It was as if each rock had been painted by a different artist and they’d all been stuck together.  Clearly this was a job for a unifying glaze.  I chose an orange glaze mixed from the red and yellow because orange is a warm colour, it might contrast better with the sky and it would tone down anything that was too green.  I sprinkled some salt on the glaze just for the bell of it and then decided to make things a bit more yellow on any edges facing the sun in the top right.

Finally I rubbed off all the masking fluid spots and added the flora using a Terry Harrison Merlin brush.  I dabbed on cadmium yellow and a bit of French ultramarine, then did a little bit of gentle dragging of the blue to create stems in places.

End result?  Yes, this is OK.  At one point all the foreground rocks were looking terrible but the hard edges that I added along their tops and encouraged to bleed down really worked.  The sky (including the trapped sky shape) is amazing as expected.  The rocks are full of interesting colours. The tall rock on the left has some good salt texture on it and doesn't look as phallic as I was expecting.  The flora is the weakest aspect but it definitely adds something - not just the colour but also the contrast between the delicate flowers growing in tiny cracks and the heavy, precarious looking rock.  Compositionally, when I turn my back on the painting,  take a few steps away and spin round to look at it cold, I can see some sine wave patterns working their way up from bottom left to top right.  I've not yet worked out whether this is a good thing.  Also, the rocks on the right look like a woman leaning back with her elbows on the back of a chair and staring upwards while the big rock rests on her right breast.  That's definitely a good thing.

Anyway, I count this one as a success and it's up for sale.

Kjeragbolten

Yesterday's paintings were bad.  To help me find some form, I thought I'd look for some precarious rocks. I managed to find Kjeragbolten, which is a rock wedged in a crevasse (technical term) in a mountain in Norway.  I understand it's a lot easier to get to than it looks and that it's a not to be missed photo opportunity for all tourists in the area,

The main three colours today were French ultramarine, quinacridone magenta and Indian yellow, one of my favourite combinations, in the key of purple warm.  The only other colour in there is viridian, brought in mainly for the water but also mixing with the magenta to something close to black, which was handy in the darkest shadows.

The three background shapes went down first.  First was the sky with the blue and a little green.  I suspect I'm not quite getting the Bridget Woods technique right as I keep finding myself blotting colour out with a kitchen towel.  Maybe I should just let it dry and see whether it ends up as dark as I was fearing.  Then there was the land using the three primaries and the sea using the blue and green.  Both were blotted dry, although the sea I rolled it dry rather than dabbing and ended up with something approaching waves.

Then it was the rocks.  I did the three shapes one at a time rather than risking paint drying too quickly.  In all three cases, I wet the area first, then added a neutral mix and then all three primaries were dabbed in to liven up the neutral colour.  After that, there was a lot of tinkering.  I think I started with shadows and cracks using a mix of the blue and magenta.  I used a lighter version of this mix for lighter shadows.  The shadows included a gull purple glaze all over the shape on the left, which I added textures to using the side and corner of a credit card.  I darkened the darkest shadows using the black that I mixed from green and magenta.  The shape on the right wasn't looking great, with the cracks that I'd painted on standing out too much against what was behind, so. I took a big risk and glazed it all over with a orange mixed form the yellow and magenta, then added some shadow colour and scraped at the shadow with a credit card.  This seemed to do the trick.  I think I fiddled some more with shadows at the end.  And I tried getting texture using salt at various times.  There was a lot of fiddling with those rocks.

At the end, I thought two finishing touches were required.  One was to put some greens and blues in the land shape, which had been looking too flat and monotone.  The other was go add a figure to give some idea of scale.  After a lot of practice on crap paper with Frank Clarke "carrot people", I decided to just have someone sitting down and looking away from us.

And I like this one.  It's not my best ever but I like it.  The middle rock looks firmly wedged in there thanks to the black occlusion shadows.  That middle rock is also definitely three dimensional.  I was expecting this to look muddy but there are some are interesting colours in there, especially the orange at the top of the shape on the right.  And, of course, paintings with lots of orange and purple in them do tend end to sing, not that this was planned today.  The worst thing about this one may just be the figure but the painting still wouldn't be as good without him.

This one's up for sale.

King Street, Cambridge

So here's today's second painting.  I'm prepared to put the first one down as a warmup but this one needs to be better.  It's another view of New Court, Christ's College but this time it's from the back.  To be fair to the College, the back of New Court has been redeveloped since my source photo was taken and now fits in properly with the rest of King Street rather than looking like a builders arse hanging of his jeans. This was how it looked in my day though.

The main three colours were rose dore, cerulean blue and raw sienna.  These three colours were used throughout the painting, which is therefore in the key of green warm.  French ultramarine, Indian yellow and Payne's grey will all be making appearances later.

Just like last time, it was a Bridget Woods sky first (again with French ultramarine rather than cerulean blue), then some Ian Fennelly buildings.  I tried to make the roofs on the left more colourful to contrast against New Court.  I also darkened their values for the same reason.  I mixed up various neutral tones form the three primaries and used these to add in details like shadows, doors, windows and a hanging sign.  I went over all these darks several times.  I also added some pure primaries in places in the shop windows for some colour.

I decided that the motor cyclists would be abstract silhouettes, so masked them out before painting in the toad and pavement.  After removing the masking fluid, I wanted bright colours in the silhouette, so wet it all first,  then added a few blobs of rose dore, French ultramarine and Indian yellow.  After this, I added Payne’s grey in the empty spaces and the water on the paper did all the work for me, although I tried to put yellow on highlights and faces and make the grey darker where I wanted to suggest arms and legs.

At his point, though, the silhouette was contrasting too much against the background, so I went over all the shadows with Payne's grey to bring everything together.  I even applied a thin glaze of Payne's grey over the shadows in the road.

Even then, the motorbike was looking a bit too static, so my last step was to do some spattering.  I used the colours in the silhouette: Indian yellow, French ultramarine, rose dore and Payne's grey.  I may have been a bit heavy with the spattering but I think the painting needed it.

It's not been a great day for me as I'm calling this one another flop.  There may be some perspective problems there: the line along the bottom of the roofs is diverging away from the New Court line that has the biggest shadows below it.  These two lines should all be converging as we move from left to right.  The silhouette doesn't work: the red, blue and grey have made no effort to blend together, so it looks all spotty like Mr Blobby.  And the spattering's definitely heavy, even if the painting would look worse without it.

Again, I'm going to put a cropped version on Facebook, Instagram and DeviantArt.  Lose a lot of unnecessary stuff on the right.

Domination

Back to painting today after a bit of a break for rain and football.  I've done two paintings today but it's been a while, so don't expect a masterpiece.

I've watched a couple of Ian Fennelly videos on YouTube recently and I like how he puts random colours all over inanimate objects like buildings and cars.  He also has a way of doing this where he uses a small flat brush to push the paint against the bristles into the corners of shapes.  I wanted to give both of these ideas a go (using an old brush for the paint pushing) so picked out a couple of photos of New Court from Christ's College, Cambridge.  It's an ugly looking concrete monstrosity and ideal material for these new techniques.

For this first one,I wanted to contrast the ugly building against the amazing gardens, so used two colour schemes.  The building is in cerulean blue, rose dore and raw sienna (the key of green warm).  But the gardens are in French ultramarine, transparent yellow and quinacridone magenta (the key of purple cool).

First up was the sky in French ultramarine with a bit of rose dore, using the techniques form the Bridget Woods book.  Ian Fennelly doesn't seem to do skies but I always do.

Then. I underpainted the building in Ian's style using the three primaries in that green warm triad and not worrying too much about which colours appeared where.  This was great fun.  Later on, I used those three primaries to mix a neutral that I used to add shadows on the building to start bringing out some shapes.

There's not much to report about the foreground.  For the trees, I tried something different.  I used one of my special Terry Harrison  rushes but rather than dib dabbing, which I usually do, I pushed the paint against the bristles, Ian Fennelly style.  This worked well, so I think I should have been doing this all along.  The neutral tone for the three figures was mixed using the three foreground primaries.  And the garden wall used a bit of both the building and garden colour schemes - this felt like the right thing to do.  There's some cadmium red and cadmium yellow in the flower beds as I needed a bit of colour there.

I also did something else that Ian does and drew in some outlines with a black rollerball.  Ian, to be fair, goes into a lot more detail with the outlines than I do.

And I spattered over some colour too: French ultramarine, cerulean blue, raw sienna and rose dore.

Final verdict?  Not good.  I like the building and how it dominates the scene and contrasts with the green trees in front of it.  The spattering helps bring the painting together and fits with the generally sketch feel.  The flowerbeds are very bad though - it's not just the flower beds themselves but also the shape of the edge of the lawn that's not right.  And while the croquet player bending over on the right is OK (the rollerball lines help) the other two are pretty bad and the brown colour on all of them is quite ugly.  So one for the reject pile.

The painting does look better after some cropping and I may well put the cropped version on Instagram/Facebook/DeviantArt:

Gregg Allman

There was no way I was going to stop at Cher, so I moved on to Gregg.  I wanted something that would contrast Cher's chiaroscuro against a coloured background, so I deliberately made Gregg colourful and put a black background behind him.  I also gave him a green shirt to contrast against the yellows and oranges in his hair.  This was all in the name of art - there are no secret messages there about their personalities.

And, you know what?  This has also come out OK.  The bits of hair sticking out of the top of his head don't look like hair but add some energy.  There's a likeness there too, but it's a strange combination of the youthful look in the source photo and the alcohol and drug addled middle aged Gregg that I've seen in some YouTube videos that he later recovered from.  Just look at the eyes - there's something not quite there.  I know I'm going to get comments on Facebook,though, telling me this looks like Shaggy from Scooby Doo.

Anyway, Gregg's up for sale.  I think this and the Cher drawing belong together.

Cher

Before I head back to watercolours tomorrow, I thought I really should give the marker pens a quick go.  So I googled for black and white celebrity portraits and found a good one of Cher and Gregg Allman.  Cher is a chiaroscuro artist's dream, so a no brainier as a choice of subject.  In this particular photo, her jet black hair was a great background to her pale looking facial profile.

So, yeah, most of this was done in blacks and neutral tones.  The great thing about having a black background is that you can do some very subtle corrections to the profile by going over bits of it in black.  That's why the nose came out so well.  I also like the eye.

To contrast with the black and white, and to make a Cher look even more like a member of the Adams Family, I put in a magenta background and I think it does everything I wanted it to.

This one looks good; it's up for sale.

Gabrielle

More inktense figure drawing as promised.  This is a new model for me: Gabrielle.

For colours today, I used bark, baked earth, leaf green, mustard.  Before wetting it, I thought it looked a bit too monotone, so I added some iris blue on some of the left facing edges, thinking it might add some interest and cool things down.

After the wetting, there were some weak areas.  The right shoulder wasn't right and there wasn't enough shadow in the genital area, so I corrected both of these.

And that's about it really.  This one is better than the last one and is up for sale.  The colours are interesting, there's a definite third dimension in the thighs but, best of all, the understated face has a nonchalance about it, staring out to the right, uninterested in anything else.  It's like an RBF.

Kristina Marie

It's been raining for a few days and there's a lot of wind predicted for tomorrow morning, so the gazebo's down and I'm not painting in the garden.  Instead, I'm back to figure drawing.  Only time to do the one today, and I suspect I was feeling a bit rushed, but tomorrow should be better.  And I know these drawings don't score highly in the polls but That's all the more reason to keep practising and trying to get better, isn't it?

Anyway, modelling today is Kristina Marie, making her debut.  I've zoomed in a bit on the source material so that I don't have to draw feet.  The idea was to not need to draw a head either but some poor layout planning meant the head ended up in there.

The colours today were violet, shiraz, chilli red and leaf green, normally a winning combination.  But I've been a bit heavy handed with the pencil marks on this one and ended up with far too much colour on the paper.  She looks like she's been bathing in the contents of my food bin.

Also the head came out badly and the abdomen ended up a bit too long compared to the rest of the body.  Even now, with some cropping at the top and bottom, the abdomen looks so long that it looks like the model's wearing a pencil skirt.  Maybe that's a good thing though.  Ambiguity.  You know what?  I'm putting this one up for sale.

The Insanity Of Jones

I'd got the last page of my watercolour block so thought I'd go all out on applying some texture to the painting surface without having to worry about anything happening to the pages underneath, not that there would be any danger of that happening.

So after yesterday's painting, I squirted loads of gesso onto my final page and spread it out.  I got a bit of texture onto it by pitty pattying it with a palette knife, scraping a few lines and putting five finger marks on it.  I then sprinkled on a diagonal line of salt, starting in the bottom right and splitting into two to head off the left and the top of the page.  I then left it to dry overnight.

I didn't start off with much of a plan today.  I just wanted to use as many colours as possible from my 24 WN halfpans and to make the painting abstract and include lots of clashing complementary colours.  Colour-wise I did end up using 23 of the colours in the set (a set in which I'd replaced the aureolin with transparent yellow).  Chinese white was the colour I didn’t use - what's the point of a transparent white?  This may be the first time I've used the raw umber - I wasn't particularly impressed with a colour that was too similar to raw sienna and yellow ochre.  I found lemon yellow to be pig ugly too and dabbed out most of it and painted it over.

The other part of the plan was to let the paper texture dictate as much as possible of what was to happen.  So I started by spotting a flat area in the top left, which I wanted to paint in indigo and Winsor orange - two great clashing complements.  Then I decided to paint the salt trails in permanent alizarin crimson, dropping in the odd yellow and blue for a bit of variation.

After that, it was all a blur.  I thought that with some greens, browns and blues to showcase, I should put the blues at the top and the greens and browns at the bottom, like in a landscape.  And I did add some colours to the browns to get what could be some interesting looking rocks if this were a landscape.  And this was the point at which the painting's subject moved into that blurry area between abstract and landscape.  It was still an abstract but I started thinking of certain bits of the painting as land, sky and the satellite.  And there's the blue area on the left that could be land or sky, and that diagonal red line that could be absolutely anything.

The sky was looking a bit too dark to be a landscape, so I found myself wetting it with a spray bottle and wiping paint off with kitchen roll.  Then I repainted and washed it a couple of more times and saw something weird starting to happen.  The raised bits of gesso in the pink bit of sky were now looking blue, as if the blue sky were trying to creep into the pink.  There were also raised blue lines in the clouds and some white looking lines in the blue sky.  It all looked so good that I added that same Winsor blue (green shade) in some places in the rocks and grass and to the raised salty bits in the red gash to have it invade other areas.

Finally, I went over the satellite again, leaving a hard edge down its left hand side.  And then I left it to dry while I searched for a good name on my crib list of Algernon Blackwood short stories.

And so I ended up with The Insanity Of Jones.  I have no idea what it's supposed to be but that's half the point.  And I don't know what the other half of the point is.  Complement-wise, there's the indigo and orange in the satellite and further down, there's the red vs green and red vs brown.  Not as many battles of complements as I was planning but, then again, I was planning on this painting having lots of separate stories to tell rather than one single story.  The best bits about this one are the textures in the sky and in the greens and browns.  And I keep looking at this and seeing new things.  I'm now wondering whether they're submarines floating around in the blue sky.  But it's not what I'd call a pleasure for the eyes, which is why it's not up for sale.

Clare Bridge, Cambridge

Back to the painting today after what's been quite a long break.  Today's subject is Clare Bridge from Clare College, Cambridge, a subject that's been on my to do list for a while.  Clare is my second college these days as I've got a son there doing engineering.

I did some serious value planning on this one, although most of the value plan was forgotten after I got started.  I did manage to reserve a few whites, though, generally on the left side of objects as the sun was coming from the left.  As I was expecting the shadows to be the star of the show, I painted this in my favourite shadow key of cool green, using only Prussian blue, transparent yellow and quinacridone magenta.  These three colours also make a decent black, which came in handy.  No other colours were used in this painting.

The sky went down first, using Brigit Woods' wet into wet technique.  Prussian blue isn't the best sky colour on its own, so I dropped in some of the magenta in places.  While the paper was still wet, I added the background trees using Brigit's dry into wet technique.

After that, it was a case of just painting on everything else.  If there's anything worth talking about, it's that I did a bit more glazing than normal.  There was a neutral grey/orange glaze over the pebbly bits down each side of the main walkway (after putting down some textured bits first).  Then there was a grey/green glaze over the pebbly bits, the walkway and the right hand wall - the left hand wall had been looking much more green than the rest of the bridge and was standing out a bit.  And after the tree branch was added, I glazed over some bits in that right hand wall with orange to introduce the branch to the rest of the party.

The shadows and the branch were the least things to be added.  The shadows started purple (as complementary to the greens as I was prepared to go) but I added a bit of yellow to them later for a bit of warmth.  I messed up not mixing enough paint for the shadows, so there may be some hard edges there in places.  I was originally in two minds about whether to include the branch but the painting was looking too green without it, so there was a job to do.

There's a lot to like about this one: the background foliage greens, the overhead branch and the way it complements the greens, all the colours down the left wall of the bridge, the looseness throughout the painting.  The left hand wall of the bridge is where the painting is most focussed, so the nearest ball on that wall is probably the focal point, but that right hand wall still fills a tiny bit too loose to me.  That might actually be a good thing, though, and it's only bad habits that are making me want everything to be in focus.  The worst bit may actually be the shadows on the bridge, which don't seem to have anything casting them.  On the other hand,  this is also how they look in my source photo.

Anyway, this one feels good enough to be put up for sale.