Castles Made Of Sand

This is my second attempt at a painting with a complementary colour scheme.  The two colours are Winsor orange and French ultramarine.  In Quiller speak, I was assuming these were a yellow-orange and a blue-violet but given the greenish tinge to the neutrals here, one of them must be slightly more yellow or blue than that respectively.  Anyway, I deliberately searched Google for photos of cliffside houses and found a photo in The Guardian by Graham Turner that I based the painting on.  It was of a house at Easton Bavents, which is in Suffolk, near Southwold.  Adnams country.

I actually planned my colours and values properly today.  The idea was to show off the pure orange in the roof, next to neutral colours in the house (not next to the pure blue).  I stuck pretty well to the plan, only deviating from it where I made the beach darker than expected.  In terms of colour proportions, I think the orange is dominating the blue enough to keep people happy.

After putting down a rough drawing and masking out some white window frames and some weird things hanging down from the eaves, I started on the sky.  I applied the techniques from the Bridget Woods book and they definitely worked today.  I sloped the sky shapes in the opposite direction to the cliff top for variety.  Where there were really bright orange streaks in the sky, I blotted these out with kitchen roll to make clouds.

Then it was on to the rest of the painting.  The house and trees need no further comment.  The cliffs and beach both started with random underpaintings before being glazed over two or three times.  On the cliffs, I used two neutrals in each section, first along the top with an orangey neutral and then along the bottom in a greeny blue one.  By the time I added the last glaze, some granulation was starting to appear, which was good.  Towards the left of the cliff, I put in some vertical strokes as the cliff was close enough to the viewer to see more detail.  I also added some blue at the end to try to create some shadows on the cliff side.

The beach was more difficult to paint.  Again, I used a number of glazes, trying to make the beach darker at the bottom of the cliffs and looking for the odd bright orangey streak in places but had trouble getting the texture right.  I tried painting in some rocks and doing some dry on dry Bridget Woods marks but was never really happy.  In the end, I got a bit of texture by throwing on some salt.

I thought for a while about adding a dog walker on the beach but decided not to for value reasons.  If there had been a big light valued cliff area, I would have painted a dark valued silhouette in front of it, but there wasn’t, so I didn't.

I rate this painting as a success and it's going up for sale.  These two colours look great together, like the Burton and Taylor of watercolour.  The colours in the cliffs are amazing and the sky looks like it's been painted by a professional from 200 years ago.  The unnatural straight lines and orange roof of the cliff are quite jarring against the nature all around and you're left with a feeling that the house doesn’t belong there.  Jimi Hendrix is still doing a great job of supplying painting names.