The H1 2022 Poll

I'm needing some help again please guys.  It's been a busy year so far and I could do with finding out which of my works are most popular.  I'd normally wait until the end of June to do one of these polls but I already have 50 works on the voting list so thought I'd better create a poll now rather than waiting.

Voting should only take a couple of minutes.  If you click on this link, you'll see 50 works.  All you need to do is highlight all the ones you like and then click on Send at the bottom of the screen.

All responders are appreciated, and I'll put the results up here when votes have dried up.

Thurnham Castle

Today I've been on a day trip to paint Thurnham Castle.  It's a little bit to the North of Maidstone and is just a pair of hills, one of which has some ruins on top of it.  It's actually a quiet place with very few visitors: I saw three people in three hours.

After having a good walk around, I picked this view.  If I'd known how I was going to be plagued by ants and midges I might have chosen somewhere else.  It wasn't a great day generally with me also slipping up somewhere and putting my hand out on front of me to save myself and finding it in a huge patch of nettles.  It was also threatening to rain all afternoon, so I had to be ready at all times to run for cover under the trees.

For the main three colours today, I picked French ultramarine, Winsor red and Indian yellow.  I needed to force myself to give the cerulean blue, rose dore and transparent yellow a break.  So this is in the key of orange warm.  Not much thought was put into this apart from wanting to have a granulating blue in the squad.  Green apatite genuine, cadmium red, cadmium yellow and titanium white all make appearances, as is pretty normal at the moment, and there are brief appearances for Mayan blue and hematite violet genuine.  And burnt sienna gets an extended outing.

After drawing some rough shapes and spattering over some masking fluid, generally avoiding the sky, I started painting.  The sky is always the first thing to be painted and my choice of three colours suggested a sunset.  From top to bottom there are bands of my blue, red, yellow and red.  The first band of red is there to keep the blue and yellow separate so that no greens appear in the sky.  I dabbed out a few clouds with kitchen roll.

Then the ruins.  These took a while to get right.  I started with a fairly random wash of my yellow, blue and red, generally veering towards yellow where I wanted highlights and blue where I wanted shadows.  I also dropped in some salt for texture.  That was enough colour for the ruins: all subsequent layers were about toning down the colour.  The second wash was mainly that grey that you get from French ultramarine and burnt sienna but variegated slightly in places by introducing the the yellow or red to the mix or increasing the amount of blue.  Again I threw on some salt.  I dabbed in the odd bit of titanium white here and there to indicate the lighter flint stones in the wall but this didn’t really work, so I softened them and dabbed them out where possible.  The wall was still looking wrong and I was beginning to think this would be another failed painting.

For the third wash, I thought about using hematite violet genuine to neutralise the colour even more and to add some texture but thought this might make the walls look dirty.  So my mind turned to mixing another colour with the hematite violet to make the other colour granulate.  Looking at the wall and my painting, I thought my painting wasn't white enough, so went against all my principles on the use of white and mixed it with the hematite violet to get a grey that may have had a bit of granulation potential.  I'd almost written the painting off at this point, so was ready to press the nuclear button.  When I painted on this grey, it became clear that it was too opaque to be of use, hiding all those primaries that I'd worked so hard to put underneath.  But I found that if I painted the shapes one at a time, then dabbed the opaque grey with a kitchen towel, I got something presentable.  This was a huge shock!

As a final step in the ruins, I mixed my three primaries into something close to a black and added some big shadows, some dark stones and some shadows under stones.

While waiting for individual washes on the ruins to dry, I worked on the foliage.  Behind the walls I stabbed in leafy tree shapes with green apatite genuine, highlights with cadmium yellow and a get barely visible cadmium red bits.  I've been doing this a lot lately but it works so well.

For the foreground foliage, I started with a very loose underpainting of French ultramarime, Mayan blue, and Indian yellow.  Later I covered this by flicking up some grasses using the Terry Harrison Merlin brush (again being used a lot at the moment) and either green apatite genuine, French ultramarine or Indian yellow as the mood took me.  I added a bit of foliage on the ruins.  And then dabbed in bits of cadmium yellow, cadmium red and titanium white where I thought they would improve the painting.  This gives a very different effect to just spattering those co.ours at the end.

The last thing I did, after I'd cleared all the bugs out of my bags and almost packed everything away, was to rub off the masking fluid.  Job done.

And this one is a big success.  The ruins aren’t the same colour as those in reality but I don't care.  The red at the bottom of the sky is a bit dark and could be a distant hill but I don't care.  In reality there aren’t trees behind the ruins when viewed from this angle but I don't care.  Some of the white spots under the masking fluid are a bit big but I don't care.  I'm proud of this one.  The colours in the walls are great and everything fits together, despite the green apatite genuine only being in the greenery and not in the walls - I think it may be the French ultramarine and the Indian yellow in the underpainting and in the upward grassy flicks that are responsible for this.

This one is up for sale.

Dreamland Margate

I've been looking forward to this for ages.  A day trip down to Margate to paint Dreamland, Margate's funfair.  With the fair still being closed for the winter, I couldn’t get in, so the best view was from the top floor of a multi-storey car park.  But I shouldn't complain because it was a wet and windy day, and I was able to set myself up and paint inside the car.

I picked a decent landscape view and put down a pencil drawing.  Then I drew in the Ferris wheel and that tower with a D on top using masking fluid.  For the thicker shapes, I painted on the mask with an old brush; for the thinner lines I used a mapping pen.  This variation in thickness looked good.

Their was colour planning.  My plan was to follow the methodology that I used for Rochester Castle with a warm green triad of rose dore, cerulean blue and transparent yellow used for most of the painting (including lots of low lying fog) and then to stab in some sharply focused foreground foliage with green apatite genuine, cadmium yellow highlights and the odd bit of cadmium red.  I started out following the plan, with a sky made up of cerulean blue and rose dore.  I forgot to bring any kitchen roll but the paint I mixed was watery enough to give a low enough value.  The blue was granulating really well too.

But the pen I started diverging from the plan.  The next shapes to be added were the distant buildings and the two colourful stands in the bottom right.  For the distant buildings, I reached for the Prussian blue because of its staining properties, making it hold it shape if I wanted to wash some fog in front of it.  For the stands, I used the cerulean blue, Prussian blue, transparent yellow and rose dore.  I also used a bit of quinacrinone magenta in an attempt to match the real life colours.  I then had to add some of the magenta to my distant buildings to balance the painting.  I think I also put in a bit of Winsor red in places too.

Next was the fog but first I removed all the masking fluid,  Then I went to to town with the cerulean blue, rose dore, Winsor red and transparent yellow to crate the fog.  The yellow added a nice glow to suggest there was something going on down there.

The I added some colour to the Ferris wheel.  For the seats, I used some randomly mixed paint from my palette rather than trying to exactly replicate the colours in front of me.  For the wheel itself, I 

I liked the colours at the bottom behind the fog.  Higher up, and for the tower, I added some blues and violets because white is never enough.

Then I stabbed in the foreground greenery using quite dry paint.  First the green apatite went down, then some cadmium yellow highlights at the top of leafy shapes, then some cadmium red spots.  This worked well again, maybe even better than for Rochester Castle as I remembered to leave empty spaces showing the fog behind the trees.  I also stabbed in (rather than spattered) the cadmiums in other places and added the odd bit of yellow to the buildings to look like indoor lights.

I still felt something was missing, so added in some outlines using a black rollerball pen.  I think this worked.  Not a huge improvement but maybe a slight one.

And then I went wrong.  I thought that three birds in the top left corner would round things off.  I tried to paint them in three different colours: cadmium red, cadmium yellow and French ultramarine.  I should have practiced first on scrap paper as I wasn't happy with the shapes, especially the red one.  I tried correcting the red bird several times, the bird getting bigger each time, eventually conceding defeat.

With the painting being a write off, there was no harm in tinkering.  So in an attempt to blot out the birds, I mixed their three colours together and used this mixture to paint over the the sky a couple of times.  With two of the three colours being opaque, this not only meant that bits of the Ferris wheel would be obscured, it also meant that the sky colour would be quite muddy.

So here it is, the final result.  Bits of it are good but some of them are most definitely not.  In particular, the remains of the red bird are still visible in the top right and the two fair stands are too distracting.  The fair stands should either be less focussed or more neutrally coloured, maybe both.  On the other hand, this one was really popular in a poll, so I've put it up for sale.

Shaun Williamson

I've been planning to go on a trip to the seaside for four days now and for four days I've been put off by either the weather or M2 closures.  On the first day I went to Rochester Castle instead but then stayed at home reading books for two days.  Rather than do that for three days in a row, I thought I'd better exercise some artistic muscles.  Today I dug out the marker pens.

As a subject I picked out the great Shaun Williamson, the local guy who played Barry Evans in Eastenders.  Shaun popped up on the telly a few weeks ago and I immediately identified him as at portrait subject.  The contrast between the light features and black hair would make for a great chiaroscuro portrait and the big forehead would offer opportunities for some crazy colours.  So I added Shaun to my to do list.

I have a little bit of history with the big man.  Shaun played the villain in a pantomime in Chatham a good few years ago.  He did a great job too.  Very early in the play when he introduced himself as the villain, he told the audience that the thing he hates most of all is being called Barry.  So every time he comes on stage, everyone is shouting Barry.  Now, there was another scene quite early in the panto, not including Shaun, of some pantomime dame doing the laundry.  It descends into a pants fight with the actor throwing loads of pairs of pants at the audience and the audience throwing them back.  A pair of pants came my way but rather than throwing them back, I saved them for later.  So when, about halfway through the panto, Shaun have a big monologue, finishing with an evil villainous laugh, I threw the pants at him.  Better than booing and Shaun saw the funny side, saying now he knew how Tom Jones feels.

So, what with Shaun being such a good guy, I really wanted this one to work out but it didn't.  The likeness and, even worse, the character just aren’t there.  I still don't know what I've done wrong.  I've compared my source photo to the drawing and nothing jumps out as being different.  Very weird.

I started off with various shades of grey, then added some colour with ink, purple and blue.  Then I tinkered about, switching between greys, fleshy colours and my pink/violet/blue trio for a while.  The purple short and black jacket and give weren't always that colour: they're just a case of me cutting my losses and going for simplicity.  The bright background was added at the end to contrast with the dark tones that Shaun ended up with.

 Not a success, this one, and it's not going in the shop window.  I'm a bit gutted.

Rochester Castle

So, after the flop that was The Wall Of Rochester Castle, I slumped off towards Rochester High Street for coffee at The Dead Cat (*recommended) hoping to spot some good paintable views on the way.  I was surprised to find that the grounds of the castle were open to the general public, so decided that was where I was going to back to do my second painting of the day.

So I came back and found a spot with a good angle of the castle to draw and where there was a tree a few yards away offering some shade for later.  I came up with a plan for the painting (including the value plan) before starting.  The castle was going to be in the middle of the painting and full of colour. There would be a darker valued tree in the bottom right, a lighter valued sky at the top and lighter valued fog in the bottom left, in front of the castle but behind the tree.  The rationale behind the fog was that I didn't want to include modern things at the bottom like lawns and road and some steps behind a metal fence.

For my main three colours, I picked cerulean blue, rose dore and transparent yellow, so this was again in the key of green warm but with a much brighter yellow for some sunlight.  Viridian was earmarked to be mixed with rose dore to create a dark neutral colour for windows.  And the plan was always to use green apatite genuine for the foreground greenery.  As this greenery was in a different plane to the castle, I was happy that it didn't upset the harmony of what was almost a three-colour painting behind it.

I started with a pencil sketch, then put on some masking fluid to reserve whites for the flagpole and ropes and to negatively paint the metal barrier at the top. Once this was dry, I added a greyish sky made up of cerulean blue and rose dore.  Anything else would have looked wrong with all the rolling fog in the foreground.  I even dabbed at it all with a kitchen towel to make sure it would end up with a lower value than the castle.

Next, I started on the castle.  I started by applying the three primaries separately, starting with big vertical sweeps for all the different shapes, generally using the yellow for the left facing surfaces.  I charged different primaries into this to create some variation and interest.  And at the bottom of the castle, I softened the edge and put in a foggy shape, mainly using the blue and red so that it matched the sky.

For the second coat of the castle, I mixed together all three primaries and glazed this over the top, changing the colour mix slightly for each different shape.  Again, I softened the bottom edge to keep the foggy shape.

Then, for the tree shape, I started by dabbing in some dry green apatite genuine using one of those Terry Harrison foliage brushes.  In some places I messed up by having the paint too wet but that wasn’t a problem - I could leave it to dry before stabbing dry paint on top and getting something more interesting.  To get some brighter bits on top of the leafy shapes, I tried stabbing on transparent yellow but it’s transparency didn't allow any hard edged yellows so I stabbed on some (opaque) cadmium yellow which seemed to work better.  I wanted to calm the greens down a bit with some red but didn’t want to mix in the red and lose the hard edged textures, so instead stabbed in some cadmium red dots which, again, seemed to work.

Then I mixed up a dark colour from some quite dry rose dore and viridian green and used this to paint the sideways facing edges of battlements (creating some 3D effects) and some impressions of windows.  At this point, the painting finally started looking like a castle.  I also rubbed off the masking fluid and used t( edge of a flat brush and my dark mixture to put in the flagpole and ropes.

The final painting looked slightly unbalanced.  In reality there was only a tree in the right obscuring part of the castle but I put a tree shape in the bottom left and a fogged out green shape in the middle bottom to bring everything together.  I don't expect anyone to complain.

One of the best things about this afternoon was the interest that the painting generated.  Lots of people dropped by to chat and give positive feedback and there were lots of kids that were interested in all my tools, techniques and colours.  These kids, by the way, were all polite and not annoying at all - it was good to see that curiosity and to feed it.

Of course, these interactions are always more pleasurable if the painting is one that I can be proud of and I have to say I knocked this one out of the park today.  It's my best painting for months.  The colours, the values and the composition all worked.  It helps that I planned things properly (including the values plan), took my time over it (waiting until previous stages were completely dry) and was always committed to painting the castle in three stages.  I suspect that having people around made me more methodical and focused.

This one was sold to a local churchgoer after I was kindly asked to exhibit some paintings at a Hartlip Church Sunday Tea.  So I'll be passing part of the proceeds to the church as commission.

The Wall Of Rochester Castle

I've had a day out at Rochester Castle today.  I had plans to head out Eastwards but the M2 is apparently closed in that direction, so I took on some advice from the wife and headed out West.  The plan was to come up with two paintings on a day.

I found a nice spot to park near the castle and was struck by the amazing view there, with a castle wall at the top of a hill.  So I set up camp there and got to work.

O thought I'd start with a pen and wash, so put down some outlines and the odd brick in the wall with a rollerball.  There were cars parked in the road and my plan was always to leave these outlined without painting them in.

So once the outline was down, I applied the paint.  My main three colours were cerulean blue, rose dore and raw sienna (the key of green warm) but the plan was always to use green apatite genuine in the greenery and I also used some French ultramarine and hematite violet genuine, spattered on some cadmium red and yellow and put in some titanium white highlights.

So, yes, the colours.  I didn't want the greens to be samey, so I started with green apatite genuine and dropped cerulean blue and raw sienna in places.  I wasn't happy with this, so also put in some rose dore to calm down the greens and some French ultra to darken them in places.  The stonework and brickwork started as a mix of the three primaries, with the proportions varied as I went along.

Because all the different brick and stone shapes were slightly different colours, the painting was lacking a bit of harmony, so I mixed up some hematite violet genuine and raw sienna and applied this as a glaze over all the stones and bricks.  And as a final step, I applied cadmium red and yellow spatters and titanium white highlights and added some figures.

I stopped at this point.  I probably could have dabbed in metal fence posts with a flat brush or credit card but, to be honest, this painting was already a flop and beyond redemption.

What could I have done differently?  Well, I could have

- used lots of  rollerballs with different thicknesses.  There's a set on my Amazon wishlist, so maybe I'll strike lucky on Fathers' Day or my birthday

- added lots more detail with the rollerball.  We're talking all the bricks and stones, not just the odd one here and there.

- only added the odd bit of greenery on top of stonework and brickwork rather than replicating the scene in front of me and having lots of big green shapes.

- left more areas untouched by paint.  In particular, the outer bits of the sky and the big green triangle in the foreground.

- started the stonework with an underpainting of mingled primaries rather than starting with a mix of the three.

- not used that hematite violet genuine in a unifying glaze - it unified everything into mud.

- taken my time.  In retrospect, this was rushed, maybe because I was looking forward to the break between the two paintings.

Drawing Practice And Inktense Experimentation

It's wet and horrible outside so I won't be doing any watercolour today.  Instead I thought I'd practice my drawing and experiment a bit with the inktense pencils, with no intention of coming up with something that anybody might actually like.  Here's how I got on.

To practice my drawing, I tried drawing my right hand (a classic drawing exercise).  Today was about contour drawing, looking at the subject more than the drawing and imagining drawing along all the edges of the shapes in the subject while letting my pencil move around on the paper.  And then doing the odd correction at the end.  You can't really tell from the photo of the final result but things didn't come out too badly.  I think I moved my hand a few times, which meant I had to make a few corrections.  The only think I'm not happy about is the ball of the thumb, which matched the subject in one pose but not in the pose that I ended up with.  In other words I should have corrected the ball of the thumb when my hand moved.

With the inktense pencils, my main planned experiment was to repeat yesterday's methodology of applying lots of colours quite densely and to wet them by dabbing with wet kitchen paper before creating hard edges in a second coat.  Fuchsia worked out well yesterday as an edging colour, so I tried it again on all the left facing edges with apple green on all the right facing edges.  At the same time as adding the edges, I added more blue to the wrist and the ball of the thumb where at thought I needed to cool things down.  Then I pained over with a water brush and was shocked about what a mess I'd created.  One big lesson for this is that apple green is a very powerful colour and shouldn't be let out without a lead.  You can see I've also overdone the blue and the red but that's just poor execution on my part.  The initial dabbed colours weren't too bad but they've all disappeared now.

One final experiment was to give the ink black a rare outing, today as a background colour.  I wet the pencil parks with damp kitchen roll and found it surprisingly easy to paint around the edges of the subject this way.  But I really don't like the black background.  It just looks dirty in a charcoal way.  Putting this on a wall would make the whole house feel dirty.  Maybe I need to put in black much more thickly so it ends up as a jet black but I'm not sure I can really be bothered with that.

I'm starting to think that there are three dead men walking in this 24-colour inktense set: the black, the white and the liner (which seems to just be a pencil that's hard to erase).  In which case I should be thinking about potential replacements at some point but that's a job for another day.

Right, I'm going to put my feet up for the afternoon and read a book.

EvaE Again

A day off today.  Or a day off from watercolour anyway.  There's something about using inktense pencils that makes painting less tiring than using watercolour, so I thought I'd give them another go today.  Just to have a bit of fun without even thinking about whether the painting would sell.

This is EvaE, making her second appearance.  Her last appearance was a bit of a disaster.  Let's see if Ivan do better today.

I used a lot of colours today, starting with sherbert lemon, chilli red, violet, deep indigo, iris blue, teal green, leaf green and baked Earth.  I started with indigo in the hair and the shadowy bits of the body. For the shadows underneath Eva, I put down indigo pencils first, then violet on top of those to distinguish them from the shadows on the body.  I used loads of different colours all over the body without leaving any white space - this was about having fun rather than producing a masterpiece.

For the wetting stage, I started by leaving the water brushes on one side and instead dabbed out all the main areas with a screwed up, wet piece of kitchen paper.  I then used water bushes to go around the main shapes, trying to leave hard edges while merging the painted colours into the cabbed colours.

I wasn't happy with the final result, with the edges not looking distinct enough and the hair not dark enough.  So I added a second coat of colours.  In doing this I was aware that I was taking a huge risk that the painting would be ruined.  I'm pretty sure none of my second coats have worked up to now.  I brought in two new colours: ink black for the hair and fuchsia for the left facing sides of the major shapes.  I also put in more chilli red for the right facing sides and added the odd bit of iris blue or sherbert lemon where I thought the painting might benefit from it.  And then. I watered all these colours with a brush pen.

And what do you know?  The second coat did the trick today and I ended up with something vaguely presentable.  The colours all over the body are interesting and. The dabbing rather than brushing technique has added a three dimensional quality in places.  The hands aren't right but I'm used to that and will keep trying to choose hands free source material.  Anyway, this isn’t bad and is going up for sale.

The End Of The Footpath

I took the dog out for a walk this morning and found this prefect site for a painting.  It’s at the end of a footpath from the Lower Hartlip Road.  The footpath is a bit overgrown in places and, even at the very end where it opens out a bit, it still feels a bit claustrophobic because of all the shadows from the overhead trees.  But just beyond that post, you step out into wide open sunny orchards.  I wanted to capture the change from dark and closed to bright and open.  So it's a great subject.  It's also a great location, with room to spread out, no disturbances and lots of shade.

I decided on my colour scheme before returning to the footpath.  Transparent yellow was a no brainier because of all the greenish yellow light coming through from the orchards.  For the other two primaries I decided to go with quinacridone magenta and French ultramarine because a purple cool key can create great contrasts between green and purple.  I also used burnt umber (for the first time in ages) to dampen down some of my more vivid colours.  As usual, cadmium yellow, cadmium red and titanium white came on at the end to play small roles.

After putting down a rough pencil sketch and spattering on some masking fluid, I painted in an underpainting that included the sky and lots of transparent yellow light showing through the trees.  I then painted everything in from the back towards the front, freely mixing my four main colours.  Some techniques that are worth mentioning here are:

- dabbing in foliage using quite dry paint and a Terry Harrison Merlin brush

- a lot of charging in of colour in the trees.  This is about putting down one colour then, while it's still wet, dabbing in other colours but making sure these extra colours are quite a bit drier than the paint that's already down

- throwing salt onto all the trees on the left just as the paint was about to lose its sheen

- after dabbing in foliage behind the trees, wetting the marks and using them to negatively paint the trees

Once I'd got to something that I was happy with (and it took a few applications to get the foreground dark enough to contrast against the light in the background) I added the finishing touches, sweeping in some grasses in cadmium yellow with the Merlin brush and grounding them with some similar sweeps at the bottom in cadmium red.  Then I spattered on some cadmium red and cadmium yellow, added a white highlight to the post and rubbed off all the salt and masking fluid.  Bang.  Job done.

And I'm a bit happier with this than I've been with other recent paintings.  The contrast that I wanted between light and dark is there.  The colours of the tree trunks are great and the salt has added some great textures.  And it all hangs together the way a three colour painting should.  The thing I'm least happy about is where the foliage in places looks like a set of parallel fuzzy bands.

This one was sold by the wife to one of her mates at Knit & Natter.

The Allotment

Out and about again today.  I thought I'd have a go with the oil pastels.  I've not painted plein air with them before and wanted to have a go, just to check whether they might be a viable alternative option on Landscape Artist Of The Year if I make it on as a wildcard.  It's a lot easier to carry the gear around than it is with watercolour after all.  I wandered around the village looking for potential subjects and ended up in the wife's allotment.  The colours of the shed and the overgrown state of the place were what drew me in.

I didn't have the iPad with me and found myself struggling to come up with a composition.  If I don't have the iPad, I at least need to carry around a cardboard mount as a sighting device.  And if I'm going to do that, I need to experiment with mounts of different sizes.

As usual with these paintings, I put down a pencil outline and then filled out the painting from back to front.  I didn't really get to have fun until I got to the foreground, when I tried to make the place look as overgrown as possible.  I started dotting in lots of different greens and yellows and then swept them upwards with one of those rubber ended tools.  I added the odd weed in front of the barrels and water tank by dabbing in leaves, then adding thin stems by rolling the pastels on their edges.

I did quite a bit of scraping with the scalpel today, in particular for that cage thing in the foreground, where I even remembered to put some grey down first before putting the green on top.  I may well have scraped off the grey with the green, though, rather than leaving it showing.  And I also made the edges of the trees more interesting.  The other special effect I used was to dab some fingerprints around the far tree to make it look like a windy day.

I added the birds at the end to balance things and to bring in a bit of life.  I realised at this point that I'd not used my favourite red, so put in a red bird first.  I then added one in my favourite blue and one in a green.  These things always work better on threes.

It was a mistake to bring out the oil pastels today.  For one thing, it was too hot (18 degrees, make a note) and the pastels were melting after a while.  The tiny last bit of my pthalo green light pastel actually melted as I was applying it to the paper, so I had to manipulate it around like oil paint.  This green, by the way, is the first non-white pastel that I've completely used up.  The second reason why the oil pastels were a mistake is that you don't realise how messy they are until you have to paint with them without access to soap and water.  I've decided that if I do make it to Landscape Artist, I won't be taking the oil pastels - I'll be painting in watercolour.

Anyway, back to the painting itself.  It's spoilt by the barrels and the big water tank on the right.  The water tank is boring and difficult to draw and should have been left out.  I didn’t get enough dimensions into the barrels, being too focussed on getting the two dimensional image down.  It also didn’t help that the barrels in my composition were too small for me to be able to put on much detail, especially with the pastels melting.  Maybe I should have only included one or two of them.  The birds are really good though.

This one sold quickly to a fellow villager.

The Smell Of Seaweed

I've been out and about for the first time this year.  I drove over to the Riverside Country Park in Gillingham and stride up and down the causeway that leads to Horrrid Hill before deciding on this view.

I started off choosing rose dore, cerulean blue and raw sienna as my main three colours.  The first two were motivated by the greys in the sky and I picked raw sienna as my yellow because I didn’t want things looking too bright.  So this was in the key of green warm.  Green apatite genuine, hematite violet genuine and viridian also had big roles to play and French ultramarine, sepia, cadmium red and titanium white were also used for details.

I have a new technique to help me with composition.  I take a photo of the scene, then use an iPad app to crop the picture.  The app not only allows me to restrict the cropping to rectangles with 3*4 proportions (so that they'll fit on the paper) but also divides up the rectangle into nine smaller rectangles, so that in my cropping I can try to get the horizon along the 1/3rd or 2/3rds line and the centre of interest at one of the four golden points.

So, yes, I picked a composition and put down a pencil outline.  Then I opened up my bottle of masking fluid, intending to mask out some buildings and parts of the boat.  But the fluid was all clotted like a nosebleed.  I added a bit of water and swirled it about a bit and ended up with something vaguely useable but not as good as fresh masking fluid.  Anyway, I used it then threw the bottle away.

The first paint to go on was the sky.  It was that same grey that I get when mixing rose dore and cerulean blue, so both of these colours went on.  I also put in some raw sienna because I was planning at the time to have the painting dominated by these three primaries.  Looking at the sky afterwards, there's a lot of the red and the blue but not as much of their combined grey as I'd have liked.

And then I just worked the shapes from back to front.  The peninsula behind the boat is mainly green apatite genuine charged into an initial wash of raw sienna and with the odd bit of rose dore dropped in.  And the water was a muddy mix of my three primaries.

The foreground was where I had the most fun.  There's a lot of green apatite genuine still in there but also lots of viridian.  Viridian doesn't appear often in my paintings but I had to use it today as it's a colour that evokes the smell of seaweed and that smell was something that I wanted to bring out in the painting.  There's also raw sienna and rose dore in there and I found myself applying some quite dry hematite violet genuine to get some dark areas. And I threw on lots of salt to encourage the granulation and because seaweed's full of it and put in some upward flicks with one of those Terry Harrison foliage brushes.

I removed what masking fluid there was and put in the boat and buildings using titanium white, French ultramarine, sepia and cadmium red.  The masking fluid had done such a poor job that it was necessary to go over the masked areas with white paint.

Finally, I added some birds in the foreground seaweed in white and sepia.  And then a seagull swooped overhead and convinced me to add another bird in the sky.

I should point out that the wind was pretty bad today, with all my gear being blown around whenever I dropped my guard.  Halfway through I decided to put the easel away and just sit down and paint.  No interruptions from people checking out my painting but a couple of friendly dogs came over to say hello.

As a whole, the painting feels like a greatest hits album that doesn’t hang together.  I like the sky (including the bird), the trees behind the boat and the foreground but I'm not sure the three of them belong together.  The boat and distant buildings haven't really worked.  A lot of this is down to the masking fluid clotting but it's also down to me not choosing a composition where they were big enough to paint a tiny bit more detail on them.  The foreground, though, with that texture and all those colours is the star of the show.  This one's going up for sale.

An Arrogant Intrusion

I was watching an interesting video by Liron Yanconsky on YouTube the other day in which he painted a church in monochrome without putting down a pencil outline to guide himself and felt inspired to give this a go myself.

I looked through my photos of potential scenes to paint and decided to go with this one.  It's a view of a New Court, Christ's College, Cambridge from the back in King Street.  For many years, this building looked like a really small, ugly car park.  It was described as "an arrogant intrusion on King Street" and I really can't argue with that.  It was built in 1968-79 and still looked like this in my 1982-86 spell at Christ's.  At some point since then, though, it has been modified and no longer looks like a car park.  There's still a row of shops along the bottom but the entrance to the car park has been filled and what was once the upper floor of the car park is now college rooms looking out onto King Street.  New Court has learned to fit its surrounding apps at last.  There is another college building development going on in King Street at the moment, and this is one that will fit in with its surroundings.  Some King Street buildings will be almost completely demolished, leaving only the fronts of the former buildings as the college's Northern boundary.  It's going to look good.

I picked Mayan blue as my main colour.  I wanted to give this blue a serious workout.  I've been using this blue a lot lately and need to go back to my others at some point, so thought I'd make the Mayan blue's last outing for a while a big one.  I decided not to make this a monochrome painting though.  I wanted to bring  in other colours to bring out the soulless mess of the concrete.  So for the orange (complementary to blue) sky, I used Indian a yellow and Winsor red, maybe with a bit of rose dore.  So this painting just about qualifies as being in the key of orange cool.

I also wanted to add some people in the foreground to include some life.  These are mainly in the usual opaques (cadmium red, cadmium yellow and sepia) although I did use French ultramarine for the woman on the far left.  I also used these colours in the shop fronts and in a row of parked cars.

I stopped for lunch at this point.  When I looked at the painting afterwards, it didn't right.  The street felt too cool.  I thought of two possible ways to change this.  One was to glaze a yellow or orange over the street and maybe the building in the far left.  I decided, though, that this might make New Court stand out too much against its surroundings.  When you think you're being overly brutal in a painting of New Court, that's pretty extreme.  So instead, I went for the spattering of the cadmiums, trying to graduate the density of spatters from full on at the bottom to very light at the top.

A couple of special effects worth mentioning: I threw some salt onto the Mayan blue to get even more texture and the gate on the right was stamped in with an old credit card.

So, how was it?  Well, I think everyone can see that this was painted freehand without a pencil outline.  On the other hand, that does give this painting a bit of life and vitality.  Sometimes putting a drawing down first sends me in a bad direction, wanting to include too much detail and then treating the rest of the painting as a colouring in exercise.  The people in the foreground aren't great, but at least the eye isn't drawn to them: it's drawn upwards to the top of the building.  Where this one suffers most is probably the lack of a focal point: everything is loose and blurred.  Makes a change to everything being in sharp focus, which is just as bad.  Anyway, this one's good enough to go up for sale.

Jenni With Her Foot On A Box

This is Jenni's fourth appearance as a model on this blog.  She does some great power poses but I've not yet managed to do her justice.  Let's see how I got on today.

For colours, I started with indigo, chilli red, sea blue and teal green.  The plan was to use indigo in the darker places but otherwise ti make this a red and blue painting with the teal green appearing here and there and providing a bit of shock value.  I ended up also using sunshine yellow, mustard and field green.  And using bark for the background.

At some point while putting this one together, I made the conscious decision that it was going to be a colourful painting rather than one with lots of white areas.  This was the point at which I extended the range of colours.  I also decided at this point to put in the odd cold colour on left facing surfaces and warm colour on right facing.  Up to here, it had all been warm colours facing left and cold colours facing right.

Of course, I never know how these paintings will turn out until after I've watered them.  And today I wasn't happy with the outcome.  The lower abdomen was all red on the left and green on the right.  So I added a bit more green on the left and red on the right.  The red gave me some good looking violets but the green muddied things a bit on the left, especially just above Jenni's right thigh.  Maybe I need to stop applying the second washes and just accept the first attempt, warts and all.

In the end, it all looks a bit muddy.  I can either have the bark background or mix reds and blues to get neutrals and violets: I can't do both.  When I do both, like I did here, the two feed off each other and make the while painting look muddy.  One other thing I did here (for the first time in ages) was to outline the figure.  I need to never do this again.  It doesn't make for a good look.  Outlines are an artificial thing representing the border between different shapes.  If the shapes are there (either in reality or in the viewer's imagination) then the border's not necessary.  It’s not going up for sale.

Force Of Life

So here's my second painting of the day.  Again, this was all about having fun rather than creating a masterpiece.  My idea on this one was to paint a colourful sunset (something I've not done for ages) and to put some sort of silhouetted skyline in the foreground.  Colours in this one were Mayan blue, Winsor red, Indian yellow and sepia, so I guess this is in the key of orange cool.

I think it was a mistake to use the Mayan blue in a sunset painting.  It's just too bonkers and out of control.  Sunsets need to be calm and relaxed.  Prussian blue or French ultramarine would have been a better choice.  Anyway, on with the show.  As with all sunsets, it's blue at the top, then red, then yellow, then red.  That first red is important as it prevents any green appearing in the sky where the yellow touches the blue.  I wanted to add some grey clouds in sky and I tried to mix up a neutral colour from my three primaries but without any luck.  What I was getting was too watery, so I should probably have squeezed out more paint from the tubes and mixed them together into something drier.  But I didn’t have time to do this: the sky was drying too quickly.  So I added some quite dry paint for each of the three primaries and ended up with the same sort of colourful cloudy sky as in the last painting and it didn’t really look like a sunset.

While the sky was drying, I looked around for some sort of skyline silhouette that I could put on top of it: this was all done on the fly without any planning.  I ended up choosing a pair of legs from a shot in a Space 1999 episode called Force Of Life.  It's a silhouette that I've been thinking about using for a while.

So I added in the silhouette using some quite thick sepia.  I deliberately went for sepia as it's an opaque colour and I didn’t want the colours in the sky shining through the legs.  I was careful with the brushstrokes to show the fold at the knee and to distinguish the legs from each other.  While the sepia was still wet, I dropped in all three primaries.  And I added some salt and did some kitchen paper dabbing to create textures.

This feels like another winner to me, so is going up for sale.  The legs look like legs, but having them against the sky raises doubts in the viewer about whether they might just be rocks.  And the textures in them are strangely fascinating.  I think when I frame this and lose a bit around all the edges, I need to lose more from the bottom than the top, make that bottom leg less boring.

All Along The Watchtower

Let's start off with the important news.  I've been rejected by Landscape Artist Of The Year 2023, so won't be in a pod.  But I'll be applying for a place as a wildcard.  They open for applications at 12 tomorrow and I'll be applying immediately.  It would be good to get in.  A day out as a wildcard is amazing.

With filming starting in June, I thought I'd better start getting some practice in.  Today I've gone back to standing up at an easel rather than sitting at a table.  Tomorrow afternoon, I may start getting in some plein air practice around the village or maybe somewhere else.

With today's paintings, the objective wasn't to create masterpieces but just to have fun and to recapture some mojo but let's wait and see.  For the first painting, I wanted to give all my granulating colours a good workout, partly motivated by how I've finished my cool press block and, until I buy another, will only have rough to work on.

Colours in this one were Mayan blue, French ultramarine, cerulean blue, cadmium red, hematite violet genuine, viridian and green apatite genuine (all granulating) and quinacridone magenta and transparent yellow (non-granulating) with cadmium yellow making a cameo appearance at the end.  With warm and cool versions of both reds and blues on that list, it obviously wasn't painted in any particular colour key.

I had no real plans for this one apart from it being a random landscape.  I started with a sky made up of cerulean blue, Mayan blue, cadmium red and hematite violet genuine.  This is the heaviest lifting cadmium red has done for a while; I used it with the hematite violet in the clouds.  I dabbed a bit at the sky with kitchen roll before it dried.  As well as making some lighter cloud shapes, it did help withbt(e granulation and textures.

For the hills, I started while the sky was drying with a layer of the violet hematite genuine because I wanted to see some of that spotty black granulation in areas that I left empty.  And then I added all the other colours.  I made one hillside quite bright with the transparent yellow to give the impression of sunlight.  The purple tone to the nearest hill shape is down to me missing the hematite violet pan and loading up with quinacridone magenta.  It was never my intention to use the magenta but it looked good, so I kept using it.  The shape of the hill on the right had too many straight lines at the top, looking like some sort of fortification, so I turned it into one.  When the paint makes a decision, you have to go along with it.  And textures were created with salt and kitchen towel dabbing.

I wasn't happy with the two hills on the left.  They had similar values and were barely distinguishable to the screwed up eye.  This is why I created the fog in the valley by wetting the paint, dabbing it out and gardening the top edge of the nearest hill.  The trees on the hill weren't great either.  They were mainly made up of green apatite genuine.  But after stippling in some transparent yellow on the right and at the top, dabbing in some Mayan blue trees on the left and fogging out some of the lower trees, things looked better.

To finish, I added some birds using a neutral colour mixed from all the colours that I had sitting around and dabbed in a tiny bit of cadmium red and yellow.  And I spattered in some cadmium red and cadmium yellow but only on the hill on the right as the hill in the bottom left was already looking quite good with its rocky colours and texture.

I don't mind this one.  It has atmosphere.  It feels like the morning after a battle.  Not quite good enough for the shop window though.  The painting was always going to share its name with either an Algernon Blackwood short story or a Jimi Hendrix track; it was quite easy to pick a name from the list today.

Oh, and as a special bonus, here's a photo of the paints in my palette partway through this painting.  Those Daniel Smith colours are out of control - just look how they granulate just on plastic!