The White Church, Comrie, Perthshire

Painting's been taking a back seat for a few days while I've been enjoying the cricket and the chess.  But the test match is over now and it's a rest day in the FIDE candidates (remember the 2020 FIDE candidates?) so I've been back out painting again.  This is The White Church at Comrie in Perthshire.  Draw a line Northwards from Stirling and Westwards from Perth or Dundee and that's where you'll find it. I discovered this church a few days ago while I was googling around for photos of white buildings.

As this was a white building, the colour scheme was a no brainier.  I used French ultramarine, transparent yellow and quinacridone magenta.  We're back in the key of purple cool.  Only three colours were used in this painting: the were not even any opaques added at the end.

One thing I did differently today was to put down an outline in black marker.  I had black markers on the brain for a couple of reasons (i) my birthday's coming up soon and the kids were talking about buying art gear, so I put a set of markers of various thicknesses on the list along with a case for them a send a couple of books that were line and wash related, and (ii) my painting of Stockbury Church, that I used this technique on a couple of years ago, has attracted a bit of attention this week and might sell.

Apart from he use of a black marker, there's not much to say about the methodology for this one.  I just painted from the back to the front using my three primaries.  The sky was dabbed out with kitchen paper as usual.  I started the church and foreground with an underpainting.  I used a couple of a Terry Harrison brushes fro the foliage.  It was necessary to use some red in the greenery to avoid garishness.  All stuff you've heard before.  Let's move on to the verdict.

Skies always look good when painted in these three colours and today's was no exception.  Even though it's probably my worst sky to date in this key, it still looks fine.  The background buildings on the right have been overworked and are too grey and too dark.  This is a bit frustrating as it wasn't as if I was trying to replicate the actual colours - I'd have been happy with just a monotone light value blue or purple.  Then there's the church.  Something's gone slightly wrong with the perspective: the steeple and classy corners aren't parallel and the walls in front of the church are tipping downwards too quickly.  I can live with the former but those brick walls look odd.  In fact, I've been a bit too much of a slave to the photo and would have been better off leaving out one or both of the walls.  And finallly there's the foliage.  I tinkered too much here and almost wrote off the painting.  At first the trees on the left looked good as untextured shapes, but then I had problems painting the big tree on the right consistently with what was on the left.  So I reached for the Terry Harrison brushes and tinkered, ending up with a decent looking tree.  Which left the trees on the left looking as if they didn't didn't.  SoI tinkered with them with the Terry Harrison brushes.  They don't look as good as they did before but at least everything hangs together now.

Overall, though, this is good enough to go in the shop window.

Ancient Lights

Abstract landscapes don't drain me as much as serious paintings, so after the last one, I was ready for a repeat performance.

After a little bit of thinking, I decided to keep pthalo blue, cobalt blue, viridian and Indian yellow from the last painting but to bin the burnt umber and to replace the two reds with quinacridone magenta and cadmium red.  Don't ask me why: these were just the colours that I fancied using.  With both a warm and a cool red in the squad, this painting isn't in one particular colour key.

With this painting, I made it to the end of my tube of Daler Rowley pthalo blue.  It's been an interesting colour, a more vivid cool blue than the Prussian that's keeping it out of my squad.  If I ever decide to change the Prussian to pthalo, I'd be using Winsor blue (green shade) which I now know to be pthalo blue under a different name.

This time I started with masking fluid spatters rather than masking fluid birds but otherwise followed exactly the same process as for my last painting.  While doing this, I added a few tree shapes against the sky.  And I scraped a few lines into the paint with a palette knife, something I didn't do on the previous painting.

To finish the painting, I started by stabbing in lots of clusters of spots in cadmium yellow, cadmium red and titanium white.  But I wasn't happy at the end of this as the very bottom of the painting was a bit too light and separate from the shape above it.  So I decided to put the hilly shape along the bottom and then stabbed in some spotty, opaque clusters.  I really should have painted in the foreground hill first and then decided whether the opaques were to be applied to the foreground or the middleground.  It doesn't really make sense with them in both places.

And once this was all done and the masking fluid removed, it was time to judge the painting.  The things I like are the sharp knife edges on the viridian shapes at the top.  And how some of those white spots in the middleground could be interpreted as people carrying lights?  I'm struggling to be honest.  And there are lots of bad points: the blue being too vivid, the front hill being a funny shape, similarly sized dots  in the foreground and middleground, the reds and yellows in the middleground outlining a giant triangle that's too symmetrical and central.

No, it's a failure this one.  It's not going up for sale.

The name for this one is another Algernon Blackwood short story.  I'm wondering whether a pattern's developing where the better an abstract landscape is, the more likely it is to be named after a Hendrix track than a Blackwood short story.

A Haunted Island

I'm taking a day off from serious watercolour painting today and going back to abstract landscapes.  I'm going back to the palette knife technique that worked so well in Still Raining Still Dreaming a while back.

Because my colours will all come direct from the tubes, I didn't get the Mijello palette out today, instead reaching for the plastic takeaway tub in which I keep my opened tubes.  And I squeezed colours out direct onto the shelf on my easel as it's supposed to function as a plastic palette.  The colours I used today were:

- Daler Rowley pthalo blue, a colour I wanted to try in the past but that doesn't have a place in my main palette

- cobalt blue, ditto

- light red, which was once the warm red in my palette but has since been replaced by rose dore and Winsor red, speaking of which

- Winsor red, which has been short of action recently and deserves an outing

- Indian yellow as I wanted a bright yellow and the alternative, transparent yellow has been overworked recently and needs a break

- burnt umber, the forgotten colour on my palette, desperate for any action

- viridian, a colour that makes the odd appearance but could do with a bigger role

In fact, with both reds being warm and both blues cool, this painting could claim to be in the key of orange cool.

I started today by painting in three birds using masking fluid.  I thought these might look good as white shapes against a colourful background.  And then I just followed the usual process for this sort of painting: I scraped on paint with a palette knife, squirted on some water and tipped the paper around a bit to get the colours moving.  One side of the painting started to look like trees and I used a brush to create extra branches for the paint to flow down.  A shame that I'd put in those birds and that the birds are one way up and the trees the other.

And then it was all tinkering.  Using a brush to turn paint marks into a sky, sprinkling on salt, dabbing with a kitchen towel.  The lesson from Still Raining, Still Dreaming about leaving big white spaces just hasn't sunk in.

At this point, the bottom of the painting was looking like water but with reflections that didn't match the rest of the painting.  I'd been hoping that the things that looked like trees might end up looking like roots but things hadn't worked out that way.  So some corrective action was necessary.    What I did was to add some hilly glazes over the top.  I did a lot of tinkering with these glazes, charging in extra colours, dabbing with a kitchen towel and throwing on salt.

When I was happy with the foreground, I left the painting to dry.  I rubbed off the masked birds but rather than leave them white, I made them more realistic by adding dark bits.

Overall, this is an interesting painting.  Are there two layers of hills?  Two layers of water?  Hills and water?  Water and hills?  It's all a bit ambiguous, not helped by the presence of seagulls and the name of the painting (which comes from an Algernon Blackwood short story today).  The shape at the bottom of the painting has flesh tones and could even be interpreted as a naked body or two naked bodies.  This one raises so many questions.  It's up for sale.

Another Corner Of Stonehenge

It's June 21, the Summer Solstice, so I'm back to Stonehenge again.  In a lot of ways, this followed a similar process to my previous painting, but there were some differences in approach.

Let's talk colours first.  I used:

- French ultramarine, quinacridone magenta and transparent yellow in the sky, just like last time

- French ultramarine, transparent yellow, green apatite genuine and a little bit of quinacridone magenta in the greenery (there was no greenery last time, only a starry background)

- mixes of hematite violet genuine with Indian yellow, rose dore, green apatite genuine, viridian green, French ultramarine, cerulean blue, Mayan blue genuine and Prussian blue (just like last time) but this time on top of an underpainting of French ultramarine, quinacridone magenta and transparent yellow

- some finishing stabbing of cadmium yellow, cadmium red and titanium white (new)

Just like last time, I started with a pencil drawing, spattered on some masking fluid, let it dry, then rubbed off the biggest spatters and anything that didn’t land on a stone.  Admittedly some of the shapes that were intended the bits of stone at the bottom of the columns ended up as grassy knolls and you’ll see some white spots in these.

Then I painted in the sky, dried it with kitchen paper and painted in the background greenery.  The sky came out great (I'm on a roll with those three colours).  The greenery was more tricky though.  The furthest hill on the right still isn't quite right (and it should have been trees on the closer hill, not a separate hill) but I think I reached something acceptable after throwing in some of the magenta to tone down the greens.

Next it was the stones, and a change of technique from before.  This time I started with an underpainting made from my three sky colours.  The aim was not just to "colour the light" but also to look for some harmony between the stones and the sky and between different valued shapes on the same stones.  Then I followed a similar process to last time by painting in the stones using various different hematite violet mixes.  This time, I tried to blend the shadowy and light areas of the stones together, which I think I managed to do.  But I also put on several layers of paint, which means there was a lot less granulation within the stones.  If I'm planning something similar in future with multiple layers of paint, I should probably stick to using whatever three primaries colours I've used in the sky rather than wasting the hematite violet genuine.

Then I painted in the foreground with a bit of shadow and stabbed in some life with the Merlin brush and the usual three opaque colours.  As I mentioned earlier, some of the stones at the bottom ended up as grassy knolls and I think they look good.  Better than they would have done as stones if I'd tried to paint every small shadowy detail.  The shadow along the bottom doesn't make things look particularly sunny because I don't have any highlights or light values on the stones or the foreground.

And finally I rubbed off the masking fluid spatters.  I'm left wondering whether I should have wiped off any spatters on the shadowy sides of the stones.  The idea of leaving them on was to make them look like stars against the shadows behind them, but the multiple paint layers that wiped out the granulation also took away that spacey feeling.

Overall, I rate this as a success.  The stones are looking out at something.  It's a shame the granulation isn’t there but what the eye don't see the chef gets away with.  This one was sold at the 2022 Upchurch Art  Exhibition to someone who said it reminded her of Outlander, a TV series and set of books where standing stones are gateways into older time periods.  So there's definitely something in the atmosphere in this one.

A Corner Of Stonehenge

This was always going to be today's painting after all that fun testing out my Daniel Smith colours yesterday.  It's two days to Summer Solstice too, so I might try another Stonehenge painting on Tuesday.

There was no limited palette or colour key today.  I just identified my favourite granulating mixed as hematite violet either on its own or mixed with green apatite genuine, viridian, Prussian blue, Mayan blue genuine, cerulean blue, French ultramarine, rose dore and Indian yellow and came up with a plan on where each of these would be used on the stones in the painting.  For the sky, I decided to use French ultramarine, quinacridone magenta and transparent yellow as these make for quite a realistic looking sky that wouldn't distract from all the colours in the rocks.

So, having planned the  colours and again coming up with a value plan, I started with the pencil drawing.  I then used masking fluid to protect the rocks around the very small sky areas between the two vertical stones.  I spattered on some masking fluid for extra texture.  Once this had all dried, I rubbed off any spatters that I could see in the sky shapes as I didn't want any white spots there.

The first paint on was the sky.  I carefully wet all the sky areas, being careful not to leak into the stones.  Then I put in lots of French ultramarine and added a bit of quinacridone magenta and transparent yellow in places, being careful not to create any greens.  And then I dabbed at it with a piece of screwed up kitchen paper.  I've got skies absolutely nailed.

Then onto the stones.  I started with the light areas on the horizontal stones, where I used the two mixes of the hematite with cerulean blue and with my two greens.  Later on I tinkered by adding in some other mixes, the mix with rose dore in particular.  In all these washes, I would start by painting in the top outline, filling the shape out with water, dabbing out some colour and charging in some drier colour in places.

Next came the big shadow area, which I painted on with the mixes of hematite with my Prussian and Mayan blues.  It all looked a bit light and a bit unrelated to the light side of the stones (maybe I should have started with an underpainting covering both the lit and shadow sides), so I did some tinkering later.  I added a second coat using both blue mixes, dabbed it a bit with kitchen paper and dropped in pure versions of both blues and the mix of the hematite with rose dore.  I ended up with a spacey look, which I decided to keep, knowing that the masking fluid spatters would end up looking like stars, making everything a bit mystical and summer solsticey.

And then I did the vertical stones.  In the most well lit parts I used the hematite neat and mixed with rose dore and Indian yellow.  In other places, I used all the other mixes.

And that's where I stopped.  Not after finishing the  erotically stones but after finishing fiddling about with the shadow area.  Once everything was dry, I removed all the masking fluid spatters.

I'm really happy with this one.  The colours in the sky and on both the lit and shadowy sides of the stones are great.  If there is a problem, it's that the shadowy side of the stones still looks a bit disconnected from the lit sides, but I can always claim this was deliberate and all to do with there being a window there to the great expanse of the universe.  This one's up for sale,

Despite managing to achieve all these granulating effects using the hematite violet genuine in mixes, I can definitely see the attraction of those super granulating Schmincke sets.  They save a lot of hassle repeatedly mixing colours while trying to keep the proportions consistent and keeping the mixing area organised.  They'd be a luxury rather than a necessity but the tundra version (or maybe forest or desert) would make an interesting surprise present if any of my family are reading this.

Third Stone From The Sun

It was too hot yesterday to be outside painting.  So I spent the day indoors watching YouTube videos of people swatching the colours from the super granulating Schmincke collections.  There are six sets of five colours: galaxy, glacier, tundra, forest, under sea and shire, although the tubes can all be bought separately.  My favourite is the tundra set, and the tundra pink and tundra violet colours in particular.  But looking at these colours a bit deeper, they all seem to be convenience mixes.  Tundra pink, for example, is just a mixture of French ultramarine and Potter's pink.  Tundra violet is French ultramarine with Mars brown.  So I ended up spending a lot of the day wondering whether I should put the tundra set on my wishlist.  Or just the tundra pink and tundra violet.  Or Potter's pink and Mars brown.  If I went for the set, I'd probably keep them in a separate palette but if I went for two colours, could I add them to my 18-colour palette, and, if so, what colours would be dropped?

In the end, I didn’t add anything to my wishlist but decided that I'd give my three Daniel Smith PrimaTek colours a serious workout, testing their granulating abilities both on their own and when mixed together.  I identified 24 swatches that I wanted to try out, divided up the paper and put the swatches down.  I think the trick with these is to start around the edges with a slightly watery mix, put water on any white space for the paint to move into, dab a little bit off and stab in some drier paint along the top.  I may have been using these colours wrongly by not making them watery enough and by mixing them on the paper rather than in the palette.  I ended up with twenty standing rocks, although I've seen people on YouTube painting pebbles and planets while doing this sort of exercise.

The final set of 24 swatches looks quite good but won't be put up for sale because a picture frame would crop off too much around the edges.  Anyway, the main point of this exercise was to experiment with those PrimaTek colours, so I'm going to go through the swatches one by one.  I've taken separate close up photos of these so that they show up all the granulation.  This means some of them are partly in shadow but that's a small price to pay.  Anyway, here we go:

First up is hematite violet genuine.  I've definitely been laying this on too thickly in the past.  With a bit more water, this really is pink paint with black spots and great for trees and rocks.  But how does it mix with other colours?

Hematite violet with viridian.  I picked viridian because it's already a granulator on its own.  Lots of background forestry texture and the garishness of the green has been toned down a bit.

Hematite violet genuine with green apatite genuine makes an amazing granulating greenish grey.  I'm not normally into realistic colours but this would be great for wet rocks.

Hematite violet genuine and Prussian blue made for a decent granulating black.  Might be useful at some point but I'd prefer to see a bit of colour.

Hematite violet genuine and cerulean blue make a gently granulating blue grey with the odd glimpse of red.  Another interesting one.

This is hematite violet genuine and French ultramarine.  I had high hopes for this one as French ultramarine is a granulator that's used in both the tundra pink and tundra violet.  I like this one.  It's another granulating black but this time there are pinks, blues, reds and violets peeking through.

Hematite violet genuine and quinacridone magenta.  I'm not keen on this one.  It just looks like a dirty application of the quinacridone magenta and I can't imagine ever wanting to use this mix for anything.  First so far that I've been unhappy with.

Hematite violet genuine and rose dore.  Rose dore is made up of a yellow and a violet pigment and I was hoping they might show up separately.  They don't.  But I still quite like this.  Rose dore is an earthier colour than the quinacridone magenta, so the extra texture from the hematite feels like it belongs there.

I thought I'd try adding some cadmium red to the hematite violet genuine as it's supposed to be a granulator.  I ended up with something volcanic looking and where the cadmium has been toned down a bit.  Definitely an interesting mix but I'm not sure whether I'll ever use it.

I'm onto the yellows now.  This is hematite violet genuine with Indian yellow.  The red in the hematite and orange and yellow in the Indian have given this one an orangey sheen.  There are lots of yellows, oranges, browns and blacks competing for attention in there, making for an interesting wash that I really didn't see coming.  This one might suit animals more than rocks.

Mixing hematite violet genuine with transparent yellow produces a mixture that has a lot in common with the last one, with oranges, yellows, browns and blacks competing for attention.  But here the orange has been toned down a bit to a more yellowy level.  And I'm wondering what those people who spend thousands on slices of toast that come out looking like Jesus would pay for this one.

Hematite violet genuine and raw sienna.  Similar to the last one really, except that I may have included less of the hematite in this mix.

That's enough of the hematite violet genuine for now.  Let's move on to green apatite genuine.  Here it is on its own, with little bits of red and black showing through.  I need to use a more watered down version of this colour than I have been using to allow it to granulate like this.

Green apatite genuine mixed with Prussian blue is a big disappointment.  No granulation anywhere in sight.

Green apatite genuine and French ultramarine.  Only a tiny bit of granulation going on, which is a huge disappointment considering how these two colours perform separately.

Green apatite genuine and transparent yellow.  At last a colour that doesn’t eliminate all the granulation from the green.  This would actually be a decent second green in a painting where the transparent yellow was my main yellow and where I was putting in green apatite genuine for trees.  A nice granulating yellowish green along the top of the trees that was consistent with all the other colours in the painting would work a treat.

With green apatite genuine and Indian yellow, it's a similar story except that the green is more olivey and less sunny as a result of using a warm yellow.  So if doing a painting where I'm having trees in green apatite genuine with a bit of yellow, I should base my choice of yellow at the planning stage on whether I want the greenery to look olivey or sunshiney.

This was supposed to be green apatite genuine and raw sienna but I'm wondering whether I screwed up and repeated the hematite violet genuine and raw sienna mix.

And now we're on to Mayan blue genuine.   This is it on its own, and it already shows promise with reds and greens appearing in places within the granulation.

This is the Mayan blue genuine with hematite violet genuine.  The hematite is amazing with just about everything, so it's no surprise to see pinks, blues and greens popping out in this swatch.

Mayan blue genuine and viridian granulates a bit but I can't help feeling disappointed.  No extra colours are popping out in the cracks, maybe because these two colours have too much in common.

Mayan blue genuine and quinacridone magenta produce a purple with some granulation and colour variation. To be honest, that's just a bonus.  I was already pleasantly surprised that what I thought was a cool blue actually produced a violet rather than a dull grey.  This is an interesting one.

When mixed with transparent yellow, Mayan blue genuine produces a really nice granulating green with the odd bit of blue showing through.  An alternative to green apatite genuine but not a direct replacement as the green apatite has black and reds showing.

And finally here's Mayan blue genuine and raw sienna.  An earthier mix than the last one, with more brown showing through and less blue.  This feels closer to green apatite genuine, not that it really matters.

This is probably my longest post ever.  Let me wrap it up with some lessons and conclusions:

- to allow granulating paint to do its own thing, I need to make it more watery

- hematite violet genuine gives an amazing texture to everything

- hematite violet genuine produces amazing granulating multicoloured mixes with blues (biggest lesson of the day)

- be careful mixing with hematite violet genuine with reds: it can just make them look dirty

- if painting in trees with green apatite genuine and needing colour variation, add yellow rather than blue because blue sucks all the life out of it

- Mayan blue can actually make purples

- Mayan blue makes interesting granulating greens

Murray Edwards College, Cambridge

After all that fun with whitewashed buildings in my last painting, I wanted to have another go at something similar. After googling for white buildings in Kent, white churches and white buildings in Cambridge, I settled for this view of Murray Edwards college in Cambridge.  I really liked the source photo: the shapes and values within it looked great for painting and, being in black and white, it didn't tempt me to reproduce any colours within it.

Back in my day, Murray Edwards was known as New Hall.  It was an all female college and still is.  If you're at a single sex college, you and a group of mates really need to adopt a co-ed college.  To do this, you need an engineer or a natsci within the group as afternoon practicals are the best way to meet people from other colleges.  Anyway, there was a group of women at New Hall that adopted a group of us at Christ's, so I had more friends at New Hall than I did at any other college.  Murray Edwards remains my fourth favourite College behind Christ's, Clare and Trinity Hall but could go back up to third if my youngest screws up his A levels.

Anyway, the painting.  The plan all along while looking for a white building was to paint it in the key of purple cool using French ultramarine, quinacridone magenta and transparent yellow, just like I did with. the Red Lion.  And these were the only three colours I used today: I didn't add any opaque colours at the end.

I started out with a pencil drawing.  Because of the sharp perspective involved, I used a ruler for all the longest straight lines.  I then masked out all the white areas.  Some of these were huge: in these cases I only masked out around the edges of the shapes.

The first paint to do down was the sky, as usual.  I thoroughly wet the whole area, then dropped in the three primaries fairly randomly while trying to vaguely follow the one point perspective and to not create any greens.  I then dabbed at all the colour with a scrunched up bit of kitchen paper, which I finds adds an interesting texture while ensuring that the value of the sky isn’t too dark.

Then, rather than working from back to front as is my usual style, I worked from dark to light, dabbing in the trees, painting in the foreground and adding all the shadowy bits on the building.  For the shadowy bits, I ended up with some interesting purple and green neutrals, but a number of coats were needed to get these dark enough.

Then I removed the masking fluid and got to work on the white areas.  I started with blue at the top of each shape, then added random yellows and reds underneath, looking to create oranges, purples and greens as well as yellows and reds.  I added extra water to these colours, then dabbed at them with a kitchen towel to keep them suitably understated.

As finishing touches, I added the purple tree shadows, then some colour at the bottom of white areas that were looking a bit too big and lifted out some paint in the windows to create some posters on the other side of the glass.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and call this one a big success.  If I'm ever on Landscape Artist Of The Year and needing to paint a white building, I'm laughing because with this triad of colours now I have a pretty straightforward process that I can follow to produce an acceptable painting.  Particular highlights today include

- the colours in the background trees

- the sky.  I'm throwing in those three primaries expecting to come up with something outrageous, but just look at it.  It's as if I've tried to make the colours as realistic as possible.

- the value pattern, for which I can thank the photographer

- the green and purple neutrals in the dark areas

- and the sunny feeling created by the shadows and the colours on the white areas

This one's up for sale.  A no brainier.

The Red Lion, Weston

It was looking too hot outside today to venture out painting, so I looked through my files for something I could paint in a shady spot in the garden.  I found this view of The Red Lion in Weston, Hertfordshire.  Weston is the village I grew up in and The Red Lion was a pub right in the middle of the village.  It unfortunately doesn't operate as a pub at the moment, instead being a venue for hire.  We used it for the wake following my dad's funeral a few months ago and they did a cracking job,

With there being a lot of white walls in the photo, I picked French ultramarine, quinacridone magenta and transparent yellow as my three colours.  This is the key of purple cool, and I deliberately chose this key after seeing what it did to the white walls in Craiglea And Sanquhar, Hartlip.  Talking of colour keys, somewhere down the right margin of the website (if viewed on a PC or tablet) you'll find a set of labels that let you see all the paintings that I've done within each key.  I find it quite handy to use these links to help me choose colours to be honest.  As well as these three colours, three opaque colours made appearances at the end.

As well as planning my colours, I actually planned my values today. The big idea in my value plan was that there should be a big value contrast between the lightest and darkest colours around the pub.  I also decided that the car in the drive should be changed from white to red to not confuse it with the house behind it and to not have any accidental value contrasts away from the pub.

And then I did the painting.  It was the usual process.  Pencil outline, some masking, then painting from the back to the front, and removing the masking fluid at the right time and dabbing in opaques at the end (titanium white, cadmium red and cadmium yellow today).

Apart from better than normal planning, the two things I did most differently to normal were:

- to include some cars.  Cars normally scare me but the cars in my source photo were all quite simple views that I was able to paint as simple shapes, so quite friendly.

- (with one exception) dabbing in trees with the side of a normal brush rather than stabbing them in with a Terry Harrison Merlin brush.

How did it end up?  Well, I'll start by listing the three things I got wrong:

- there's a perspective problem on the pub roof.  The lines along the top and bottom are diverging as they go backwards when they should be converging towards a vanishing point.  Something that was due to loose painting rather than dodgy drawing.  And to be honest, it's not an error that immediately jumps off the page - it just sits there and hopes not to be noticed.

- there's one tree in the right that I stabbed in with the Merlin brush rather than dabbing it in.  This was a mistake.  Stabbing brings it more into focus and leaves it competing with the pub for attention.  I did what I could to soften the focus and the red bits I added being blown around by the wind may or may not help fuzz out that part of the painting.

- going over all the shadows a second time.  At one point the shadows in the road were violet and made the painting look really sunny.  I should have left them as they were but thought they weren't dark enough, so went over them again in a darker, more neutral colour.  This lost me a bit of sunshine.  A classic case of tinkering making a painting worse rather than better.

But look at that sky!  Look at the colours in the road!  Look at those colours in the trees on the left!  And, most of all, look at those colours on the white building on the right!  There might be a couple of things wrong with it but the colours in this painting are what everybody will notice.

This one was gifted to someone with long standing connections to the village of Weston as an 80th birthday present.

Charlie K

Wasn't feeling up to a landscape today so I reached for the inktense pencils for a bit of figure drawing.  Today's model is Charlie K, making her debut.

Colours today were bright blue, Shiraz, fuchsia, chilli red and teal green.  The plan was to mix the blue with the Shiraz for the darkest areas and for the teal green to add a little bit of surprise colour in a few places in what would otherwise be a pretty /purple/blue palette.

I don't like what I've ended up with.  I've been a bit too heavy with the blue, resulting in harder edges than I'd like.  And the left shoulder and collar bone have merged together, making it look as if Charlie has a very weird shoulder.  If there's anything good to be taken out if this one, it's that left hand.  I need to choose poses with hand shapes like that, as opposed to hands made up of five separate fingers.

It's not going in the shop window, this one.  I think I'll watch the cricket this afternoon.  Today's not a day to be painting.

Blackpool Pleasure Beach

My second episode as a wildcard at Landscape Artist Of The Year was screened in February 2023 but here's what I had to say after filming in June 2022.  

I had to travel up to Blackpool for this one, the alternatives of flying to Northern Ireland or having to comply with a strict dress code for artists at Royal Ascot not really appealing to me.  I found out a couple of days before that we'd be filming near the pleasure beach, which was good news to me as I'd booked a hotel room close by.

I came up with a plan for the painting at home.  The idea is that I'd paint what Blackpool looks like to someone plummeting downwards on the rollercoaster: I'd rotate the view so that the roller coaster train was on a horizontal bit of track.  I explained to everyone that dropped by (artists, their seconds, judges, the general public) that this work represented two paintings.  One (at the top of this post) shows everything from the my point of view; for the other, you just hang the painting straight and get the view that the passengers would have seen.

Anyway, on to the painting itself.  The main three colours were rose dore, French ultramarine and Indian yellow.  The first two were easy choices, based on the colours of the roller coaster beams.  For the yellow, I was planning in using transparent yellow but ended up going for Indian yellow instead, meaning this painting is in the key of orange warm.  I think it was motivated by me wanting any greens to be dulled right down but this was a mistake.  It meant I had warm versions of all three primaries, making for a very warm looking painting.  Transparent yellow would have put me in the key of triadic right which (my notes on) my experience tell me would give the atmosphere of a cold day but with the heating on indoors, which would have suited the day better.  As usual, some opaque colours made supporting appearances later on.

I started by putting down some masking fluid to protect the tops of the buildings from my sky colours, which feels overly prudent in retrospect.  But I also spattered over some masking fluid, which always gives a bit of a pop.  Then I painted on the sky using my three primaries and sprinkled on some salt. The sky came out amazingly well and the salt decided to work today, giving the impression of papers blowing all over the place, which meant I'd captured the weather conditions perfectly.  If the competition had been ended at this point by an act of God, less than 30 minutes into the competition and with three quarters of my painting covered, I’m convinced I would have been crowned the winner.

After the sky had dried and I'd removed the masking fluid from the rooftops, I painted the roller coaster and the foreground in parallel, flipping backwards and forwards between them.  Let's talk about the roller coaster first.  I started with all the thickest red and blue lines that you can see.  I loosely added a train on the horizontal bit of track, with some people with raised arms.  And for the thinner blue girders, I tried stamping in dry paint with a piece of credit card.  But the paint came out too thick in places and got even worse when I tried to lift it off.  As a last resort in an attempt to rescue a painting that was close to being written off, I stamped in some white highlights with the credit card.  And it worked!  People were telling me how good the white looked.  I'm a very lucky man.

For the foreground, I started with a multicoloured wash, then tried to add darker washes over the top to create a bit more detail. I found this really difficult as the wind was making it impossible to be delicate with the brushes.  It didn't come out great.  While I couldn’t do much about the looseness and lack of detail, there were two problems that I did manage to correct.  First, the foreground buildings didn't really work well together, so I laid a thin orange glaze over the top, which seemed to work.  And second, after the orange glaze, the foreground and roller coaster didn’t seem to work well together; I solved this problem by adding lots more of the blue to the foreground in all the windows and shadows.  I ended up with something marginally acceptable.

As final touches, I added the figures and birds.  The figures were painted on using cotton buds, with cadmium red, cadmium yellow, French ultramarine, titanium white and sepia.  The birds were painted on using titanium white and sepia after spending some time actually observing birds.  And the final step was to remove the masking fluid spatters.

As a painting, I think there's a great underlying idea but I'm not entirely happy with the execution, especially of the foreground buildings.  Maybe they'd not have looked so orange if I'd used transparent yellow rather than Indian but it's too late to change that now.  This one will be going up for sale.  But Landscape Artist Of The Year is about more than the painting.  It's about the craic and the adventure.  How did that go?

Let's start with the weather.  It was generally a nightmare.  The day started off very windy but I found a spot by a bench and managed to tie my easel securely to it using a linen bag and the lace from my brush roll.  A couple of other artists got into trouble when their easels blew over.  Later on it started raining and I had to protect my painting under a towel.  I did go back to the hotel to get an umbrella but it turned inside out too many times to be of any use.

The presenters and judges?  Well, there was no sign all day of Joan Bakewell but Stephen Mangan did wander round talking to people.  He spotted straight away that I wasn’t a local, so I told him that the dress code at Royal Ascot had put me off applying for a place in the Southern heats.  And just for good measure, I pointed out that he wouldn’t be able to get away with the clothes he was wearing in Blackpool in the Ascot heats.  Comedians never like being in the receiving end of banter like that, do they?  And it was good to see all three judges take a tour around all the wildcards.  All three commented on the wonkiness of my painting, and all three got the point about there being two versions of the paintings in two different reference frames.  One of the judges described a group of four of us as "colourful corner".  Another asked whether the four of us in the corner already knew each other before today: she was amazed at how well we were getting on together.  Which brings me on to…

The other painters.  Words just can’t describe the positive vibes and genuine camaraderie that you get among a group of wildcards.  Things always start off a bit reserved in the morning as people concentrate on their own paintings and don't want to disturb anyone else but after a couple of hours, things loosen up and people start circulating and talking to each other.  Some of these people deserve a special mention, so here goes.

First, here's a long shot of colourful corner.  I'm second from the left, so there's one artist to my left and two to the right.

Here's the artist on my left, Lisa Ainslie.  She'd travelled down from the Scottish borders with her young family.  Her painting had a great blue and pink in it that vibrated against each other on the paper while also matching what she was wearing.  She didn’t seem happy with the quality of her final painting but I thought it looked great.  Having said that, I've since seen some of her other work and it's even better than this, so maybe she did have an off day after all.  * Photo credit: Lisa *

Immediately to my right was a guy called Daniel Moore, originally from Northern Ireland but now based in Manchester.  He provided that little bit of extraversion that we needed in our corner to get the party started.  Here's his painting.  Again some great blues and pinks.  He sounded as if he wanted to add more detail to the buildings when he got home but I'd have been happy to stop at this point.  Daniel was really popular with the production team from early morning all through the day and got a bit of on screen time.  * Photo credit: Daniel *

To Daniel's right was Fiona Matheson.  She started by masking out the roller coaster, then sprayed on loads of paint from aerosol cans.  After removing the masking she used masks and stencils to add the buildings along the bottom, this time using a brush.  Once the production team became aware of what was being created, they became more interested and I think thought we'd be seeing Fiona in action when the program comes out.  This was my favourite out of all the wildcard paintings.  A favourite with lots of other people too.  That rollercoaster has a real swoosh to it.  It's a shame this one didn’t feature in the program.

My second favourite painting was by Mark Harris, an unorthodox potter and someone described on the program as a contrarian.   Being more interested in the sea than the pleasure beach, Mark was on the opposite side of the wildcard area to the colour corner team.  He's one of those guys that will happily talk about painting with anyone.  He was looking around at the views while queueing for registration and telling me that nobody would be using green today, so I did give him some stick when he put all that green down for the sea.  And it was Mark that brought the production team's attention to Fiona's masterpiece, which was such a classy thing to do.

And finally I should mention the artists' seconds and the public passing by.  They would look at everyone's paintings and find positive stuff to comment on in all of them.  In my one previous wildcard adventure, we were fenced off from the public.  But I prefer it when random people wander around and talk to us.  I like hearing feedback from non-artists as well as from artists.

Needless to say, I wasn't the winning wildcard.  More surprisingly nor were any of those artists featured above.  I didn't get a great view of the winning wildcard painting but it must have been good to beat Fiona's.

H1 2022 Poll Results

Thanks to everyone that voted in the latest poll. It's time for me to talk about the results.  There have been 27 responses so far, and I've never had more than that.  People are welcome to keep voting on this poll or indeed any earlier polls.  I've no plans to close any of them.

Here are the links to all the polls:

- H1 2022

- H2 2021

- H1 2021

- 2020

- Portraits with markers

- Summer 2019

- Q1 2019

- Summer 2018

Anyway, the results.  These paintings didn't get any votes.  I can't complain as I was one of the 27 that voted and I didn’t vote for any of these.

These paintings all got one vote.  A few there that might consider themselves lucky to get any votes at all.  On the other hand, I was surprised Sarah Ann (middle of the top row) only got my vote.  Maybe she was a bit too muddy in places for everyone's taste.

Two votes for all of these.  The four in landscape format did well to come out this high.

These paintings all got three votes.  It feels like we've left behind the very worst stuff now.  More importantly, there are two more people out there that like the one of me.

Four votes for these.  While we're past the worst, it doesn't yet feel like we've reached the best.  Sarah Ann is still the biggest shock.  Rory Burns and Ruby are the top scoring portraits.

Five votes for these paintings.  We're starting to get to the good stuff now.  Animal Biscuit Valley (at the top in landscape format) is one of my favourites.

Tom mix, votes six.  Rhus on the left did really well to come out this high.  My inktense pencil nudes don't tend to do well in these surveys.  Six votes for a nude is like six votes from France in Eurovision, a big positive message.  Ullapool (bottom right) is one of those that other people seem to like more than I do, both on this poll and on Facebook.

Seven!  Two decent oil pastel paintings.

Eight votes for these.  Two of there (the one on the right and the one at the bottom) are the first ones so far in the countdown to have been painted on location.  Six paintings out of fifty on the poll were on location and all of them have finished in the top eleven.  That's one big message coming through.  I'll be doing plenty more plein air watercolour paintings during the summer.  And some plein air oil pastels when the weather cools down enough that I can take them out without them melting.

Torres Del Paine National Park got nine votes.  This is in Argentina, so done from a photo.  The oil pastel landscapes are more popular than the oil pastel portraits and figure drawing.

The Allotment and the Trinity Hall Wall got ten votes.  The Allotment was popular on Facebook and sold quickly.  There are paintings that I prefer to it that got fewer votes but that's why I do these polls.  The Trinity Hall one was the top scoring Cambridge painting out of the six in the poll.

A big jump to 14 votes for Rochester Castle.  This is probably my second favourite out of the fifty, so I'm glad to see it getting so many votes.

Three paintings tied for second on 15 votes.  Two on the left of obscure corners of the village that I was more than happy with and Dreamland Margate on the right that I thought was a disaster at the time after I had to redo the whole sky in muddy, opaque colours to hide some really bad birds in the top right.  I wish I knew what people liked about it.  Is it the colours in the fog at the bottom of the wheel?  I'll have to try something like this again.

And the favourite with 16 votes was Number Two, the house next door.  Definitely my favourite out of the fifty and I'm glad to see people agree with me. See the downstairs window on the right?  That's the room where this one sits on the wall.  Three Hartlip paintings in the top four might be a message or might just be down to lots of local voters.

Thanks once again to everyone that voted.  These polls always throw up surprises.