Climate Change

It's been a while now since my last painting but I decided earlier in the week that today was going to be my first watercolour day of 2023.  The days have been feeling a bit warmer but not warm enough to head out for some plein air painting so I was only out in the garden.  I may have been a bit premature digging out the watercolours as it was much colder outside than I thought.  The 20 minutes up to sunset were freezing.  Most of the afternoon I spent indoors waiting for paint to dry.

The view is one in Queendown Warren, where I've been taking some long walks lately.  It has some magnificent views across the valley that would be great to wake up to but are a bit lacking in the sort of big shapes that I need to make paintings interesting.  This view was the best I could find.  Colour-wise, I've used all three of my sets of supergranulators (tundra on the left, Shire in the middle and desert on the right) plus some cerulean blue in the Shire sky.  I just wanted to give these colours a go and couldn’t decide which to use, so went for all three in different sections.  I could have divided the paper into three with masking fluid or masking tape but thought I'd have a go at blending the three subpaintings together.

After putting down a drawing, I masked out the fenceposts, some snow on the rocks and branches and a signature and then spattered over some masking fluid for snow in the tundra section.  And then I gradually built up the rest of the painting using my supergranulating colours.  I was in the mood for multiple layers today, so started with an underpainting before adding on medium and dark values.  Rather than strictly dividing the paper into three, I allowed the three sets of colours to invade each other's sections and blended them together in places.  Lacking the patience to leave paint to dry and worried about the falling temperature, I used the hairdryer at times to speed things up.

I think this one has to go down as a success.  It's probably the best that the Shire colours have ever looked and I think this is because the tundra and desert colours bring out the best in them.  Maybe I should try some tundra and Shire or desert and Shire paintings of the warren.  My plans to replace the Shire supergranulators with forest when they run out might have to be changed.  The worst bits about this one are the tree on the right, which should either have been left out or painted on a lighter value, and the foreground rocks, which don't exist in reality and that I only included in an attempt to let the supergranulators do their thing.  But the colours in the hills and the tree lines are amazing wherevthe different colour sets have mixed together.

This one's definitely going up for sale.  An encouraging start to the year.

Landscape Artist Of The Year

Just six days to go until episode 4 of this series of Landscape Artist Of The Year and my second appearance as a wildcard.    It's on Sky Arts, Wednesday 1st February, 8pm.  I'm not expecting to feature much this time, if at all.

The 2023 Colour Palette

This week I've been thinking about the colours in my watercolour palette.  My 2022 palette included three Daniel Smith primatek colours as special guests and they've been under trial throughout 2022, looking to earn themselves long term squad places.  So how did they get on?

Well, first up, there's the Mayan blue genuine, a sparkly dark blue with hints of both green and indigo.  I think it's an amazing colour.  It's trial has been successful and it's earned its place in my palette.

Next we come to haematite violet genuine.  An interesting colour, mainly for its special effects when combined with other colours and granulating all over the place.  It's expensive though and seems a bit short of pigment, running out really quickly.  When my tube's empty I'm going to be giving potters' pink a go.  It has the same granulating effect on other colours, which is why it features in so many of the Schmincke supergranulating colours.  Those two colours are competing for one place.

The third primatek colour was green apatite genuine.  It's a colour I like, granulating into two different colours, but its thunder has been stolen a bit by the supergranulators.  If I want that supergranulating effect then, rather than use my regular palette and throw in green apatite with a red, yellow and blue, I'd go for a set of supergranulators instead.  And it's not as if the green apatite could be used as an extra colour with those sets: it's too green for desert and tundra and too highly pigmented for shire.  So it's with regret that I'll not be replacing it when it runs out.  Instead, Payne's grey, which has been patiently waiting in the wings  all this time, will replace it.

But there's more palette news.  I'm changing one of my colours.  I keep hearing too many stories about Prussian blue having lightfastness  problems.  It’s been one of my colours right from the beginning but I've made the difficult decision to let it go.  Replacing it is Winsor blue green shade (known as pthalo blue to most paint manufacturers).  It's a colour I'm looking forward to using.  It's highly pigmented and can look garish on its own or in mixes.  It's often referred to as an alternative to Prussian blue and I see it as the teenage version of an adult Prussian.  One thing that Prussian can do that pthalo can't is to achieve very dark values but this won't be a problem as the Mayan blue genuine has the dark values covered.

All of this meant that my colour swatches from two years ago were looking an bit out of date.  They were based on three reds, three yellows and three blues, so 3x3x3=27 different combinations.  But of those 27 swatches, the nine involving Prussian blue were now out of date and I was missing 18 swatches featuring my two new blues.  So it was time for a new swatching exercise.

I found this sketchbook on Amazon.  Cold pressed cotton paper with the same weight as the paper I use and 48 long (24 double sided sheets).  What's not to like?  I prefer double page spreads to single pages, so I've left the first and last pages empty, and then for the other 46 pages I have:

- 4x3x3=36 pages of swatches of blue/red/yellow combinations.  So that's (i) the Mayan, Winsor, cerulean and French ultramarine blues, (ii) Winsor red, rose dore and quinacridone magenta, (iv) raw sienna and Indian and transparent yellows.  Cadmium yellow and red are in my palette but being opaque colours, only generally used as herbs and not as key ingredients, so are not included in these triad swatches.

- 2x2x1 pages of swatches of blue/red/yellow Artgraf combinations

- A couple of pages looking at what I can get from mixing viridian with different reds (including burnt sienna and cadmium) and mixing burnt sienna with blues (including Payne's grey)

- Three pages of swatches of my Schmincke supergranulating sets and a fourth page ready for the forest supergranulators if I end up replacing the Shire supergranulators with these.

On all of my triad swatch pages, I have four big blocks of colour where I've tried to mix a number of different greens, purples, oranges and neutrals.  There's lots of variegation in all those boxes.  And on every page (not just the triad swatches) there's room for me to make notes, and I've copied some of these over from the old postcard swatches and from my notes on colour keys.

I took a lot of time over these swatches.  Not much choice in the matter when using a sketchbook rather than postcards, but I still took more care than before.  The whole swatching exercise took three days!  I screwed up one page and had to Pritstick some corrections over the top, which was a bit annoying.  I'd be lying if I said the thought of redoing everything all over again hadn't tempted me.  Anyway, I'm expecting this sketchbook to be part of my arsenal for a good few years.

<Edit: I later decided that green apatite genuine would be a good addition to my Shire supergranultors.  It’s darker than the Shire colours but they need some dark greens in there for trees, otherwise they're only suitable for rolling hills>

Stuart Broad

I don't want to spend more time talking about this one than I have to, so let's get on with it.  It's another cricketer portrait.  I needed two more cricketers to complete my XI: an opening batsman and a seamer who could bat at 9.  I thought Stuart Broad could fill that latter slot.

But so much went wrong with this one.  I don't think I was in the right mood to paint today and should have sat back and read a Western, but too late now.  I with a grid and drew upside down but never really got a likeness.  I should have kept trying but went ahead and reached for the pencils instead - as I said, I wasn't in the right mood. I actually went through two layering and wetting stages: after the first the face was too yellow (especially compared to the neck) and the background wasn't dark enough to negatively paint the hands and shirt, so I applied more colour and wet it again.  This normally ruins a paint8 g but improved things slightly today, although I still think this is a big flop.

So what's wrong with this one?  Well

- Not enough time spent trying to get a likeness - this looks more like Dominic Cork to me

- Stuart’s left iris right in the middle of the eye rather than looking to his left.  Very poor on my part.

- Colours layered on the face rather than used sparingly like in my better figure drawings.  Finally getting coloured pencils has resulted in me doing things with inktense pencils that work with coloured pencils but nor with inktenses.

- No planning with colours.  I just used everything.  Another thing that works with coloured pencils but not with the inktenses.

- Just lots of laziness and no thinking.  Too many shapes on the face (right side of his mouth, dark areas around the left eye socket) that are the wrong shape or wrong value and where I can't blame the initial drawing.

On the other hand, there's one thing I do like and that's the colours that I've ended up with in the background.  Layering multiple colours has left me with some really moody darks.

That's me done for today.  I just looked at the weather forecast, hoping for some warmer days with no rain but it looks like there’s a cold spell on the way, so no plein air work coming soon, let alone watercolour.  I nee to start thinking about what to use as my Landscape Artist of The Year entry for 2023. 

The Natural Way To Paint, Charles Reid - Book Review

Not a Christmas present, this one.  It's a book I've been after a while and that I've been watching out for using the CamelCamelCamel website, which monitors the prices of books on Amazon.  Well, this one became available in December at a reasonable price, so I ordered a copy.  It arrived not long after Christmas after a long journey from the USA.  It's a 144 page paperback.

It's all about figure drawing and, in particular, about Charles' unique loose figure drawing style.  If you don't like the look of the cover or of any page previews that you can find on the internet, best stay away.  Anyway, let's get down to business.  This book has six chapters of various lengths.  I'm going to discuss the chapters individually but, to be honest, the book felt like one long journey.

The first chapter was on contour and gesture drawing.  Contour drawing was covered brilliantly in another of Charles' books.  There's more coverage here but from a different viewpoint.  A nice example drawing some eyes and some discussion of extending contour drawing to contour painting.  There's a bit on adding shadows to a facial contour drawing where, sadly, the quality of the illustrations is too poor for me to be able to see what's happening, but the text explains everything.  We then go on to gesture drawing, which is illustrated with some excellent worked examples.  Charles' idea of gesture drawing is linking different parts of the body with a single curve - maybe the edge of one arm and of another leg, for example, look like two sections of one long line.  I don't think this is the same as the fast and loose scribbling that Bert Dodson calls contour drawing in his book.

Then we have a chapter on painting techniques and colours.  The most useful stuff in this chapter was on how to hold the brush, how to mix colour on the palette and keeping the palette clean (I'm looking at YOU, Liron Yanconsky!).  There's also some early stuff on Charles' style, talking about painting with spots of colour.

Then we start getting down to the real business with a chapter on getting from silhouettes to 3D form.  We start with drawing silhouettes (in more than one colour) and how to make them three dimensional using shadows, colour temperature and colour intensity.  We get the first mentions of how to hint at the facial structure by painting shadows in the right places, which is absolutely not the same as painting eyes, noses and mouths.  There's also lots of talk about blending shadows together, even if they're different colours and both on the body and in the background.

Then there's a short and sweet chapter on facial features which is absolutely rammed with a valuable tips on painting the eyes, nose and mouth that I've not seen anywhere else.  And that's probably because this is all about painting the face in a figure drawing, where less detail is needed than when painting (for example) a head and shoulders portrait.

Then there's a chapter on demonstrations.  This chapter, while reiterating some of the ideas from earlier in the book, also introduces plenty of new ones.  In particular, this is where there's the most discussion on linking together the figure and the background and on using the background to negatively paint the figure. A lot of this chapter, rather than being step by step demonstrations, is just examples of finished works used to illustrate points, which suits me.  There are only two actual demonstrations.  Both are worded as instructions but they didn't feel like recipes as there was plenty of wording in the first person, with Charles' comments on both why he was telling us to do particular things and on how well the paintings were going.  So he didn't raise my hackles at all.

And then the final chapter was on composition and design.  Most of this chapter was a series of paintings with commentary from Charles on why he made particular compositional decisions.  So not really a set of tips, but more a demonstration of thinking in practice.

The book itself was packed full of tips.  It didn't feel like reading a set of condensed notes like other tip-packed books do.  This was more a long story by Charles where the tips just emerged organically and in an easily digestible manner.  It's only when a you've read a few pages and start to reflect that you realise just how much he's giving away.  If he was sat in this room painting and talking, I'd be listening to every word he said.  And all the words glide down effortlessly like a Baileys & Vienetta - writing like this is an underrated skill.

The book's all about figure drawing in Charles' style but that doesn't mean we all have to copy him.  There's plenty in there that I can incorporate into my own figure paintings (or even landscapes or portraits) with only minor tweaks to my style.  On the other hand, I'm itching to try out Charles' style all in, either with watercolours or with the Artgrafs.

I'd not recommend this, by the way, as a first figure drawing book, pointing people instead to Huston or Legaspi, and even then probably only after a more general book on drawing.  This is a book for the experienced figure artist wanting to learn more advanced techniques and to explore new styles.

I don't feel like I've eulogised enough about this book.  Maybe I'm just knackered from making notes on it and then recording the notes on a flash card app that I can use to throw up random tips from random books.  I almost said that reading the book had made me tired too, but that's definitely not the case.  It's only afterwards when you try to sort through everything without Charles there to guide you that you realise how much there is to sift through.  Make no mistakes, this is an excellent book and one that I'll keep coming back to.  I have three of Charles' books now and they complement each other nicely.  It's like sitting down by the fire to hear his stories for three evenings - different stories each night with only a bit of overlap.

A pleasure to read, inspirational, packed with eye-opening tips.  This is a brilliant, brilliant book and is the easiest five palettes that I've awarded for a while.

🎨🎨🎨🎨🎨

Supergranulator Swatching

For my second and final set of swatches today, I turned to the supergranulators.  Now being the owner of three sets of Schmincke supergranulators, I invested a couple of days ago in a new metal tin for 18 full pans, although it looks like it might fit 21.  And this tin needed a swatching sheet to keep in it.  Not just to help me understand the colours but also to help me avoid disastrous errors when refilling pans.

You can see I've divided most of the tin into three rows, corresponding to the tundra, Shire and desert sets.  There are also the three colours out on the right that aren't part of the sets but which I've been using in conjunction with them.  Rose dore adds some much needed warmth to the Tundra set and red to the Shire.  Cerulean blue is needed for skies with the Shire set, Shire blue being quite green.  And cadmium yellow has been used with the tundra set whenever I need greens with a bit of life, admittedly not greens that you'd ever see in tundra regions.  There's still room in the tin, of course, if I find that the desert set also needs some supplements.

To make the swatches, I started by laying down colour in three quarters of a circle.  I'd then put water in the fourth quarter and encourage some bleeding.  After that, maybe charge in some thick paint in the thickest areas, maybe stab in some water in places, maybe lift off a bit of paint.  It's a lot of messing around but it's worth it as it gets the paints to really strut their stuff and to separate into their individual ingredients.  I need to remember this when it comes to painting as I don't think I've yet shown off these colours to maximum effect.

As to individual colours, I was already a big fan of the tundra pink and violet but how are the desert supergranulators?  They're the new kids on the block.  Well the green and the grey look really interesting to say the least.  I'm looking forward to giving these a try.  Tundra and desert look there to stay.  The jury's still out on Shire: if I don't come up with something good before they run out, I may have to try out the forest supergranulators.

Anyway, that's all for today.  Back to reading that Charles Reid book.

Artgraf Swatching

It's a new year and I want to be out painting as soon as possible so that I can get a set of paintings worth including in an entry to Landscape Artist Of The Year.  It's still too cold outside to paint properly but, with no rain expected this morning, I was able to wrap up and head outside the garden to swatch out my new gear.  The first time I pick up a paintbrush in the new year has to be swatch-related: it's the law.

First up is my Artgraf gear.  Nine chunky pans packed full of pigment, possibly involving graphite and shaped like tailors' chalks.  I tested these out on rough watercolour paper, cut to a size that would slip into the case for my six earthy Artgrafs.

First I swatched out all nine colours separately on one side of the paper.  For each colour, I marked the left third of the box with the chalk and then wet it.  Then in the middle thirds, I used the chalks like watercolour pans and painted in a strip.  Then for the right third I painted on water and tried to coax the colour over from the middle third.

And what did I learn from this?  Well:

- applying the chalks to the paper then wetting the marks gives the most intense colour

- it also makes the tooth of the paper show

- although I believe these are opaque colours, they can shine like transparents when diluted down

- the magenta colour is less intense than the others, so it takes a bit of work to build up some thickness.

- sanguine is more earthy than I thought it would be.  At times it also has some weird purple tones.

- sepia is more like burnt umber

- brown looks more like sepia.  Maybe sepia and brown are being packed the wrong way round?

- the dark brown is close to black

Then on the other side of the paper, I did a mixing chart using the three primaries and adding in sanguine and ochre, which felt like alternatives to the magenta and the yellow.

And these were the conclusions from the mixing chart:

- good to see that the magenta and blue could get to a violet.  I've seen artists on YouTube only being able to reach a neutral colour: their sets may have had a warmer red than magenta in them

- the greens look interesting: bright ones with yellow and earthier ones with ochre.  Definite promise there.

- the four oranges all look fleshy.

It's the fleshiness of the oranges that I found most interesting.  I'm partway through reading The Natural Way To Paint by Charles Reid and he mixes colours like this from cadmium red and either cadmium yellow or raw sienna.  And then he throws in cerulean blue, a cool blue, to cool things down in places.  I'm already starting to think that these colours could be used for figure drawing.  The sepia, sanguine and maybe the brown could all darken down skin tones.  I could end up with a more realistic palette for figures than in my inktense paintings but everything's relative and Charles Reid style figures are still at the impressionistic end of the spectrum, just not as extreme as my inktense figures.  If I do try figure drawing with the Artgrafs, though, I should learn from my earlier attempts and use them more like watercolour pans and less like inktense blocks.

Graham Thorpe

I've been in action with coloured pencils again.  This one took me three days.  It let me use some of the ideas that I picked up from the Karen Hull book.  The subject is former England cricketer Graham Thorpe.  Nothing much has been heard of Graham since he was rushed to hospital in the middle of 2022 with a serious illness.  I hope he's on the road to recovery.

After putting down some initial shapes using a grid, I got to work on the eyes in great detail, magnifying my source photo to help me.  In particular there are highlights in there and some coloured marks on the white of the eye that try to make the ball look spherical.  I then started on the rest of the face by putting in all the weird colours I could see in the source photo.  There were greens, blues, reds, oranges, purples, pretty well everything.  I also did some work on the ears and mouth.  When I stopped at the end of day one, the painting looked like this:

This was actually looking pretty good, but I was never seriously tempted to stop.

On day two, I started work on the cap and t-shirt.  Somewhere in one of the books I read that the more levels of blue that you mix, the better.  So while the t-shirt started as several different blues in different places, this was later topped up with separate layers of pthalo, helio reddish and Prussian blues.  The cap started off with thin blue lines drawn in places but these were latee covered in various different layers of blue.  I put in a background, only two layers of colour as I didn’t want it to compete with the face.

Which brings me on to the important bit, the face.  After putting on more impressionistic colours in t(e face and the first of them in the neck, I put on a single layer of beige red.  I was keeping the layers quite light: no pressing or burnishing.  After the beige red went on, I stopped for the day.

That was day three.  The face was a bit too soft and light compared to the background and I wanted it to stand out more.  And I know the so.union to this now: just add more layers of colour.  So I put on more layers of impressionistic colours everywhere.  And then I added a layer of flesh tones.  But this time I restricted the beige red to the lightest areas and used cinnamon and coral in darker areas.  After this, the face was standing out enough for me to be ready to apply the finishing touches.

And those finishing touches were all about blending, with three types of blending applied:

- no blending in the background which I wanted to remain blurry and understated

- blending and burnishing the eyes and lips with a burnishing pen, flattening the tooth of the paper and giving the colours a slight shine

- blending everything else with paper stumps for a more matted look (and not flattening the tooth, leaving more capacity for colour if required), trying to sculpt the 3D shapes at the same time.

And that was me done as I was happy with what I ended up with.  Better coloured pencil artists might well continue adding more colour until the paper was completely full and, after smoothing, would end up with something that looked more like it had been created wit( paint than with coloured pencil.  But I like stopping at this stage when some of the tooth of the paper still shows through - this paper, produced by Seawhites of Brighton, really works for me.  And I do really like what I ended up with here.  The shiny eyes, the subtle (for me) impressionistic colours in the face and a great ear.  Even the cap and t-shirt are fascinating when viewed up really close.

Graham's up for sale.

Critiqued By Liron Yanconsky!

Today I was honoured to have my work critiqued on YouTube by Liron Yanconsky, an artist that I hugely admire.  The link is https://youtu.be/UCVkeEvwl54 and my work comes up just after 1:26.  I submitted some of my better work because Liron's great at spotting areas for improvement even in paintings that I think already look great.

The main messages coming out for me were:

- to improve my use of two point perspective

- get better negatively painting round the outside of shapes

- tone the colours down a bit ("desaturate").  Liron's the master of low saturation - every colour he uses starts from the muddy neutral colour in his mixing well, whereas I start from clean colours.

Lots of positives too but it's the areas for improvement that interested me the most.

And I recommend Liron's YouTube to all aspiring watercolour artists and, indeed, to anyone who just likes to watch a talented artist in action.

Realistic Portraits In Colored Pencil, Karen Hull - Book Review

And here's the last of my Christmas books.  It's a 144 page paperback, slightly oversized at about 9 inches by 12.

The book can be divided into three pieces: about 15 pages of introduction (materials, mark making), 15 pages of tips and 115 pages of demonstrations.  I think you can tell already that this won’t be scoring five palettes.

The 15 pages of introduction are pretty self explanatory.  I didn't learn anything from them.  But then we get to the most interesting 15 pages of the book: the tips.  There was actually a fair amount of useful stuff in there on textures and facial features but this was only a small part of the book.

And then we get the demos, making up a whopping 73% of the book.  There are five of them, so they take up an average of 23 pages each.  You'd think that this would mean Karen went into a lot of detail.  And she kind of did but she didn't.  Because rather than talking us through all her decisions she just gives us a knitting pattern.  Every step in every example is not much more than a list of colours she used.  There's not much explanation and, when there is, it's added at the end.  Too much "Put on these colours…..because….." when a better author would have said "Take a look at the right of the forehead in the photo.  Can you see the pinks and blues?  I wanted to reproduce these.  I had a choice of these colours <picture>.  I went for colours X and Y because I wanted warm blue and dusky pink."  Or whatever.  You get the picture.  Tell us a story about how you made all these decisions.  It's the story that needs to be front and foremost, not the decisions.  I ended up looking at the photos of the work in progress and skimming over the data - I won't even call them words.

So, yeah, not great.  I'm starting to wonder whether coloured pencil writers are just lazy and settling down into a nice easy way to write books.  At some point, someone needs to come in and do to coloured pencil books what people like Charles Reid, Hazel Soan, Jeanne Dobie and Frank Webb have done for watercolour.  Give us books of tips and examples from paintings.  No artist with any individual creativity within them is going to enjoy a book like this.  Anyway, while this one was never going to get close to three palettes, I did learn something from the 15 pages of tips, so that rules out the single palette.  Two it is then.

🎨🎨

It's maybe worth me pointing out what it was about the similarly structured Lisa Ann Watkins book that got it a higher score than this one.  There were two things:

- more useful information on mark making in the introduction

- how, before we got to the full demos, there were individual demos on eyes, noses and fur.  A better attempt at taking us on a learning journey that going straight to the full demos.

- and how Lisa stressed that demos are just demos and not a set of instructions to be followed

The Old Bridge, Latheronwheel

After reading those two books and coming up with this painting, I think I may finally have "got" coloured pencils.  It's all about adding multiple layers very gently and resisting the temptation to strengthen colours by pushing down hard.  You need to get into a zone where you're just adding colours and not watching the clock.  On the other hand, sitting still in the same place bending over a desk for too long can cause a bit of back pain.  This painting took me eight hours, made up of four two hour sessions.  Coloured pencils are definitely not for wimps.

For subject matter I googled Scottish bridges and ended up with this one close to the East coast, a little way south of John O'Groats.  The idea of picking a bridge was so that I could mark out some stones with ink.

Anyway, down went the initial drawing in pencil.  Then I added some ink, taking lots of inspiration from Helen Hanson.  I marked out lots of stones in the burn, loads of stones on this side of the bridge and the odd stone on the other side and underneath.  The stones on this side weren't religiously copied from the source: I just drew in four or five in different places to give me some idea of angle and scale and then filled in the rest randomly.  I also put in some textural dots, filling out some of the greenery shapes so that I could still see where they were after rubbing out all the pencil.  And I added a few bits of flora.

And then I added all the colour.  I started from the foreground and worked my way backwards.  I added loads of coats, all of them ridiculously softly and holding the pencil in the middle, a long way from the point.  I didn't just use greens but also earthy browns, the odd grey, blues, yellows (cadmium in the sunniest places, reds and pinks (madder gave me some great shades).  Just everything really.

For all the green areas (so everything except the sky, the bridge and the mist distant trees) I tended to start with purples or earthy colours, these being rough complements of the green that would dominate those areas - this was following a tip from Arlene Steinberg.  This colour would only be added in certain places and for each subsequent layer, I'd do the same, only adding it in places.  For the background trees, though, I was looking for something cool and blue that could recede, so after starting with some purples I covered the whole area in Prussian blue and this worked brilliantly.  For the bottom left area, I also marked out some grasses with pencil, ink and an embossing tool.

After putting down each green area, I'd mix the colours together with blending stumps, being careful with the direction of my strokes, so that if they showed up (which they did) they’d only add to the image I was trying to create.

For the bridge, I started by darkening the gaps between the stones with blues, greens and browns.  I used three of each colour and varied them around so that all 27 combinations would feature.  For the stones, I used cool greys, then put in random colours, applying them separately to each stone.

The final step after completing a first stab at all the colouring was to take a step back, work out whether the painting fitted together and make corrections.  At this point I decided the inked stone outlines were too vivid, drawing the eye away from other parts of the painting.  So I went over all the gaps between the stones with the sepia pencil, pushing quite hard and trying to make the ink lines invisible.  I also thought the ink wasn't uniform enough over the painting, so added more in places: some random grasses to mark edges, some dots for texture and some extra rock outlines along the side of the burn around areas that were supposed to be grass rather than rocks.  I also raised the grass along the bottom of the bridge and the burn, overlapping them into those shapes so that there was no need for them to have bottom edges.  And then I was pretty well done.

This was a successful painting in my opinion, and a big step forward for me artistically.  There are some great multi-level colours in places, most notably above the bridge and in the big grassy bump in the bottom left.  And just look at the underside of that bridge!  The tooth of the paper is doing some heavy lifting there and making me look outrageously skilled.

If anything, it's the inks on this one that let the side down.  I can't help wondering how much better this would look if I'd not used inks at all.  Or at least used them less (so not for rocks or the bridge).  Going forward, I might use less of the inks.  And in my review of Helen's book, I did say that it could also serve as an introduction to ink-free coloured pencil landscapes, so maybe that's the way to go.  Leaving out the inks would also leave me happier using this grainy cold press paper, so double winning.

Anyway, this one's up for sale.  Maybe I'll do another coloured pencil landscape in a couple of days.