Tree Looking Over Queendown Warren

Hello there, and a big hello if you're here trying to decide whether to invite me into one of the pods for Landscape Artist Of The Year.  The competition closes to entries on Monday so I'm hoping/expecting that judges will be checking out this website some time soon.  If you're one of those judges, you can click on one of the words in the word cloud at the top of the page of you want to filter posts.  I'd suggest landscapes, oil pastels or personal favourites.

Anyway, it's an oil pastel landscape today.  My LAOTY submissions were all oil pastel Landscapes and if I make it into a pod, I'll be bringing the oil pastels along.  The subject matter today is a dead tree in Queendown Warren where I go for my daily four mile walks.  The tree has a great view over the valley and I thought this particular shot of the tree made for a great composition.

The big challenge I set myself today was to make the sky, background, foreground and tree all distinct from each other.  Something that's easy enough to achieve in watercolour by varying the water content but oil pastels?  That's another matter.  I did the painting one plane at a time and thing I did manage to get the distinction I was after.  So it was sky first, very light with the colour, using the edges and not the ends of the pastels, adding lots of white, then smoothing things out with a finger.  Next was the background up to the horizon.  I’m really pleased with how this turned out.  The hedge/tree borders between fields worked out well and you can see in the fields where I've tried to sculpt the landscape while smoothing out with my fingers.  The foreground trees were more tricky.  It took a lot of attempts to get to where I finally ended up but I'm reasonably happy.  When smoothing the colour out, there was a very fine line between oversmoothing with no texture and scraping around leaving too much texture.  I got there in the end, with just enough texture to distinguish the trees from both the hills beyond  and the big tree at the front.  Then came the hillside, the tree and the bit in front of the tree.  For the first and third of those, a lot of it was just a case of putting down random, mainly green, colours and smoothing them downhill, then adding some random colours, mainly brown, in places for foliage and sweeping it up in places.  But let's talk about the tree.

Actually, there's not much to say about the tree, come to think of it.  I put down loads of random colours, generally darker in the darker places and lighter in the lightest places and the highlights.  And then I smoothed it all out with one of those rubber tools, trying to get hard edges around the outside of the tree, while also sculpting the tree with curved lines around the trunk and branches.  After I'd done this, I tried adding and smoothing in more colours where I thought the tree wasn't colourful enough.

Once the tree was done, I filled in the bit of land in front of it and scraped out loads of grass, which showed off all sorts of colours that were waiting underneath.  And that was me done.

Let me say first of all, this one's good enough to go in the shop window.  The highlights for me are the distinction between the layers, the sculpting of the tree and the colourful grasses.  The only thing I'm less than 100% happy about (and others may well disagree with me) are the colours.  It's all a bit blue sky, green grass, brown tree with any impressionistic colours being a lot more understated than is normally the case with my artwork.  I can see some of the (pinkish) light English red in the tree but my other two signature colours, delft blue and deep red, have gone missing.

Anyway, onwards and upwards.  Might have to keep going with the oil pastels for the next week or two.

Thea In Artgraf

Yeah, too much other stuff going on in my life at the moment for me to be able to fully immerse myself in watercolours but I had a creative thought during yesterday's walk that I wanted to try out.  With the Artgraf colours, the trick is to not make long brushstrokes with water because the pigments are so strong that a long stroke just carries the colour along the stroke and hides all the other colours that you were hoping blend in.  In my previous two Artgrafs, my solution was to divide to the paper into little areas that I could work in separately.  But then when I was breathing in the fresh Kent air yesterday I thought why not just do really short strokes everywhere and end up with a painting made up of lots of tiny rectangular brushmarks?  I'm not sure but original idea was probably to have overlapping brushmarks rather than a mosaic effect.  And I was thinking more about painting landscapes than about painting figures.  But I don't always follow the plan.

Today's model was Thea, making her third, no fourth appearance on this blog.  I deliberately chose a back view so that I could have a big shape in which to practice restricting myself to small shapes.  The colours all went on first and then I applied the water in short strokes.  The strikes weren’t rectangular everywhere: I tried in places to sculpt the body with the edges of the mark shapes.  Here's what I ended up with at that point:

Had I thought this to be a perfect painting, I'd have stopped at this point.  Absolutely no question.  I was still in an experimental mood, though, so thought I'd carry on and see whether a bit more work could improve things.  So I had a go at calming down the mosaic effect.  For the hair and face I painted all over with water, trying to get colours to run together.  And for the rest of the body I applied water to the gaps between tiles and tried to coax them to join up.

And that was me done.  I think that, if anything, the earlier version looks better.  The blue shadows down Thea's left side don't clash as much with the rest of her body in the tiled version.  On the other hand, I like the accidental Spider-Man hints on her right forearm in the final version.  Should I have added a background?  I think not: the background would need to be understated and Artgrafs don't do understated: if they're not full on, they just look unfinished and sketchy.  Anyway, I think this one's good enough for now to go in the shop window.

And, yes this is Thea's fourth appearance.  I thought this pose looked familiar.  I'd drawn it before at https://artisticactuary.blogspot.com/2022/09/katjas-back.html and given credit to the wrong model.  The original post has now been corrected.

An England XI

So now I have a complete England XI.  Properly balanced too: two opening batsmen, a wicket keeper and a five man bowling attack that includes two spinners.  Several potential captains but I think we all know who I'd be putting in charge.  If you want to know who they all are, just click on Sport in the list of labels at the top of the page and scroll up and down and you'll find the individual works with their own posts.

And I want to remind everyone that, despite the presence of some legends, this isn't my all time great England selection.  Some of these players are in there only because I came across great photos of them that were just begging to be painted.

Mike Brearley

Another cricket portrait has been long overdue and I've finally come up with one.  I wanted my cricket portraits to make up a balanced England XI (after leaving out my monstrous Stuart Broad fail) and to do this I needed another opening batsman.  I went for Mike Brearley, the greatest captain England have ever had.

As usual, this had several layers of colour to it, with the first ones being very light pressure and the later ones increasing in pressure.  The background and rocket jumper were smoothed out with paper stumps, but everything else was burnished, mainly in white but with a couple of flesh tones in places. Oh, and the hair was burnished in a light, cool grey.  I wanted to distinguish between the main subject matter and the background but I think I'm better off just smoothing everything out with a paper stump – this will be my last go at burnishing a portrait if I remember.

I included loads of different colours everywhere, as you can probably see.  They came out well in mist places but not in the sheet of paper that Mike's holding, where I was starting to rush things at the end.  As for the order in which I did things, I didn't bring everything all through together: I started by putting down enough dark shapes for me to be able to recognise what was in the picture but after I worked on one bit at a time.  Background, then hair, then face and hands, then clothes.

Overall, this one passes and gets a place in my XI but it's not good enough to make it into the shop window.  The likeness isn't there, the mouth and oversized hair being the biggest problems.  There's the rushed piece of paper he's holding.  And in the background the boundary between the bricks and the window is missing a window frame.  But there are some positives too, the reflections in the window being the biggest.

This one took me four days to do and I was rushing at the end.  I've a few other things on my mind at the moment and might need to take a break.  But we'll see.

Zaza II

So, as promised yesterday, I had another go at painting Zaza using the Artgraf colours.  I've used exactly the same pose but have made a change to the layout of the bands.  This time they're equally sized and equally spaced in the background but when they go across the body they're trying to create some sort of 3D effect by following curves.

The methodology and colours are unchanged from yesterday except for two changes:

- the stripes across the body, no longer being straight bands, were marked in pencil and I had to try to move the paint up to the edges myself

- for the stripes in the back, I also used pencil marks, so didn't follow yesterday's methodology of using a ruler to create a temporary mask along the edges.

Comparing this to yesterday's painting, my observations are:

- the colours on the body and the dress are muted, maybe less saturated.  While I'm normally one for not holding back on the colours, I think I marginally prefer today's to yesterday's

-  I think I prefer the colours in yesterday's background stripes though.  Today's seem a bit washed out in comparison.

- while having properly spaced and lined up stripes in the background is an improvement, I think that the softening of the edges (both across the body and in the background) reduces the levels of excitement.

It's hard to decide which of the two I prefer but I rate both of them as successes and worthy of places in the shop window.  In both of them, he folds in the dress are off the charts.

And I'm really starting to enjoy painting with these colours.  I need to think about whether I can use them for landscapes or portraits.  Either way, I may well keep coming back to these stripes, just because it helps discipline me into being careful with applying the water.

Zaza

I'm back on the Artgraf paints today for a number of reasons.  It's pouring with rain outside for a start.  And I'm a little bit distracted by the World Championship chess, so I don't want to be using some medium that requires 100% of my attention.  Finally, I have two pages left in my watercolour block and they're a bit detached from the cardboard underneath, so might buckle if I used normal watercolours on them.  And I'm in the mood for something different.  So let's get started.

It's a debut for Zaza as model, in a pose that I might be able to get away with posting on LinkedIn.  During my outward daily walk today I hit upon the idea of masking out stripes along Zaza's body.  Then on the way back I started thinking about having some refracting bands going across the painting.  So these bands would be at one angle on the left, a second angle along the body and back to the original angle on the right.  Rather than have solid white bands across the painting, I thought I'd colour one set of bands on the body and the other set on the background.  Sounds like a plan.

So I put down a grid of guidelines, then sketched in the outline of the body and masked out stripes with masking tape.  I added some colour by picking up the dry Artgraf pans and using them to make marks.  I tried to vaguely use yellows on the right and in the highlights and blue in the shadows and on the right.  Reds I added everywhere.  For the towel, I started by putting on lots of earthy colours, then added a little bit of the primaries here and there.  Here's how things were looking at this stage:

Next came the exciting bit: the addition of water.  After learning from previous attempts, I was extra careful today.  I used a small flat brush and only performed very short strokes, trying to restrict them to individual colour areas wherever possible, before adding water where colours met and encouraging them to mix.  I also did my usual thing of trying to sculpt the body shapes and contours with my brushstrokes.  It's maybe worth mentioning here that a big side benefit of masking out stripes was that I could work on the body one area at a time without having to worry about the opposing issues of not wanting hard edges to dry while also not wanting to paint too quickly and mix all the colours together.

After the body was dry, I worked on the background stripes.  Rather than masking these out with tape, I used a ruler as a mask, putting yellow ochre along the top of the stripes and dark brown along the bottom.  I then bridged the gap between these two earthy colours with sepia and brown everywhere, and then put in odd primary colour mark for a bit of variety.  And then I painted water over the background stripes and that was me done.

So what do I think of this one?  I'll start with the summary.  It's a success and is up for sale.  The colours are great and I think I've finally managed to use the Artgraf colours properly.

But then there are the stripes.  My refracting bands are a bit jarring because (i) they don't line up on the left and the right, and (ii) they're of varying widths, depending on what the angle is of the edge where they meet the body.  I'm planning on doing a similar painting tomorrow but this time (i) I'll start off with the background bands, making them all horizontal, identically sized and equally spaced, and then (ii) for the bands across the body, I'll use bendy lines to accentuate the three dimensional body shape.  I'll still have the thinner bands on the body and the thicker ones in the background.  I may even use this same Zaza pose after it went so well today.

The South Wind

Yesterday was a day off but I'm back painting again today.  I'm still not feeling up to painting some dead serious watercolours with my usual palette and mainly based on three primaries - that might just have to wait until all the stress is over and my studio is up and fully operational.  That means that if I'm not going to be using the supergranulators as a cheat code, I'm just going to have fun instead with abstract landscapes.

Today the plan was to have a go at repeating some earlier successes by applying paint with a knife straight from the tube and to see where it took me.  And to have a lot of fun along the way.  I started, though, by marking in some birds with masking fluid with the idea that even if I ended up with a psychedelic mess on the paper, it could be interpreted as some sort of landscape.  I also spattered on masking fluid to create magic in the air.

For my starting colours, I went for Winsor red, light red, transparent yellow, cobalt blue, Prussian blue, bunt umber, burnt sienna and viridian.  The light red, cobalt blue and Prussian blue aren't on my first choice palette and need to be used up at some point, so why not start here?  Any concerns about the long term lightfastness of Prussian blue didn't concern me here: it's not a big deal if one of the blues turns to grey at some point (and that's still an if) then it's less of a big deal in an abstract painting.  The green and the earth colours are feeling a little underused, hence their call up.  And Winsor red and transparent yellow were the colours needed to brighten things up in the resulting set.

Once the masking fluid had dried, I squeezed out pea sized bits of of paint and then applied these to the pre-wet paper with a palette knife and spread and mixed them, all fairly randomly.  Some of the knife marks started to look like a tree and some fallen branches and I was happy to encourage this.  I fiddled a round with things, spraying on water and throwing on salt without much to show for it.  The most important thing I did at this stage was to work on the sky.  I first added water to smooth it out and found it was looking too red and dark valued but the addition of some yellow and some dabbing with a kitchen towel got me to something acceptable.

After the paint had dried, I started working on coaxing a landscape out of these random marks.  I added all those background trees on the left using my original colours plus cadmium yellow, which I find is often required to make trees stand out against what's behind them.  I then moved onto the foreground and, after having no luck trying to use my original colours, introduced cadmium yellow and cadmium red to the team.  I used these opaque colours to harden existing edges and to add new edges.  The marks I made tended to be hard edged along one side (the edges of tree trunks) but soft edged along the other side (to give the impression of the trunks being round).  I found that this actually worked and was starting to turn this into something looking like a landscape.

And rather than stopping there, which I could have done with a clear conscience, I kept tinkering.  Because this painting was all about having fun, remember?  So I brought in the titanium white and added some snow.  I added it in the trees and along the tops of the hills and fallen branches.  Just as with the cadmium colours, I was careful to have hard edges along the top of the snow and soft underneath to create a 3D effect.  The 3D effect came out so well that I even started using the white in places as a glaze where there wasn’t any snow, just to strengthen shapes and create depth.  In places the white paint picked up some of the colour underneath it, which was also great.  I also added some long grass marks in the foreground and shorter ones below the trees using the Merlin brush and the three opaque colours.

Finally, I removed all the masking fluid and found that I needed to paint over the birds where some paint had got underneath the masks.  I ended up with making them a cloudy grey colour which wasn't ideal but I felt I was reaching the point at which any more changes to the painting would only worsen things.  So that was me done.

So what did I end up with?  A painting reminiscent of Sastrugi a couple of years ago.  The main difference  compositionally is that I have a big vertical shape to contrast against the horizontals.  And there's a change to the questions that spring to mind: with Sastrugi, the mystery was around whether the painting depicted snow or water but now the question is whether those are fallen branches or just the lumps in some uneven ground.  Maybe some of the lumps are the ground and some branches?  Some of them look like silver birch branches.  Don't ask me what they are; I'm only the artist.  But whether they're hillocks or branches, the colours in them are amazing, the blues and reds in particular.

This one's definitely a success and it's up for sale.  The name comes from an Algernon Blackwood short story.

Bowerman's Nose, Dartmoor

Similar subject matter to yesterday but this time it's on Dartmoor rather than Bodmin Moor.  This is a stack of granite called Bowerman's Nose.

After sticking mainly to the desert supergranulators yesterday, I thought I'd make a change and use two sets of supergranulators.  The idea was to use the desert colours for the Nose and foreground and the Shire colours for the background and sky.  But this was just a starting point that I expected to deviate from in places, and that's definitely something I did do.

Another change to yesterday's methodology was that I put on a small spattering of masking fluid before starting the painting.  Most if this was over the Nose and surrounding rocks but I also included a little in the sky.  I find that the little white spots that the mask leaves behind add a little feeling of magic to the atmosphere.

I started with the sky, wanting to use the Shire blue and Shire grey.  But the Shire blue, as I already knew but was in denial of, is too green for skies.  So I after starting with those two colours, I added in some French ultramarine (chosen because it's one of the components of Shire blue).  I also dropped in some Shire yellow and desert orange just to keep the sky linked to the rest of the painting.  And I threw in some salt for more moodiness.

Next were the rolling hills and fields in the background.  I stared with Shire blue for the furthest hill on the right and Shire green and Shire olive for the nearer hills but ended up using all those three colours plus Shire yellow and desert orange/brown wherever I wanted to and wherever they looked good.  As long as the paper was still wet and I was adding paint that was drier than what was on the paper, I could do whatever I wanted.  Eventually I stopped and let the paint dry.  Once it was dry, I thought it all looked a bit boring, which was why I added slots of very simple trees using all five Shire colours.

Then it was onto the Nose and rocks and I followed the same process as yesterday.  I started with an underpainting over all of it in desert colours, loose and wet into to wet and vaguely trying to use the yellow on the left and the green and grey in the cracks and shadows.  After the first layer was dry, I added a second layer much more carefully, one rock at a time and alternating rocks so that they didn't bleed into each other.  In this second layer, I tried to bring out the granulation by charging in extra spots of colour, dabbing in the odd spot of water and occasionally lifting paint off with kitchen paper.

 Finally I was left with having to do something about the grassy mound in the foreground.   I already had a low value underpainting there from lots of random marks that I'd made with all of the Shire and desert colours while working on the rest of the painting.  I thought about adding some sort of layer on top but couldn't decide between using desert colours (and making it too similar to the rocks and Nose) or Shire colours (which would be too similar to the background, alienating the Nose and rocks).  Instead, I hit upon the idea of using the Merlin brush and some dry paint to flick up lots of grassy marks.  While Shire blue was my favourite grassy colour because it was dark and shadowy, I ended up using all of the Shire and desert colours.  And it ended up helping the while painting fit together.

For a finishing touch, I squeezed out some cadmium red, cadmium yellow and titanium white, intending to add some opaque spatters as a garnish.  But I hesitated for a minute and tried flicking up some yellow grass marks on some scrap paper.  I decided I quite liked these, so added them to the painting.  And then I added red and white grass marks and abandoned the idea of spattering on the opaques.

And after rubbing off the masking fluid and the odd undissolved salt crystal and adding some more paint to one rock that was looking slightly off colour, that was me done.

I rate this one as another success.  It looks like it belongs on the front of a paperback.  Watership Down or Duncton wood, that sort of thing.  I'm starting to feel better about these Shire colours.  The trick is definitely to find the right reds to tone down those greens and the desert colours can definitely do that.  If there's one thing about this one that I'm less than 100% happy with, it's how the two sides of the hill behind the Nose don’t talk to each other as much as I'd like them to: when putting down the initial drawing I made a mistake in drawing them in separately rather than as one energetic gestural line straight through the Nose.  Anyway, this one's up for sale.

Dragon Path

Preparation of the site for my art studio is now complete, touch wood, so I can go back to painting even if I'm still feeling a little stressed.  I gave the supergranulating desert colours an outing, not just because they needed one but also because I thought they might make an easier way back into the swing of things than going for my normal palette.

As subject matter I've gone for the Cheesewring on Bodmin Moor, Cornwall,  it's one of those weird piles of balanced but stable looking stones that I can't resist painting.  I was hoping that the desert colours would bring out some of the starkness of the moor.   If they did, then maybe the tundra supergranulators could also bring that out in a different painting on another day.  Rather than naming this one after the Cheesewring, I've named it after the short story by Jacqueline Simson that introduced me to this rock formation.  The story can be found in Terror Tales Of Cornwall, presumably available at all good booksellers.

After getting a rough pencil drawing down, the first shape I tackled was the sky.  After wetting it (and being careful not to wet the non-sky shapes), I threw in all my five desert colours, not worrying too much about what colours went where.  The colours started off a bit too watery, so I charged in more concentrated colour in places, trying at the same time to get some colour variety in a sky that was starting to look a bit too uniformly coloured.  I threw on some salt and added some tiny watery spatters to try to bring out some atmosphere as the paint dried.

Then I moved on to the rocks and the background, again using whatever colours I wanted wherever I wanted to but tending to have the darker colours (desert grey and desert green) around the bottom of the rocks and the lighter desert yellow on the tops and on the left.  I tried to vary my middle values between desert orange and brown and the darks between desert grey and green.  I included the tree line on the left only for compositional reasons - there's no hill there in reality, let alone a wooded hill.

And then I stopped to look at what I was left with and it wasn't pretty.  The sky was very similar to the rest of the painting in terms of both hues and value.  But I believe I managed to solve this problem. The first part of the solution was to distinguish the tones.  To do this I applied a glaze of tundra blue over the sky, generally thin but of varying thickness.  Things looked better already.  The purist in me wasn't happy about having to use a cold tundra colour with all those warm desert colours but when it comes to a punchup, the artist always wins.

The second step in the solution was to darken all the values in the rocks.  To be honest, this should really be thought of as normal painting practice rather than a rescue: it's only how bad the painting had been looking that made me think of this as a rescue.  Anyway, I went in and darkened all the values by adding a new layer.  In this second layer, I wanted to harden all the edges, so as well as taking extra care over the ends of the stones, I started by painting alternating stones and finished by going back and painting all those that I'd skipped.

It started raining at one point and I stopped and came indoors, thinking I'd finished.  But then I saw that there was one stone that didn’t look right, being much redder than all the others in the Cheesewring.  So I headed outside to the canopy hanging over the side of the garage and finished the painting out there without an easel.  And that was me done.

And, you know what?  I thought this was going to be a disaster and was preparing excuses about being out of practice but I really like this one.  The values work, the colours all hang together, the granulation is working even after adding a second layer and there's a real moodiness coming through.  Not only that but it's feeling professional for reasons that I can't identify.  It's a winner and it's up for sale.

Pulp Fiction

I have a day's respite today from preparing for the art studio and thought I'd better dust off some cobwebs and get back to my artwork.  After watching Pulp Fiction all the way through for the first time ever a couple of nights ago, I wasn't short of potential subject matter.  Tarantino is a genius when it comes to lighting and shot selection.  You start to notice stuff like this once you've been painting for a while.

I picked a shot with the John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson characters in it.  I've not had mulch chance to practice portraits lately so thought I'd take advantage of the chance to do two at once.  I always also attracted by the light in both characters' hair and all that black in the ties and whistles.

I started with the darkest areas as usual, and with my well established black recipe.  That's a layer of delft blue, then dark pt(also green, dark red and helio blue reddish.  And then repeat, so that's four layers if colour in total.  In between layers I would use those same four colours in the faces and some other colours in the background on the left.  The highlights on the suits started white but I added in all four of my black ingredients, quite softly.  I also added some light yellow glaze over all highlighted areas (suits, faces, gun, window frames, hand,…).  With some of the later coats, I wasn't that bothered about filling shapes exactly to the edges - I like the way my coloured pencil portraits look aged and fuzzy and wanted to encourage this.

Finally I burnished the gun and any highlights in white and then smoothed out everything else wot( a paper stump.  And that was me done.

I've not really achieved likenesses for either actor and SLJ's shortened arm looks odd but I do like the look in Travolta's eyes and and the highlights in both characters' hair.  The rainbow colours in SLJ's hair look great but were just a happy accident.  After careful consideration, though, this one won't be going in the shop window.

Still, I got some practice in.  I'm starting to feel that once that art studio is fully operational the standard of my artwork is going to go through the roof.