Jennifer Evie

I wasn’t in the mood for a long day of painting today, so decided to have another go at a figure drawing with the inktense pencils while the lessons from my last attempt about not using too much pigment and sculpting the body with my brushwork were still fresh in the memory.  Today's model is Jennifer Evie, making her debut.

For the initial pencil drawing, I uses a 7x5 grid to help me get everything in the right places.  I was especially careful about drawing in most of the shadows and creases on the thing she's wearing.  I say most because the are places where I just got into the flow and made up my own gestural creases rather than copying the source photo.  I think this mix of copying and improvising may actually be better than either of the individual strategies on its own.

My initial plan was to make this a monochrome painting in deep indigo but I changed my mind at one point.  I think it was when I got to Jen's left arm and realised there were no shadows down its edge.  I can cope with little lost edges but a whole arm seemed too much to me, so I decided to negatively paint the arm by putting in a background colour.  Using indigo didn’t feel right, so I went for bright blue instead.  And to keep everything in harmony I put some of the blue into the hair and into any shadows on the body.  And because two colours felt wrong to me (either too few or too many), I brought in poppy red as a third colour.  I added it to some of the body shadows, generally those on the left of all the individual shapes.

After wetting all the colour, I decided the painting needed some background on the left, so put this in using the rod and the blue.  And with a little bit of pigment left in my wet water brushes, I was able to add some very low value marks in a few places.  And that was me done.

And you know what?  I like this one.  It's an interesting set of colours (just the three; violet was not included, believe it or not).  I've used enough white space today, there's some great gesture in the folds, the background (and the way it fades out) looks professional and the clothing, without any red or blue in it, contrasts well against the body.  This one's up for sale.

Garrow Farm, Bodmin Moor

So here's the painting I've been busy with over the last couple of days.  It's a deserted farmhouse on a Bodmin Moor, a scene that's been in my source material pile for a while.  I originally picked it out as a potential subject for a painting with the desert supergranulators and it's possible that I may come back to this scene in future.

I started by putting down a very light pencil drawing.  Because exact replication of the scene wasn't that important, most of the drawing was freehand, although I did use come ruler measurements to get the building right; one of the advantages of using a photo on the iPad rather than a printout is that I can scale the size of the photo on the iPad to match the size on the paper.  Once the pencil outlines were down, I put down some marks with fineliners.  Most of these were the shadowy gaps between the foreground rocks, although I did add some shadows under other rocks, under the edge of the roof and in the doors and windows.  I also drew in the trees, added spotty textures on the hillside and outlined the odd brick.  I managed to resist the temptation to outline the house or the hills: a sure fire way to turn my starting drawing into a page in a colouring book.  Oh, and I also marked out a few ruts in the paper for grasses and roof tiles.

And then I moved on to the colours.  For the initial colours, I used:

- blues for the sky between the clouds, with some purples and greys at the bottom of the clouds

- all sorts of colours for the rocks at the front and, to a lesser extent, those further back

- otherwise (so for the house, the walls and all the empty land), following an idea in the Arlene Steinberg book, I started with the complement of the local colour.  So violet for the orange hills, red for the grass and I can't remember what for the house.  And at that point I took an overnight break.

This morning I returned to the painting and continued to add colour, keeping the pressure of the pencil on the paper as light as possible.  I tried to add as many unorthodox, impressionistic colours as possible while I was still able to apply the colour lightly.  Local colour could wait until I was needing to apply more pressure.  The sky was maybe an exception, with only blues, reds, purples and greys applied.  There were no yellows or greens in there.  It was while colouring the sky that I really got into a groove.  I was playing a Widespread Panic album (Light Fuse Get Away) and the long, creatively meandering guitar solos crept into my work, when adding one colour to the sky I'd wander around all over the place, hanging around in one spot for a while but then heading off somewhere else without taking the pencil off the paper.  Every now and then I'd swap the pencil for another colour.  I soon found myself doing something similar over the hillside.  Painting to music is one of those side benefits to building the studio and it's not just making it more fun to paint, it's also improving the quality of my work.  I can't wait to using combining coloured pencils with the Grateful Dead in the background.  And whenever I picked up a colour that I thought might do the trick, I marked out a couple of bricks in the building.

At some point I got to a place where I couldn't add any more low pressure colour, so started having to apply more pressure when adding colour.  This is the point at which I switched from crazy impressionistic colours to sensible, local colours.  So more oranges and browns on the hillside and more greens in the foreground.

And, before long, I found myself needing to think about finishing the painting off by smoothing the colour out or (more often) by burnishing.  First, though, I added in the greenery of the trees as I'd reached the appropriate pressure level.  You can see I've used loads of different greens and  some bright yellow highlighting but there's also some burnt sienna in there for earthiness.  And then it was time for burnishing.  I used white in the sky, and on the building and the rocks.  For the foreground and the field t9 the right of the house I used three different greens.  And what else?  Terracotta in the background amd middle ground and I think it was a light warm grey in the stone walls.

Finishing touches?  Well, to get a smooth transition from hills to middleground to walled off field to foreground, I added a bit more terracotta to the walled off field and a bit more green to the middleground.  And because some of the shadows between foreground rocks were looking a bit too stark, I added some Payne's grey around the cracks (obviously firm pressure at this stage).  And that was me done.

And was it a success?  Oh yes.  There's so much to like about this one.  Just take a step back and look at it.  The colours in the sky, the colours in the hills, the colours in the house, all of them unsaturated (ie neutral rather than in your face) but all including so many impressionistic subtleties.  And then there are the colours in the rocks at the front where I've not held back and the contrast is evident.  The greens in the trees also contrast against the background, in this case in a green/orange  complementary way.  Yes, this one's going up for sale.

Coloured Pencil Full Swatch

It's all go at the moment.  We've got someone coming in on Tuesday to replace all the doors and windows in the house, which means not much time for painting for a while.  So I might be using coloured pencils over the next week as I don't mind taking overnight breaks from painting when I'm using that medium.

I've completed a coloured pencil painting over the weekend but, before we come to that, I thought I'd better update my coloured pencil swatching now that I have 60 colours to choose from rather than just the 36 that I started with.

And here's my swatching sheet with three different pigment levels for each colour.  This sheet will be much more useful for making colour choices than just looking at the colour of the barrel.  Take a look at that walnut brown if you don't believe me - much closer to black than I was expecting.

I guess you could look through this page and identify colours that are so close together that one of them could be replaced with something else.  Raw umber, second from bottom of the middle column, for example, looks very close to the colours above and below it.  But, you know, I'm happy with these 60 colours.  With that many pencils you're always going to get close matches.  I'm stick8 g with this squad and not planning on making any substitutions.

A Bit Of Wood

So what have you painted today?  A tree.  What have you called it?  A Bit Of Wood - it's the name of an Alg…. Is it an interesting composition?  Well it's in landscape format with the tree bang in the middle like the bit down the middle of an open book.

I admit it doesn't sound great but It looks OK to me.  I only had time for the one painting today (heading off to lunch at the Rose & Crown soon) so thought I'd go for another if the crackle pasted boards.  I was thinking of doing one with Shire supergranulators and one with desert super granulators.  I went for the one where the paste formed lots of vertical bands if the board was held up in landscape format and chose the Shire supergranulators thinking this could end up as a forest scene with lots of trees and one big tree at the front playing a starring role.

I started with loads of cadmium yellow along the middle of the board, hoping this would show through as sunlight later on.  Then I reached for the Shires.  I used Shire blue and grey on the main tree, forest brown and green apatite general at the top of the background, Shire green, yellow and olive in the middle background and whatever I fancied in the foreground.  I tried a couple of layers of this but it soon became clear that my choice of colours was too weak and too green.  I was going to have to change plans.

And my planning was replaced by anarchy, so I can't describe in detail what I did. I reached for my normal palette of transparent colours and used most of them in the painting: two yellows, three reds, three blues, two browns and viridian, along with all the supergranulating colours I'd been using up until now.  At one point I squeezed some colours directly out into the paper and spread them all over the central tree with a palette knife.  That seemed to work, although I did need to do some dabbing with kitchen paper to prevent things turning to mud.  I tried adding background tree trunks in red and blue without any luck: they just kept diffusing away into nothingness.  So, instead, what I did with the background was to:

- keep the darkest greens at the top (forest brown, Shire blue and green apatite genuine)  with brushstrokes fanning out from the top middle of the board

- put lots of interesting colours in the bottom background (viridian, Winsor red and Winsor blue green shade are always good value)

- dab paint out wherever the cracks were biggest.  This made them even more prominent and gave a cobwebby impression.

Just as last time, I had great fun tinkering as the tinkering never actually made the painting worse,  but eventually I decided to stop.

So here we are.  I quite like this one.  There's light, texture, atmosphere, the feeling of there being a story behind it all.  This one's up for sale.

A Victim Of Higher Space

I enjoyed painting the foreground in that last painting so much that I decided to go straight into another painting afterwards.  So I reached for one of the three crackle pasted boards that I'd prepared yesterday.  All I wanted to paint was an imaginary hill and a sky, so I went for the board that was divided into two textures where I'd embedded a satsuma bag in the paste and pulled it out the following morning.

I started with acrylic inks, putting indigo into the sky, tipping the board backwards and trying to get the ink to run into the cracks in the sky while leaving islands of white between the cracks using granulation medium, water spray and kitchen paper.  I think I got there.  But when I tried to repeat the exercise on the foreground with sepia and Earth red inks, I found the texture to be so churned up and rough that I couldn't remove all the ink, so it's still there, adding earthy undertones.

And then I went in with all the tundra supergranulators, using only the blue, pink and violet in the sky but all five colours in foreground.  I just added colours wherever I thought the painting needed them for balance.  Except for the tundra green – I generally tried to keep that to the lower slopes.  I added some white ink at one point, hoping it might run into some of the deeper cracks but without much luck.  It did add some lighting highlights in places, though, and I may have added some more highlights with a bit of kitchen paper dabbing.

This one was really just about having fun, and I think that's what I needed to get me back on track.  This is my best painting since moving into the studio.  I especially like all the bits of green on the hillside and like tundra green a lot more than I did before after completing these two paintings today.  This one's going up for sale unframed.  It's only simple but sometimes simple's all that's needed.

I was late getting up this morning (sometime between half eight and nine) and did my daily German lesson on the iPad before heading outside.  I was expecting Looking At You to take up most of the day and was shocked when I found myself stopping for lunch at 1.30pm with two paintings completed.  I think it's painting on these weird surfaces that speeds me up: there's no waiting around for paper to dry.

And this one's named after an Algernon Blackwood short story.  The website with a list of names of his stories might have disappeared but I just remembered I have a collection of them on my Kindle and can look there.

Looking At You

So here it is.  I've finally gotten around to using the second of the shelves I helped myself to when the in laws threw out that old fridge.  The first shelf was used for The Eye In The Sky back in 2020.

Just as before I started by sanding down mostly the class and then putting on a couple of thick coats of Daniel Smith watercolour ground, in both cases leaving a hole in the top left for the eye to peep through.

For the landscape, I picked another scene from Nuuk in Greenland as I wanted a cold scene befitting the shelf's former life and was planning to use the Tundra supergranulators.  I've used a lot of artistic license here,  it just deliberately changing the colour of the house from blue to green (to suit my choice of paints) but also the loo) of the house, adding a third set of windows to the front as I'd got proportions wrong, drawing by sight rather than doing any accurate measurements.

And then the colours went down.  Tundra blue, pink and violet in the sky.  Tundra blue, pink, violet and orange in the foreground,  tundra green on the house with a dark colour mixed from the tundras for the roof.  I also went over some whites with titanium white at the end and pit on a titanium white spatter.

This whole stage of laying down colour was great fun.  For once, every extra bit of layering/fiddling just kept making things look better.  I loved the pinks and violets in the sky but was then absolutely staggered by how the pinks and oranges looked in the foreground, warming things up nicely.  How I ever got myself to stop painting I really don't know.

Finally I taped an eye to the back of the painting.  I decided to go for my Logical Right Eye, a painting that's been earmarked for a job like this for a long time.

So, how does it look in the end?  Well, if it wasn't for I Am The Eye In The Sky, I might be happier.  Compared to that older painting, this one feels inferior.  The eye doesn't harmonise as well with the rest of the painting.  Maybe I should have stuck the eye on the back before I started painting.  And I definitely should have should have picked colours that harmonised with the eye rather than colours that made for a good painting without eye.  Without the eye, though, would this be a good painting?  I'm still not convinced.  The sky is good enough and foreground is off the charts but the house feels a bit shaky.  I'm having a bad run on buildings; maybe I should do some empty landscapes for a while, especially when it comes to painting in that perspex sheet I have prepared.  This one ended up getting binned - it was too big to be worth keeping around and/or spraying with preservative.

Preparation

Some more gear arrived in the this this morning, so I'm taking a day off painting to prepare some surfaces for future paintings.  I have here:

– an old fridge shelf, from the same fridge that the shelf cane from for I Am The Eye In The Sky.  Most of it has been painted over with Daniel Smith watercolour ground, but leaving a conspicuously empty space in the corner.  I think we can all see where this one's going.

– the same applies to the last perspex window pane from the playhouse that used to be where the studio now sits.  Daniel Smith watercolour ground with a big hole in it.

– and then there are three cheap canvas boards from The Works.  These have been sitting around a while waiting to be crackle pasted and painted on.  I've finally gotten around to it now, covering them all in titanium white Golden crackle paste and half burying an old satsuma bag in one of them.

That's all for today folks.

Stirling Castle

I was flicking through the Tony Smibert book this morning looking for inspiration for two forthcoming eye on the other side of the glass paintings.  You don't know what that means?  Just wait a few more days.  Anyway, there were some paintings in the book where Tony and/or Turner had gone to town on the sky and land and left a white castle shape on the top of a hill.  I thought I'd have a go at something similar and, after a bit of googling, came up with Stirling Castle as a suitable subject.  All I've used from the source photo is the silhouette of the castle shape and the rough shape of the hill it's on.  Everything else is made up, including the colours.

For the colour scheme I went for French ultramarine, quinacridone magenta and raw sienna as I wanted colours that could lift out easily if I wanted to lighten areas.  So this is in the key of purple cool which, according to my notes, is good for chilly looking days with the heating turned on indoors.  This key is also good for orange/purple contrasts, so I'd already devised that there would be a big purple hill against an orange sky.

I also did a rough value plan today.  The castle was going to be the lightest area, and the biggest hill the darkest, so that the biggest value contrast was around the centre of interest.  The hill in the bottom left was also to be dark, with the hill on the right and the sky being somewhere in between.  After studying my value plan for a couple of minutes, I decided that I needed to include some light fenceposts in the bottom left for a bit of balance.

I started with a bit of masking fluid, protecting the castle's shape and the fenceposts in the bottom left.  I also masked out some white chalky bits in the cliff side, which turned out to be a bad move, and spattered a little bit of masking fluid over the hills, which turned out OK.

And then the colours went down, from back to front as usual.  The sky was mainly made of oranges and yellows with the odd bit of blue thrown in.  Increased some texture with salt and with screwed up kitchen paper.  It came lay well, even looking bit fare I say Turneresque.  Skies are going really well for me right now and if I was in a world championship of watercolour and it was rained off after thirty minutes with only the skies down I'm confident I'd win on Duckworth—Lewis.

Then it was on to the hills.  I'd already put on a bit of orangeyness with an underpainting while putting on the sky and added several more layers on top,  trying to charge reds, blues and yellows into each layer to create a bit of variegation.  At times I tried lifting off some paint to create fog but never with any success.  To be honest, I think I put on too many layers and things are starting to border on muddy.

Then it was on to finishing touches.  I added some shadows on and beneath the fenceposts, something I normally forget to do.  And the white castle wasn't looking  right, so I added some purple shapes for the darkest areas.  Even then I wasn't satisfied, so added a watery purple glaze over the top.  The white areas on the chalk face were looking even worse, so I glazed some more colour over them and the surrounding hillside.  And that was me done.

I think this one just about qualifies for the shop window, thanks to that amazing sky, the orange/purple contrasts and the fenceposts and hill colour in the bottom left.  In other words, this looks great from a distance.  The thing I'm not happy with is those lighter bits on the hillside, making it look as if the castle has overflowed or vomited.  No, this one's not going in the shop window.

I tell you what, though, I do need a break from castles.

Hever Castle

With the whole day available for painting today, I've finally completed a watercolour in the studio.  Without wanting to take much time planning, I went for a view of Hever Castle that I'd been planning on painting in a certain style as practice for being a wildcard at the castle in June.  We now know I won't be a wildcard but that's no reason to not go ahead and paint the castle anyway and to show what StoryVault teams are missing out on.

This is in the key of green warm, the three headlining colours being cerulean blue, raw sienna and rose dore, all colours that I could see in the stonework and that I thought might work together.  I'm not convinced by this combination, and (weirdly for a cool blue and cool yellow) I found it doesn’t produce great greens.  Cadmium red, cadmium yellow and titanium white all came on as garnishes later and I admit I did reach for the French ultramarine to help me with the dark colour in the bird and with some of the greens.

I started with drawing in some outlines with fineliner pens.  Looking at the final result it's clear this didn’t work out.  Maybe the problem was that the castle was a boring shape with too many vertical lines.  Or maybe the problem was that I was to careful to paint up to the boundary when painting both the sky and the castle: with fineliner outlines it's better to be a bit more loose to avoid getting a colouring book feel.

And then I added all the colour, working from the back to the front as usual and applying a number of layers to the castle and the foreground.  Again the castle's not quite right.  Maybe one of my early layers was too thick.  Or maybe I was putting down too hard a distinction between left and right facing surfaces.

The reflection worked out brilliantly though.  It was the think that attracted me to this scene to start with and something that I thought needed practising before LAOTY.  It's a shame the reflection and the sky are wasted on a painting with that castle in it.

As finishing touches, I stabbed in some flowers and yellow tree highlights with opaque colours.  And added a bird.  And some opaque spatters to try to distract from that poor attempt at painting a castle.  And I even added some highlights with a white gel pen.  And that was me done.

And you know what?  Even with the best water I've ever painted and one of my better skies, this one's going into the reject pile.  It looks ok from a distance but, close up, the colours in the castle are too dark and the wrong tint.  And the black outlining brings everything down further.  No, not for me Clive.

Somewhere

Well this is something new.  I'm writing up a painting before I've taken a photo because it's being left to dry overnight and seems to still be developing.

Let's start at the beginning.  A few weeks ago, a very talented local artist, Roger Milton, former landlord of the Rose and Crown, was having a bit of a clearout of his studio and invited me over to see whether I could provide a loving home to a y thing he might otherwise have thrown away.  One of the things I came away with was a set of Pebeo Vitrail paints.  They're apparently for painting on glass and can produce stained glass effects.  I thought that sounded interesting and I do have a glass fridge shelf and three Perspex panels that I'm planning to paint on at some point.

The plan for tonight was to experiment a bit.  I took the mankiest of one of my three Perspex panels and marked up some squares on it for experiments.  I wanted to see whether watercolour ground and crackle paste could work on the perspex and how the  Schmincke supergranulators worked on those two surfaces.  And I wanted to see how the Vitrail paints worked on watercolour ground, crackle paste, sanded Perspex and bare Perspex.

The first thing I found was that my crackle paste had all dried up and that I couldn't get it back to its former state by adding water and shaking or heating it.  I need to invest in a new tub at some point as I d9 plan on using cracks paste again at some point.

And then there was the Vitrail paint.  What can I say?  This stuff is evil.  DO NOT BUY IT!  I was careful to use only a cheap brush but the paint destroyed it.  It became unuseable.  They recommend using pipettes with this paint too, but it also wrote off a pipette.  Once I'd used one colour in it, I couldn't clean it and that first colour contaminated all the others.  I thought I'd lost one of my two pop up water pots too, but I managed to save it with white spirit.  And I had to use white spirit to get the paint off my hands.  Even then, my fingers still felt sticky the rest of the evening.

At first I threw the paints in the bin, but I then had second thoughts.  Why not send them on their way with a bang by pouring them on a sheet of perspex, letting them run together and creating an abstract?  So this is what I did.  Out on the lawn, obviously - there was no way I was letting those paints back in the studio.  Even then, I put an old plastic tablecloth underneath the perspex.  And the devil paint soaked through it in places.

So, enough about the paint and on to the painting.  I started by pouring paint on randomly, hoping that it would run around.  I should probably have tipped up the perspex at this point but didn’t, instead using the written off brush to try to encourage some mixing.  That didn’t really work,  only producing mud.  So then I tried tipping the perspex around and that's when the paint started running and producing interesting patterns.  I added more of the white, hold and yellow paints in an attempt to brighten things up.  I wasn't going to add colours like brown and black as things were already muddy enough.  With all this tipping adding of paint, it was a bit of a rollercoaster ride: things would get more interesting then more boring, them more interesting again, then more boring.  You get it, yeah? And then I cracked and decided I wanted something vaguely realistic in there amidst the abstract, so marked in a tree and some branches wit6 the brush.

I was creating a huge puddle of paint on the tablecloth by now and wondering whether the painting would ever dry.  And, more importantly, where it could dry.  It couldn't stay in the garden where the dog could brush past it and get dirty and there was no way it was coming indoors or in the studio.  Could I put it on a shed or garage roof?  Maybe but I really didn't trust that paint not to run all over the place and leave me to wake up to the sight of the whole garden being this horrible muddy colour.  So I went for the option available.  I left the painting to dry overnight in one of the wheelie bins.  Not the recycling or garden waste bin, the other one.

The paint was still running, so who knows whether there will still be a tree in the painting tomorrow morning?  I have no idea what to expect.

………

Ok, it's the next day.  The painting still hadn't dried but after going over it with a hair dryer and leaving it in the sun (inside a large cardboard box) it's pretty well there now.  I'm leaving it outside on a table for now.

And what I've ended up with is, well, pretty ugly really.  Too much of the paint has turned dark and muddy and the tree is badly drawn.  There are a few interesting spots with stained glass effects and I think this one would look best just stuck onto a window where the light could shine through it at times.  But, no, it's ugly.  This one won’t be going in the shop window and is actually going straight to the bin as it smells of paint and that's not a smell I want in the studio.  The painting still needs a name though, so I picked out a Jimi Hendrix track; it looks as if my online list of Algernon Blackwood short stories may have disappeared, leaving me with the Hendrix list to consult for painting names.

After using one perspex sheet on this painting and one for experimentation, I'm left with one Perspex sheet and one glass fridge shelf.  And with two oil pastel eye paintings already waiting, I'll be taping an eye to the back of both of them and painting the front in watercolour, leaving a hole for the eye to peep through.  I have plans.

Daniella Taking A Break

So, yeah, tonight was the night to christen the art studio.  But, what with one thing and another, it wasn't until about 7pm that I finally got the chance to head outside.  A watercolour needs a bit of planning, so there was no way I was going to finish a painting and tomorrow's looking busy, so I thought I'd do a figure painting in inktense pencil.  With that medium and subject, ai could actually take my time and still produce something.

I picked a pose by Daniella.  This is her second appearance on gh8s blog.   Colour-wise, I used pretty well everything.  I tried to be light with the colours but with that many of them, even playing it light means there's too much pigment on the paper.  My excuse is that I've not done much painting lately, so needed to go full on.  I guess it's good that I got this out my system on this painting rather than ruining a watercolour landscape.

So, yeah, too much colour.  I'm not sure I like these colours either.  There's too much purple, yellow and green and not enough red and blue.  It's definitely red and blue for me next time.  I tried a couple of rescue tactics on this one: a second layer of colour and some sketchy looking outlining.  I'm not sure whether they've made the painting better or worse but what I can say is that it was a flop before the rescue attempt and it's still a flop afterwards.

And, thinking about this one the following day, I think I was concentrating too much on trying to brush light colours into dark colours and not enough on sculpting the 3D shapes with my brushstrokes.

So a bit of an anticlimax but I'm hoping to have a long day out there on Sunday and to start producing some absolute bangers.

The New Studio

Two posts tonight.  Let's do this one first.  The big news is that I've moved into my art studio and it's ready for me to use.  Local firm AF Electrical Contractors Ltd have connected me up to the mains today, so I now have air conditioning and lighting and have been out there painting this evening.

There's still stuff to do:

- some more cube shaped black drawers arriving on Monday to go in the shelving unit

- still waiting for blinds to be fitted

- there's an outstanding snagging point over one of the windows

- AF are coming back tomorrow to finish their job by filling in the trench they dug for the electric cable

- and I'm struggling to get my internet link to work out there

But there's nothing there to hold me back from painting, so that's what I've been doing tonight.

The studio itself was built by Green Retreats.  I'm waiting to see how the snagging is dealt with and how quickly the blinds are fitted before I give the final verdict but so far all is pretty good.

Rejection

The news just came through.  After not making it to Portrait Artist Of The Year or into a pod on Landscape Artist Of The Year, I've completed the treble after being unsuccessful in my application to be a wildcard on LAOTY.

Maybe I should have applied to be in one of the Aberdeenshire heats rather than one of the Kent heats.  In fact, I can remember feeling this way two years ago after being turned down for the Kent heats and wondering whether I should have been looking towards Cornwall.

Oh well.  I'll be applying again next year.  I need to think now about what my first studio painting will be, now that I don't need to practice painting Hever Castle.

Jerry Garcia

I had a chance to do some painting today, so thought I'd better take it.  This was painted in the garden, but the original drawing went down at my desk inside the studio.  I won't be doing a complete painting in the studio until I'm moved in and can just leave gear out drying rather than having to pack everything away afterwards.

The idea for this one came from a Claudia Selene video.  After spending some money on art gear, Jackson’s offered me a free 90 minute course at Etchr.  I chose a portrait demonstration by Claudia.  She picks a photo of a subject that was suitable for chiaroscuro (that's two value, black and white) painting.  She spends a lot of time getting pencil outlines down for all the light and shadow shapes using a triangulation method, then colours in all the dark areas with lots of colours and, bang, she's done.  I didn't follow Claudia to the letter, instead just picking and choosing ideas, as you'll see.

I did some googling around looking for a good chiaroscuro subject.  I thought guitarists might make good subjects and found four that I will probably end up painting.  First up, though is Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead.  Rather than just going a headshot,  I thought I'd include some fingers and guitar strings as guitar strings tend to work out well for me,

For the initial pencil drawing, I followed Claudia's advice, getting down an accurate pencil drawing of all the dark and light areas and not bothering with any edges separating dark from dark or knight from light.  But whereas Claudia used triangulation techniques to get an outline down, I used the grid method.  At times, though, I did follow Claudia's lead and played with the magnification on the iPad so that my painting and source were the same size, allowing me to do some measuring with the pencil.

Once the pencil outlines were down, I masked out the smallest light areas, just like Claudia, but then also spatters on some masking fluid as I was wanting there to be a bit of magic in the air.  And I added a few stray hairs here and there and the guitar strings and frets using masking fluid in a mapping pen,

For colours, Claudia suggests sticking to dark colours but I wanted some bright, psychedelic colour in there, befitting such a Grateful subject.  So I picked out French ultramarine, Winsor red and transparent yellow, putting this one in the key of triadic right.  And I thought I'd supplement these with viridian green and hematite violet genuine, two colours that don’t get as much action as they deserve.  When it came to adding the colours, Claudia has a genius suggestion that I followed.  Rather than wetting all the dark areas, I wet most of the dark areas but not the edges.  When I added paint, I then had to use the brush properly along the edges, which gives much harder edges than I'd have got if I'd wet the paper right up to the edge.  At this stage, I put all five colours down fairly randomly, my only conscious decisions being around keeping the colours balanced over the page.  After the first colours were down, I sprayed more water over the page, then sprinkled on salt, something Claudia didn't do but didn't rule out.  And where there were edges I wanted to soften, I tried to do this with a wet brush.

When the painting was dry, there were a few things I wasn't happy with.  Jerry's highlighted hair was looking like a halo rather than hair, with the darkest bits looking like all of his hair.  So I put on some hematite violet genuine and a grey mixed from my three primaries.  After a few attempts and some dabbing  with kitchen paper I eventually reached something just about acceptable.  I also used the hematite violet and mixed grey on Jerry's hand and on some of the other white areas.  The guitar was looking a bit too white, so I mixed some ultramarine with the hematite violet, put on a watery wash and dabbed at it.  That seemed to work.  I glazed over Jerry's guitar strap with hematite violet because the light buckle on its own wasn't enough to make my brain conjure up the whole strap.  And finally I added a second layer of paint in a few places that looked as if they needed it, avoiding any areas where the salt was having an effect.

After everything had dried, I removed all the masking fluid and any residual salt and that was me done.

And keep your voices down please but I quite like this one.  There's a definite likeness there and my eyes have been opened to how it's possible to get a likeness in chiaroscuro just by accurately mapping out the dark and light shapes.  I'm expecting that people on Facebook will be saying that this looks like Dave LeeTravis or Roy Wood but these opinions will be coming from people that have never seen footage of the Dead.  Anybody who's seen Jerry Garcia will know that this is him.  The colours and the salt are working well but I'm especially pleased with my decision to glaze over the guitar strap - that strap brings things to life.

Needless to say, Jerry's up for sale, and at a price cheaper than many a Dick's Picks concert recording.

Landscape Artist Of The Year Dates

Work continues on the art studio.  An electrician is out there at the moment, sorting the fuse box, light switches, mains sockets and internal and external lighting.  The air conditioning is being fitted on Wednesday and after that I might actually start using the studio and doing some painting, even if there are still blinds to be fitted and the studio still to be connected to the mains.

But I need to keep this blog going, so I'm going to share some news.  I didn't make it on to Portrait Artist Of The Year and didn't make it into a pod for Landscape Artist.  I have applied, though, to be a wildcard again, for the heat at Hever Castle on 21st June.

The production company are being much more free and easy about publicising the heats and inviting spectators along, as you can see from the post above.  As far as I'm concerned, spectators are more than welcome – anyone who doesn't like the attention shouldn't be painting plein air to be honest.  So do come along to watch the heats if you fancy an interesting day out.  Just be aware that for the Hever Castle heats (and maybe Dunnottar Castle?) you'll have to pay to get into the grounds and that the Buckler's Hard date is a semifinal, so won't have a group of wildcards for you to banter with (and that will be more interesting than staring at the pods).

The sad news, though, is that the choice of first round of heat venues means that the colourful corner team from Blackpool won't be painting together.  All being well, I'll be in Kent and I expect Daniel will be in Liverpool and Fiona in Aberdeenshire, with Lisa having a choice between the latter two.  I'll be watching out for them all on the telly though.  Good luck guys!

Art Studio Getting There

There's been a lot of garden action today.  The walls, roof, doors and windows have all gone up.  The builders will be back again tomorrow to finish all the external panelling, to fit up the inside with floorboards and skirting and to tidy everything up with a clean, just like they do at the place that services my Toyota.

Next week, the internal electricals and air conditioning will all be sorted, at which point I'll be buying some bits and moving in.  Dates are still to be arranged for fitting blinds and for connecting everything to the mains but we're getting there.

Hoodoo In The Chinle Formation

Afternoon all.  First, the obligatory opening paragraph for this time of year.  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. We've just gone past the closing date, 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.  If I make it into a pod, I'll be using oil pastels, as per my submission, so I'd suggest landscapes, oil pastels or personal favourites.

But it's not an oil pastel today.  I fancied doing a watercolour but will be waiting until the studio's built before I go back to serious painting with my first choice palette.  Until then, my watercolours will all be using the Schmincke supergranulators, effectively a cheat code for getting a set of colours that harmonise together without the need for much thought.

The subject matter today is a hoodoo in the Chinle Formation, near Moab, Utah.  I just love to paint piles of rocks, especially with the desert supergranulators.  The sky has desert grey in it along with three of the tundra colours (blue, pink and violet) everywhere else I'm only using the five desert colours (yellow, oranges brown, green and grey).

The sky westbound first.  No masking fluid involved today: instead I was really careful to only wet the sky areas.  Once I'd wet the sky once, I added more water to it more heavily, trusting the first water coat to keep the sky within the boundaries.  And then I dropped in the colours.  I started with the tundra blue and desert grey but thought the grey was a bit too neutral, which is why I introduced the Tundra pink and violet.  A bit of dabbing with a kitchen towel and a little sprinkle of salt helped bring out the granulation.  Good job.

The rest of the painting was all in desert colours and it took I guess two layers.  The first layer was an underpainting, just putting down colours fairly randomly but with one eye on the values. With yellow and orange generally in the lighter areas and green and grey in the darker.  For the second layer, I had two different strategies.  First, for the background I kept most of the underpainting and just added a few shadowy brushmarks on top.  But for the hoodoo, I took a lot more time and care and added a lot more paint.  I was frequently consulting my source photo to get shadows in the right places and trying to get the granulation working by (a) charging in little spots of colour in places, and (b) lifting paintbox with a dry brush.  At times, there were little bits in the hoodoo where too brown/yellow/whatever and I would go back and add more colour to bring them back into line.  The immediate foreground took a few more layers to get right because I needed it to closely match the colours in the hoodoo, giving me a "reverse L" compositional pattern.

I stopped there and I quite like what I ended up with.  The colours work well and there's a decent contrast between the sky and the rocks.  I think it was a smart move to keep the background mountains really simple.  If there's a downside to this, it's that it's so similar to Dragon Path from about a month ago.  It feels weird having painted two watercolours that are so similar in  colour and design.  But maybe that's just me.  It's still a success, though, and is up for sale.

Oh, and a couple of afterthoughts:

– The only blue or green pigment within any of those five desert colours is a pthalo turquoise that's mixed with cadmium red to make a very grey looking desert green.  So why does the hoodoo have a greenish tinge to it?

– Schmincke supergranulators are on special offer this week at Jackson’s, so I'm taking the opportunity to restock my shire supergranulators with 15ml tubes.  Shire's just about managing to hold onto its place within my top three sets.  But I'm also bringing in an extra tube.  I'm giving forest brown a go.  It's more like a neutral green than a brown but I do need a calmer green to go with my shire colours.

Art Studio Foundations

The builders have been round today to put in the foundations for my art studio.  I was only expecting them to putting the piles but they've also put down what will become the floor (don't worry, there will be wooden floorboards later) and left all the bits that will eventually become the roof.

More builders will be back next week for three days to build the studio proper, then electricians for two days the following week to sort out the internal electrics.  After that, there will be someone round to fit blinds, someone to put in the air conditioning and a local electrician to connect t/ studio up to the mains.

Things are happening.  It's time to believe.