Heeeere's Jonny

I’ve had an idea for another set of marker portraits to get started on but had just one page left in a sketchbook and didn't want the set to straddle two sketchbooks.  So I needed a subject for a one–off portrait to complete the old sketchbook.  Without anybody in mind, I headed for Facebook and looked for the friend whose birthday was coming up next.  First up was Peter but his photos were all a bit too picture perfect, so I went for the next one on the list.

So this is Jonny, a mate from Uni. It's a photo of him rowing, probably as stroke of our college first boat.

The original plan was to black out the background and hair with no visible difference between then but I put the hair down first and it evoked 1980s Jonny so much (today he sports a Gregg Wallace hairdo) that I had to keep it and added a purple background instead.

There's not much to say about this one otherwise.  Markers are always great fun and good for practising seeing and drawing big shapes.  It's amazing what they can do really.  None of you will know Jonny but this is a really good likeness.  A shame about the erroneous purple mark on his left shoulder though.  This one's not up for sale – I'll be gifting it to Jon next time I see him.

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly: The Collection

And here they are, all together.  As I expected, their positives as a set are greater than the sum of their individual positives.  They're up for sale.

The individual painting posts are here, here and here.

Il Brutto

So here's part 3 of 3 and that's the collection complete.  Tuco followed the same methodology as the previous two paintings so, what I did (and I'm using copy and paste here) was to:

– get a pencil drawing down using a grid

– mask out key highlights, this time on the gun, the right hand and the rings on Tuco's left hand

– spatter some masking fluid into the background

– protect the edges of the upper and lower gutter areas with masking tape

– add all the colours, starting with the interesting shapes (hand and gun) but otherwise in a fairly random order, not just back to front

– add multiple layers to the darkest areas

– add some salt to the background

– once the main painting is finished, mask out camera film–like holes along the edges of the gutters and mask out the Italian caption

– add load of random colours to the margins and throw on some salt

– once everything's dry, remove the masking fluid and we're done

With one painting completed using Shire colours and one with tundra colours, it was the turn of the dessert supergranulators today.  These colours are well suited to Western scenes.  And they produced good flesh colours too; one common theme across these three paintings has been how well my flesh colour mixes have turned out.  I also used a little bit of cerulean blue today, mainly to get a more silvery colour on the gun and the rings but you can also see a little bit of it in those trousers.

Tuco might be my favourite of the three, mainly because of the colours, although I also like the right hand and the gun.  Something about the shape of his right hand suggests he's going into this gunfight with a bit of imposter syndrome in him but Sergio Leone and Eli Wallach have to take the credit for that.  There's also some good granulation going on in the trousers and the background and gutters, while not exactly representative, do convey the heat of the dessert.

This one's not up for sale as an individual painting, instead being offered as part of a set of three with its companion pieces.

Il Cattivo

Number two in my The Good, The Bad And The Ugly collection is Angel Eyes, the bad one, played by Lee Van Cleef.  In allocating supergranulating sets over the three protagonists, Angel Eyes was always going to get the chilly tundra colours.

I stuck to same methodology for this one, which was to:

– get a pencil drawing down using a grid

– mask out key highlights, this time on the gun, the stitches, the buckles, the bullets and the finger nails

– spatter some masking fluid into the background

– protect the edges of the upper and lower gutter areas with masking tape

– add all the colours, starting with the interesting shapes (hand and gun) but otherwise in a fairly random order, not just back to front

– add multiple layers to the darkest areas

– add some salt to the background

– once the main painting is finished, mask out camera film–like holes along the edges of the gutters and mask out the Italian caption

– add load of random colours to the margins and throw on some salt

– once everything's dry, remove the masking fluid and we're done

Colour–wise, I pretty well stuck to the five tundra colours.  The only place where I needed some extra help was with the bullets, where I dropped in a tiny, tiny bit of cadmium yellow.  And for the gutters, I started with the tundra violet, pink, blue and orange, taking the view that two green–free gutters were required to balance all the greens in the background and on Angel Eyes' coat.  After watching the result start to dry, though I did make a couple of changes, adding some green but also lots of tundra violet along the edges next to the main painting just to rack up the violets enough to create a green/violet dichotomy on the page.

And, yes, I like this one.  The tundra colours create a chilly mood, the green/purple clash works well, the highlights are good again, the supergranulators are granulating everywhere.  There's so much to like about this one.  And there's something else I've just noticed.  In Marvel Comics in the1960s, superheroes tended to be dressed in red, blue and maybe yellow, whereas villains would be dressed in green and purple.  And that green and purple colour scheme must be engrained in my psyche because those colours just spell evil and they're screaming out of this one.

This one's up for sale but only as as part of a set.

Il Buono

It's been more than a year since I painted a scene from a Western and I'm returning to that subject big time with a set of three paintings based on the shootout at the end of the Good, The Bad And The Ugly which we all know is the greatest five minutes in cinematic history.  I've picked out three photos of the protagonists' hands and guns that look I interesting and that convey the tension of the scene.  They're all too wide to be cropped to fit into a painting, so I've ended up with dead space along the top and bottoms of my paintings to deal with.

In terms of colour, I wanted something that would link all three paintings together.  I did consider using the same colours for all three paintings but I don't trust myself to mix the same colours three times.  I'd have to create all three paintings simultaneously and I didn’t fancy doing that.  Instead I hit on the idea of using my three sets of supergranulating paints, one for each painting, giving them all separate personalities.  Sounds like a plan, right?

First up is Blondie, played by Clint Eastwood.  The pose is appropriately relaxed and his trousers and the gap between his legs represented an interesting dark shape opposition–wise.  In the colour allocations, this "good" character had to be given the Shire colours.  I supplement them these days with forest brown and green apatite genuine, effectively giving me six greens and a grey.  For the purpose of this painting, I also used burnt sienna and burnt umber to dull down the greens, add some warmth and create fleshy colours.

I put down an initial pencil drawing, reserved lots of highlights with masking fluid, spattered some masking fluid on the background and protected the edges of the empty gutters along the top and bottom with masking tape.  And then I was ready to go.

I didn’t work back to front today and I instead jumped around all the different shapes in the painting.  I started with the hands because I wanted to get them right.  Most of the colour there is Shire yellow and raw sienna, with some burnt umber in the really dark places and a couple of greens charged in to create a bit of variety.

And then, yeah, I wandered around all over the place painting.  I like how the shirt sleeve came out: I painted on some stripes in Shire blue and then putting some water to blue them.  The belt is good too, with the charged in colours working well.  Where I had most trouble was with the trouser shape.  I started with an underpainting of lots of random colours but was always intending this shape to come out pretty dark.  And it never did, despite there being probably four layers of paint there now.  Burnt umber, Shire blue and Shire grey just couldn’t get  me to a dark enough colour.   Maybe I could have introduced some French ultramarine to the mix but I felt that with the two browns I'd deviated far enough already from the Shire colour scheme.  And the colour I've ended up with isn't too bad.  Who says I need to replicate the source photo anyway?

And then I was left with the problem of the gutters.  I decided to go for a filmspool look by masking out a couple of rows of spots and painting over them.  Knowing when I'm onto a loser, I wasn't going to try to create a black to paint over the spots and instead painted over with all the greens I'd been using.  I left out the browns from the gutters, wanting to get back to a Shire feel (albeit with those two extra greens).  And I decided to add the handwritten caption in Italian.  It was something that, if I'd not had these gutters to contend with, I'd have masked out in the painting, so why not do it in the gutter?

I'm reasonably happy with this but will reserve judgement until I see all three paintings  together, see how they feed off each other.  The best bit for me in this one is the highlight on the middle fingerboard Blondie's right hand.  Once you've seen it, it's hard to ignore.  It's close to perfect.  The shirt sleeve and the belt are great too, but let's see what happens over the next couple of days. 

This one's not going up for sale as an individual painting.  Instead it's up for sale as part of a set that includes two more companion pieces.

Towards Stockbury From Queendown Warren

Back to the artwork after a few days off, and this is looking like an understated return but there are few things that I tried out in this one, with varying degrees of success:

- I picked a simple view for a change, with big simple shapes, just to see what I could do with it

- I thought about what it was about this view that made me want to paint it.  It was the bright yellow colours in the fields in the other side of the valley, so I made sure these were emphasised

- I used two source photos: one for the terrain and a separate one for the sky

- I tried to indicate the slope of the yellow fields by applying strokes of burnt sienna along flat contours and along maximum gradient contours

- I tried to use a lot more blue and yellow and less green than normal, especially within the trees

- I tried to get a lot of texture into the foreground with those big grassy strokes

- I tried to make the foreground more interesting by dividing it into strips with diagonal borders

Of these, it's only really the dividing up of the foreground that didn't really come through, otherwise I'm pretty pleased about how these experiments worked out.  From a distance, and without glasses, this looks pretty good.  The colours in the sky, the yellow fields and the grasses are all great.  Take a close look at the grass and you'll see where I've tried to fill in some of the gaps with dark sepia.  Where the painting could be better is along the bottom - underneath all those foreground grasses there's no undulation in the terrain, it's all a bit flat and boring.

Still, this one's good enough to go in the shop window.

Essential Techniques Of Landscape Drawing, Suzanne Brooker – Book Review

So here's the book I got for Fathers' Day and have just spent three days reading.  It's a 196 page hardback book, with reassuringly thick, shiny pages and a smell that reminds me of a newly painted hospital.  Just picking it up makes me feel accomplished.  It"s like the Tom Hoffmann book in that respect.

It's obviously about drawing and, in particular, about drawing landscapes.  And (quick calc) 79% of it is about drawing in graphite pencils.  Not just with one pencil but with a range of pencils of different hardnesses.  But I still wanted this book because even that 79% includes lots of ideas that I'm smart enough to be able to translate into similar ideas with watercolour, oil pastels, coloured pencils, inktense pencils and even markers.  Contents–wise, the book breaks down roughly into:

– 15 pages of introduction

– 20 pages of buildup

– 20 pages on light and shadows

– 25 pages on composition

– 85 pages on landscape elements

– 25 pages on other media – that's the other 21%

Nothing much happens in the introduction, to be honest.  It never does but these books would feel weird without someone talking while we settle down and make ourselves comfortable.  The next chapter starts things moving with some stuff on materials and on all the different ways to hold a pencil before starting to define lots of different terminology that Suzanne will be using throughout the book.  Almost every section in this last chunk of the chapter seemed to finish with "more of this on page x" which was fine by me.

And then the book gets started properly with a chapter on light and shadow.  Most of this chapter is about how to draw cuboids, cylinders and spheres.  How to shade them, where the highlights are, where the darkest shadows on their shadow sides are, etc.  I found this to be exceptionally thought provoking and I've seen others praising this bit in reviews.  It wasn't anything new to me, but somehow reading about all this in a book on landscapes got me more focused than I was when reading other books, which only tend to illustrate ideas with tabletop still life photos.  And Suzanne does keep emphasising all this stuff here in later chapters.  This chapter also talks a bit about different shading patterns: long lines, short lines, cross cross, that sort of thing.

Then we're into the fourth chapter, on composition.  A lot of stuff in there that I've read about before, most notably in the Frank Webb book, but there's always something new if you read these books carefully.  For me, it was where Suzanne talked about how the best eye routes for a painting were zigzags paths made up of diagonals and how these could be created with undulations and grassy clumps in otherwise flat and boring foreground areas.  There was also a geometrical construction to divide a page into nine equal rectangles (so the artist could put the focal point on one of the corners of the middle rectangle).  I don't remember learning how to divide a line into three in O level technical drawing, so was a bit dubious about this, wondering whether it was only an approximation involving the square roots of 2 and 3 or something that would only work exactly for a rectangle in particular proportions that happened to be quite close toothsome of the typical sheet of paper.  But I did the maths and found that Suzann's construction works exactly and for all rectangles!  I definitely learned something new there.

Next up is the meat of the book, 85 chapters roughly evenly divided between skies, terrain, trees/foliage and water.  This chapters bang full of useful tips, illustrated using lots of demonstrations.  Suzanne keeps harking back to ideas in the light/shadow and composition chapters but there's lots more here too.  The most useful bits to me may well be on textures, for all four landscape elements.

Finally, there's a chapter on other media, covering charcoal pencils, coloured pencils, pastel pencils and water soluble graphite.  Of these, only the pages on coloured pencils are directly relevant to me at the moment, although I may try out charcoal pencils at some point and some of the stuff on water soluble graphite could also apply to inktense pencils if I use them differently.  You'll have seen from my previous post that Suzanne's already putting new ideas in my head about how to use coloured pencils.

Throughout the book, there lots of sections on "practice strokes" that, after getting the reader used to how to hold a pencil, introduce lots of ways to add texture to all the different landscape elements.  There are also lots of short demonstrations.  They're worded as instructions rather than demos but I can forgive this as they have just the right number of steps and are worth examining closely to understand techniques, even if I'd never just copy an author's work.

Overall, a very good book.  I'm glad I put it on my Amazon list, right up at the top.  It's focused on graphite pencils but there's plenty there I can use for other media.  Charcoal pencils in particular if I can drop enough hints before my birthday next month.  I actually think this book would represent a good follow up to Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain, building on the ideas there by introducing all the theory on light and shadow and some ideas on composition and applying everything to landscapes after learning to draw via still lifes and portraits.

Tempting though it is to award this one five palettes, I need to keep palette inflation under control and I don't think this one qualifies as a galactico.  But it comfortably scores an impressive four palettes.

🎨🎨🎨🎨

Coloured Pencil Primary Mixing Swatches

I got a new art book for Fathers' Day.  The review is coming very soon, maybe tomorrow.  I'm keeping the book a secret for now, but as something it mentioned in passing about coloured pencils that spurred me into action.  The author was talking about how mixing layers of blue and yellow made very different greens to individual green pencils.  I knew this.  It then it recommended that I do some swatches to see which pairs among my primary colours made the most interesting secondaries.  Why have I never done this?

So I set about some swatching tonight.  I picked out nine reds, nine blues and four yellows (later adding in green gold as a fifth yellow - it was a mistake to leave it out) and swatches all the pairs of colours that didn't share the same primary category.  For each of those pairs, I coloured in a square with one layer of each in one corner, two of each in another and both one/two combinations in the other four corners.  And then I smoothed out each square with a paper stump.  And what did I find out?

For the purples, it was always going to be the cool red/warm blue combinations that resulted in the brightest mixes - these are generally in the top right corner of the purples in the photo.  Helio blue reddish, though, wasn't as conducive to purple mixing as I expected, with the blue being too dominant over the reds.  I found the ultramarine and sky blue to be a bit weakly pigmented, needing a lot of pressure on the pencil point to be able to compete with the reds.  And those bottom three blues (pthalo, Prussian and cobalt turquoise) produce some pretty neutral looking colours when layered with pretty well any red.

For the oranges, the warm reds and warm yellows produced the brightest combinations, as expected (bottom left of the oranges in the chart).  They look like they'd make good sunset colours or even flesh tones.  The cooler reds, like magenta and dark red, tend to produce warm neutral colours when mixed with yellows but cooler reds fare better as long as they're paired with warm reds.

Finally on to greens.  The cool yellow/cool blue combinations in the top right corner produce the most vivid colours but, just as with watercolour, they look a bit too vivid, needing a bit of red or brown in there to bring them back down to Earth.  The more interesting greens are where a cool and a warm colour paired together, again something that I've seen with watercolour.  Delft blue seems to have far too much red within it to be able to produce a green - something wirth remembering.  And the helio blue reddish, which struggled mixing purples, produces vivid greens, so maybe it's a cool blue when I'd been thinking all this time it was warm.

But the big lesson here is that these are all interesting secondary mixes.  Maybe I should be using more of these mixes in my paintings and steering away from secondaries?  In particular, should I try some landscapes at some point with a limited range of primaries (one warm and one cool of each?) and no secondaries?  Food for thought.  Anyway, it's gone 11pm now and. I should go indoors and get some kip.

Green Retreats

My art studio is well and truly complete following the placement this afternoon of a huge glass window unit that had some scratches in it.  And now that we're there, I'm happy to recommend Green Retreats as a builder of garden offices.  They’ve been 100% professional throughout the process and were happy for me to hold back paying in full until snagging problems had been corrected.  And those problems were corrected in a timely enough manner.  There are photos of the final product here.

I'd only add two bits of advice:

– I'd recommend getting a local electrician to connect your garden office to the mains with an underground cable: Green Retreats like to default to an overground connection

– if you wanted to visit a Green Retreats showroom, head for the one in Oxfordshire which has a huge range of garden offices on show (about 20 off the top of my head?) whereas I understand the Twickenham showroom only has like two or three.

But, yeah, great art studio.

Results Of The H1 2023 Artistic Actuary Poll

Thanks to everyone that responded to my latest poll.  I've had eighteen responses but things have gone quiet now, so I think it's time for me to look at the results.  The poll remains open and people are welcome to keep voting.  Of the 18 that voted, two chose not to see the figure drawing paintings which was encouragingly low but high enough for it to have been a smart move on my part to give people the option to steer clear of that side of my work.

So let's go.  First up, these paintings didn’t get any votes.

I can't complain, especially as I put my own votes in and they didn’t include these.  I was glad to see Looking At You not scoring any votes, justifying my decision to put it in the wheelie bin last week, it being too ugly to put on display and too big to file away.

Then there were those that got just the one vote.

Sad to see The YouTube Six only getting the one vote but I guess there aren't that many people that are into all of music, food, painting, chess, maths and physics.  It was a niche collection.  On the other hand, I've no idea why anyone would have voted for Neil McCarthy, bottom middle.

Then these paintings all got two votes.

Moeen was the real shocker here for me.  I was really pleased with the texture that I got into his beard but that's why I set up these polls, to show myself what little idea I have about what people like.  Otherwise, yeah, it feels like I'm still in the bottom tail of the distribution.

Then these ones all scored three.

It feels like we’re getting now into acceptable paintings.  I got good likenesses out of those two cricketers drawn with markers, and three votes is a decent score as marker drawings don't tend to be big scorers in these polls.  John Cleese and Thorpey good too but I still prefer Moeen over them.  Let's move on.

Four votes for these four pillars of society.

The self portrait is my favourite painting out of all of them in the survey but I wasn't expecting it to come out high as nobody wants a picture of me on their wall.  David Suchet, on the other hand, really surprised me.  He was one that I expected to be right up among the top scorers.  These here are the top scoring coloured pencil portraits, so maybe coloured pencil portraits just don't appeal?

Stirling Castle got five votes.

You're kidding me, right?  I know the sky came out well but more people liked this than liked David Suchet?  Wow.  Keep those surprises coming.

I thought we were getting into the good stuff but I'm no longer sure.  Let's see which paintings scored six.

Ah now , OK.  I should be thinking separately about portraits and landscapes.  People prefer landscapes to portraits and whereas we're looking at the top end of the portraits, we're still at the acceptable stage for landscapes.  Jerry Garcia, by the way is the highest scoring portrait, and he's in watercolour, when I thought my best portraits were in coloured pencil, oil pastel and markers.  Interesting

Seven!

Ah, now I think we're getting to the good stuff.  If anything, I think it's the oil pastel paintings in this set and the previous one that look weakest, so maybe there's a message there that oil pastel's a popular medium.  And there are still figure drawings coming through, which is a surprise.  Seven votes for Zaza here is exceptionally high compared to figure paintings in previous surveys.

We’re still not done.  These paintings all scored eight.

We're well and truly into the good stuff now.  I can't argue with anyone voting for these.  Another figure there too, and he's not the top scorer in that department.

These two scored nine votes.

Hever Castle on the left was the  top scoring watercolour painting.  Not one I'm personally keen on with its penwork but it looks a lot better from a distance or on a mobile phone screen, so I guess it's understandable that it came out so high.  And Stephanie was my highest scoring figure drawing and probably the painting whose score most exceeded my expectations.

Not many to go now.  Third highest scorer with ten votes was The Old Bridge, Latheronwheel.

This was my first ever coloured pencil landscape.  I've still only done four.  One of them was too recent to be in this poll.  One was that farmhouse on Bodmin Moor that we've already seen score seven votes.  What was the other one?

The other one was Towards Third Court, Christ's College, Cambridge and came in second with eleven votes.

So there you go, coloured pencil landscapes are really popular, the three of them here scoring 28 votes but coloured pencil portraits are real underperformers with me, Moeen and David Suchet only scoring 10 between us.  The voters have spoken.

And what came out on top?  We're done with coloured pencils, watercolours inktense pencils, markers and Artgraf tailors chalks so what's left?

Oil pastels, that's what.  This was another of those paintings that I was expecting to do well and it's no surprise to see it come out on top with 13 votes, a 72% approval rate.  I'm glad to see some justification of my decision to put this one through as my main submission to Landscape Artist Of The Year 2024, even if that ended up coming to nothing . 

So the main conclusions seem to be that:

- figure paintings are becoming more popular

- coloured pencil landscapes are really popular

- coloured pencil portraits are less popular than I might have imagined

- and oil pastel landscapes seemed to exceed expectations (looking at the six and seven vote ones here rather than the top scorer)

Again, thanks to everyone that voted.  You never cease to surprise me.

View From First Post Corner, Cambridge

So after that last painting I followed a footpath that I'm sure didn't exist back in my day into Fenn Ditton to grab a lunchtime pint at The Plough, a pub with a great garden extending down to the river.  It's a bit too far into the Bumps course, though, for patrons to be able to see much interesting action in anything but the top men's division, so my plan was always to make my way further down the river to find myself a good spot to both paint and spectate.  And I found the perfect spot at First Post Corner.  Being on the outside of a corner, it has good views down two straits.  And it's also just the right distance into the race to be a bumping hotspot.  Indeed, when I won my oar at the 1986 May Bumps, three of our bumps (including the one on day four) came on this corner, right in front of the professional photographers and the boozed up spectators.

My spot today was just a few feet away from the river and a right next to a private party.  Loads of people on both sides of the party divide to talk to about painting and rowing, so no opportunity to ruin the painting by working on it while it was wet.  A special hello to my favourite fan of the day, preschooler Ted who had plenty of questions and was up for conversation.  If you're reading this, Ted, then (i) you're pretty gifted for someone your age, and (ii) I can put your mind at rest by telling you I did go for another beer afterwards at The Plough and I did put my used bottles in the bin that I found on my way there.

For this painting, I picked the view towards the Motorway Bridge (strictly speaking the A45)  because a painting needs a focal point and there were no landmarks looking the other way.  I stuck with Mayan blue genuine and Indian yellow but switched my red to quinacridone magenta just to be different.  So this was in the key of triadic left.  Cadmium red, cadmium yellow, Winsor blue green shade, cerulean blue and titanium white all played small roles too.

I put down an initial drawing in pencil, including three carefully observed spectators, a carefully observed cyclist and what was a lazy eight, with their oars not quite in sync.  I masked out all these people and the Newnham graffiti on the bridge and spattered on some masking spots.

And then I just worked from back to front again, one big shape at a time: sky, trees, bank, other bank, river.  The trees caused me the most trouble.  I wanted to distinguish between all the different trees and to make the furthest away recede by making them bluer.  But I used too much neutralising red again – maybe I was suffering from forgetting to bring along scrap paper to test colours on.  So the trees on the right are looking a bit too rocky.  I had a lot of tinkery attempts at the river, trying to combine observed reflections with choppy brushmarks and I think I got there.  The opposite bank, though, isn't really right.  Maybe Indian just wasn't the right yellow to use today.  Oh, and for the Motorway Bridge, I decided I needed to use cerulean blue to get closer to the actual colour.

Before removing the masking fluid, I stepped back and looked at the painting.  Someone came by for a chat at this point and could see my point when I told him the river didn’t match the sky and that the trees, while all coming from the same three colours, were looking out of harmony, like some kid had wanted to use every single colour in the box.  So I told him I'd be adding a thin layer of blue river the river to match the sky more closely and a thin layer of red over the trees to get them into harmony.  I think he was a little shocked over my plans for the red glaze.  But I added them both and things definitely improved.

Then it was off with the masking fluid and time to fill in the shapes underneath.  For the blades on the oars and for the rowers' vests I wanted colours reminiscent of Christ's so picked out Winsor blue green shade.  For the spectators, I combined this blue with cadmium red and cadmium yellow.  I wanted to use different colours because I didn’t want the spectators to blend into the background.  I also mixed a green, a black and a fleshy colour from these three and then used them to fill in all my empty shapes, starting with red against green and yellow against purple and then adding whatever colours were necessary to keep things in balance.  I'd been keeping in reserve all afternoon the possibility of putting a lorry onto the bridge and my final action was to add a red lorry as red felt like the colour at the top of this painting's wishlist.  And that was me done.

Everything I said about the previous painting applies to this one too, especially the point about being too dark.  It's such a typical Artistic Actuary plein air painting.  I need to think more about planning and controlling values when I'm out and about and maybe need to hold back on trying to exactly replicate what I can see.  But why is this only a problem when I'm out and about and not when I'm in the studio?  I have no idea!

<It's the next day and I'm wondering whether it's using red to neutralise the greens that's the problem. Maybe I should neutralise them with raw sienna or burnt sienna instead?  At least for greens made from this blue/yellow combination?>

The Long Reach, Cambridge

So today I headed out to the river to do some painting.  Not being allowed to paint inside colleges and having my building draftmanship confidence dented yesterday were the key drivers for the change.  My plan was to start in the morning with a painting of the railway bridge over river, looking from the Long Reach.  But when I got there I found that the view of the bridge that I wanted no longer existed thanks t9 the building of a new pedestrian footbridge in front of it.  So I looked the other way instead and settled on a view looking down the Long Reach with Fen Ditton Church showing through the trees.  A decent view to be fair.

For colours, I went first for Mayan blue genuine for its earthiness and it’s granulating properties.   Ot wanting the garish greens that would come from pairing a cool yellow with a cool blue, I picked out Indian yellow as my second colour.  And after looking through my swatch book, I decided that rose dore would make the best neutrals as the red to go with those two.  So this is in the key of orange cool.  Titanium white will make an appearance later.

I put down a rough initial drawing, helped by holding the paper up to block out my scene and marking the boundaries of birder shapes and the limits of internal shapes around the boundary.  This helped me get down what was an accurate enough initial drawing for a landscape.  Unfortunately I found I'd placed my horizon too high on the paper and rather than rubbing everything out and starting again, I tried to keep the same drawing but move it down the paper by eye.  It took me two attempts, I kept making mistakes, and still ended up with a horizon that was too high.  Next time I'm rubbing it all out and starting from scratch.  After getting the drawing down, I masked the skull, a couple of swans and the church.

And then I just worked from back to front.  I had a lot of fun with the sky, wanting to include all three primaries and eventually deciding that the best way to do this was to have an orangey sky along the horizon.  I tried to include the red in all my greens and probably ended up with something too neutral along the horizon.  There was  a quite bright looking field in the distance that I managed to keep yellow and orange and that creates a bit of interest at the focal point.

The river and the grassy area on the right were  always going to be the biggest challenges.  For the river I tried to replicate some of the sky colours and to replicate some of the trees but probably tinkered too much, trying hard to replicate what I could see in front of me rather than keeping things simple like I did with Hever Castle.  For the grass I started with a really adventurous underpainting with some random primaries, dabbed dry.  After that I added a couple of green layers on top and should have stopped there but was too interested in adding grassy hummocks.  These hummocks never worked Outland all ended up being converted to extra green layers, finally resulting in something that's darker than it should really be.

Finally I removed the masking fluid and painted in the skull, swans and church.  The skull and blades are red/orange, a colour that I thought was needed to all the blues and greens on display.  After not being happy with the neutral colours on the church and some reds on rooftops, I’m inverted them to more man–made colours by putting some watery white over the top and dabbing it away.  And after waiting for another skull to go by, I added a couple of white afterimages of the previous stroke to the water.  And that was me done.

This one's OK I guess, certainly better than yesterday's effort, but doesn't feel perfect.  I always seem to prefer my studio efforts to my onsite ones.  It might be that en plein air I’m concentrating on what's in front of me rather than what makes for a good painting, maybe tinkering too much in the name of replication.  I'll keep pondering that.  But, anyway, this one's not quite good enough to go in the shop window.

This was a great painting location.  Just slightly off the beaten track so just enough people walk by.  Most of them had dogs too and I can't resist getting talking to new dogs.  There were some crazy ones out there today that liked nothing better than to swim in the Cam, a river so dirty that I'd rather spend the day in soiled pants than wash them in it.

Looking In From Christ's Pieces

For reasons (d) other I'm in Cambridge for a couple of days and brought most of my gear with me to do some painting.  I forgot the kitchen roll and water bottle but I'm sure can get by.  I only had time for one painting today but might manage two tomorrow before heading back to the hotel to enjoy the England match.  I was surprised to hear that there were students still sitting exams, which is why I wasn't allowed inside Christ's and why I didn't even bother asking at my sons' colleges Clare and Tit Hall.  After wandering around Cambridge looking for inspiration, I decided to set up shop on Christ's Pieces with a view of the end of the Fellows' Building within Christ's.  Cambridge is always pretty busy but Christ's Pieces, being very slightly off the beaten track, was at just the right level of business for me.  The optimal spot for painting was even at a shady dead end clearing surrounded by shrubs, so perfect.  Tomorrow, though, I think I'm going to head for the river and watch some bumps races while I paint.  It will mean some rough walking conditions, though, I’m to set up on the opposite bank to the busy towpath.

I made the mistake today of not really having a plan.  I put down a rough and ready initial drawing, only to find I'd cut of fine top of the building and I didn't even bother redrawing.  And everything was freehand, with no draftsmanship in evidence.  I had trouble drawing horizontal and vertical lines and am looking forward to painting a building–free landscape tomorrow.  The only compositional thought that did go into to this one was that the two trees made quite a good frame and would allow me to be adventurous with the colours.

I didn't put much thought into colours today.  I just in the key of purple coolish French ultramarine, quinacridone magenta and transparent yellow, my three favourite colours.  Later I threw in burnt sienna, mainly to to help with the building colours, and hematite violet genuine, mainly to help add some texture to the wall representing the boundary of the college.  Cadmium red and cadmium yellow came in later, with cadmium yellow playing enough of a role for this to no longer be a purple cool painting but a purple warm/cool hybrid.

As you can probably guess, I masked out window frames, spattered on masking fluid and then worked from t back to the front.  The sky and trees went brilliantly but I was already disappointed in the painting because of the cropped building and poor draftsmanship, so there were no celebrations.

For the building, the wall, the grass and the paths, I worked in multiple layers, trying to build towards what I wanted.  The building, grass and path were built up in fairly sensible layers with localism colours and lots of variegation.  The building, to be fair, came out in a very Christ's looking colour.  The rest, less so, spoilt by the shadows.  More about them later.  The college wall started out pretty good, with a wild, colourful underpainting, some salt and some dabbing with an old–shirt.  After this, I put on a couple of glazes, one of which was just hematite violet.

And, after a little intermission where I putting railings with dry raw sienna, French ultramarine and an old credit card, it was time to add the trees.  I had so much fun with these, starting with a variegated mix of French ultramarine and burnt sienna, then charging in all three primaries, the burnt sienna and the hematite violet.  I got some great effects but couldn’t resist tinkering, trying to improve things.  But eventually I stopped in a reasonably sensible place.

I then decided that there were just three things left to do, and in a very specific order: add shadows, remove the masking fluid and add some leaves and greenery.  So first I added shadows with a watery purple glaze, hoping it would bring the painting to life and make the sun shine.  It didn't, mainly because I thought about where the sun was and decided that the building wall and boundary wall facing us should both be in shadow, so both glazed.  The building survived the glazing but the boundary wall lost all its vibrancy.  Then I removed the masking fluid and glazed over the windows with a greyish blue and dabbed them, just because they would have been too bright otherwise.

And then I went for the greenery.  I debated whether to go for cadmium yellow or sepia as my main colour, opting for the yellow as I thought the painting needed a bit more oomph.  So I used the Merlin brush to stab in loads of cadmium yellow, cadmium red and French ultramarine straight from the tube.  This did brighten things up but the painting looked to me as if it had lost some harmony.  So I introduced the cadmium yellow to the trees, in the same way that I've been using titanium white on rocks.  I started with quite a thin layer on the left of the trunks, used a bit of water to spread it over a bit, then dabbed it off.  And lo and behold, the trees started to take on some life and to harmonise with the rest of the painting.  I then tweaked this by adding cadmium yellow down the left, quinacridone magenta down the middle and French ultramarine down the right and dabbing them dry while trying to sculpt the trunks into cylinders with my dabbing strokes.

And that was me done as it was gone 3pm by now and I was able to head back to the hotel to check in.

And, let's be honest, this one's a flop, isn't it?  The trees came out OK and are encouraging but otherwise I think this one suffers from being too rushed.  Even the lack of kitchen paper and a water bottle is down to some rushed packing.  Let's move on.

RIP Jazzy John Romita Snr, 1930–2023

Jerry Garcia And Bob Weir, Copenhagen 1972

With all this coloured pencil jamming I've been doing lately, I've been playing a lot of Grateful Dead.  YouTube has obviously gotten wind of this, so recommended that I take another look at a video I've watched countless times of the Dead performing Me And Bobby McGee at Copenhagen on 17 April 1972.  It's a great performance and you can see from Jerry's celebratory neck twist at 2:48 that he knows he's absolutely nailed the guitar solo.  But for today's purposes, it's more important to note the graininess of the video and how Jerry's and Bob's tops are dark enough to blend into the background.  This video was absolutely begging to inspire a coloured pencil portrait.

So, as is usual for my portraits, I started with a grid, placed all sorts of important points on the paper using a ruler, then drew on some quite faint outlines.  And then I was ready to get started.

And I started with the  black that covers most of the paper.  This has seven layers to it.  In order, they were delft blue, dark pthalo green, dark red, helio blue reddish, magenta, emerald green and pale geranium lake.  I started with some very light layering but layers 4 to 6 needed to be heavier as the paper was starting to fill up with colour.  Although for the last layer, in pale geranium lake, I was going back to being quite light pressure as I was only wanting my background colour to pick up a hint of red and not to turn into a reddish neutral and to need bringing back with another layer of green.  Oh, and with that sixth layer, I didn't use emerald green everywhere but used pine green instead on Jerry's and Bob's torsos to contrast then very slightly against the background.

For the bits lit up in red I still used magenta and dark red but also introduced madder and rose carmine, maybe even a bit of mauve or violet to blend Jerry’s lit hair into his darker hair.  And I used all the colours mentioned so far to fill the faces with impressionistic tones.  Some of the darks on Bob's face use the same seven layers as the dark background but applied really lightly.  There's also some green gold in there, most notably in tinting Jerry's glasses.  To finish the faces off, I added some fleshy tones for variety.  Beige red, terracotta and even a bit of cadmium orange.

The microphone already had lots of red light on it but I also added some cool greys.

And I finished off by smoothing out everything with a paper stump.  This wasn't one that I wanted to burnish and make shiny.  I deliberately blurred over edges in an attempt to replicate the graininess of the video.  After this, I thought Bob's eyes were a bit too wide open, so cut them in half lengthways and applied my seven layer dark colour overview top half.

And that was me done.  I enjoyed taking my time over this one and am really pleased with the final result, which I think captures a lot of the atmosphere in the video.  It's good enough for me, and I dare say for Bobby McGee.  This one's definitely going up for sale.

You probably think, by the way, that I was playing some Grateful Dead while working on this.  Well I wasn't for two reasons.  First, a lot of this was put together over two mornings, a time of day when the sun doesn't shine through my patio doors.  So I could keep them open with the aircon off and that means no music if I want to keep the neighbours happy.  And second, this was a focused painting, where I was needing to concentrate on covering every square centimetre of the background with seven layers, not a landscape that I could jam.  And I'm saving the Dead for coloured pencil landscape jamming sessions.

All Saints' Church, Cambridge

It got to about half past five tonight, and after starting out thinking I was having a day off, I thought I might make a start on a coloured pencil landscape.  Earlier on today, I switched the box of CDs that I have the studio.  I have six boxes of discs, each representing a cross section of my music collection.  And that means every time I switch boxes I'm presented with more Grateful Dead albums that I've not played in a while.  This box has three of their albums, nine discs of music.  I thought I'd go for a 1977 concert (a very good year) and play one CD, saving the rest for tomorrow.  But once start jamming it's hard to stop.

But I'm getting of myself.  I picked out this scene (which, if you haven't guessed is a view from within Christ's College) for two reasons.  First, because I thought the toothiness of the paper would give a good hazy effect to the church and, second, because I thought those trees would be a great test for my coloured pencil jamming.

The initial drawing wasn't a great test of my skills so, formten first time in ages, I didn't use a grid or even a ruler, just drawing by hand in light grey.  To mark out the initial shapes, I went for mauve in the sky and reds and browns fro the trees and grass.  I left the church as a white shape.

And then I filled the paper with colour.  As usual I kept moving from shape to shape rather than working from back to front I tend to do with watercolour.  For the sky, I added on all sorts of different blues in layers, different blues in different places, then added a unifying layer of sky blue on top.  Then I dabbed out some white clouds with a putty eraser and then burnished over it all in white.

For the grass I followed a similar technique.  Multiple layers with variegated colours but nor really jamming.  So I kaput going over the grass with greens, blues, yellows and the odd bit of brown in different places.  Obviously I added those shadows too, definitely using valutier mortum violet and dark sepia but also some other violets.  Maybe blues and reds too.  I started with shadows at the back and in the middle, as per my source photo, but put them in as horizontal shapes pointing to the left pointing to the left rather than upwards and to the left.  And the position the sun that those shadows implied would mean that there would also be shadows right down at the front.  So I added these and you can see where I didn't get the colours quite right: the nearest shadows are more brown and less purple.  Anyway, the grass and shadows were all smoothed out with a paper stump.

There's not much to say about the church, the bench and the back wall.  For these I generally tried to replicate the colours that I could see using multiple layers.  And not many layers for the church, which I wanted to stay really bright.  The darks in the church windows were made from layers of a blue, a red and a green.  All these shapes were smoothed out at the edge with a paper stump.

And then we get to the trees and the flower beds.  The trees were jammed, jammed, jammed.  After putting down the first layer of reds and browns (I say a layer but it was jammed, leaving lots empty space) I danced around with a layer of greens, just to get the colour in the right ballpark.  After that, I jammed in loads of levels of greens, browns, reds, blues and yellows.  Sometimes this meant using tight circles in places, sometimes it meant moving from place to place without ever sticking around.and things just kept building and building.  There's so much texture there: I can see all those individual twigs.  During the jamming, I admit I did have one eye on values, especially jobbtest right where I wanted the tree attraction back and some bits of the closest tree to be darker.  And I generally concentrated the yellows (including the cadmium yellow, which was playing a blinder today) around the edges of the trees and on the tree on the left that the sun was shining on.  Whenever I added reds or browns, everything suddenly improved and the painting came to life – that's worth remembering.  Eventually I decided that I needed to unify colours before the paper became full, so added a unifying layer, albeit in two different colours on the right where I wanted that value contrast.  The flower beds were my biggest problem today: they started off being coloured sensibly (like the church and back wall) but ended up getting jammed instead.  It didn't help that the purple flowers in the bottom right started in the light but ended up in shadow.  And I finished by smoothing out the trees and flower beds with a paper stump.

And that was me done.

Well, that was an enjoyable few hours of jamming.  From a distance, this looks amazing, the trees and the church in particular.  The jamming definitely worked.  And the one point perspective of the scene brings the viewer's eye to the church with its hazy edges.  It's a shame the flower beds weren't 100% jammed but I'm still thinking this is pretty good.  Definitely one for the shop window.

Key Man

Lots of old keys laying around the house after getting all the doors and windows replaced, so I glued a load of them together just for the hell of it.  And that was me done.

VNixie

I'm taking it a bit easy today, just going for a quick figure painting with the inktense pencils. I swear I must take almost as long choosing a subject and pose as I do painting but I eventually settled on this pose by VNixie.  My choice was restricted by me wanting to paint someone I'd never painted before but I did find a pose that I liked.

After the success of Michael, Hot And Cold back in March, I thought I'd try something similar but this time, influenced partly by the source photo, I went for cool colours above the waist and warm below.  I started with indigo in the darkest areas everywhere and supplemented this with iris blue, teal green and a teeny bit of field green in the cool areas and Shiraz, fuchsia, poppy red and a teeny bit of chilli red in the warm areas.  The hair started with indigo but I added in all the warm and cool colours as I used them.  And that's about all there is to say.

Overall, yes it's not bad and worthy of a place in the shop window.  The red cheeks draw the eye and there are a couple of good lost edges on the right arm.  If I wanted to be hypercritical, though, the hair feels a bit detached, the neck a bit too monotone and the transition between warm and cool colours a bit too sudden.

Anyway, that's me done for the day.  Feet up and reading a book now.

Church Of San Pedro De Atacama, Chile

Another watercolour today.  Here was my line of thinking:

- lots of recent paintings have been in the key of orange cool: Duane Allman, I Can Read Your Mind, A Moment At Stonehenge

- that's a lot of warm yellow, cool blue and warm red.  Maybe I need to give the cool yellow, warm blue and cool red a go, just to even things out a bit

- so I'll be painting in the key of purple cool

- based on my previous experience, my best paintings in purple cool are of white buildings in the sun

- so let's find one of those, then and paint it!

Today's colours were transparent yellow, French ultramarine and quinacridone magenta.  Raw sienna was the alternative choice of cool yellow but that's had some recent action (when it disappointed).  And it's a genuine three colour job today, with no supporting cast.  As subject matter, I picked this church in Chile, based on a photo taken by old friend Derek Stone on his recent tour of the Andes on a bike.

I started by putting down an accurate pencil drawing using a grid and a ruler.  At some point I need to get back to doing more freehand drawings but not today.  And I masked out a few small highlights.

And then I got to work with the colour.  First was the sky.  It's very plain and blue in the source photo and I copied this at first but later dropped in the odd bit of yellow and red in later layers and even tried scuffing things up with some fast backward and forward diagonal strikes with the brush.  I think I eventually ended up with four layers in the sky: I wanted it to be quite dark to contrast against the church.

For the other shapes, I started with the darks in the door and windows then, rather than doing my usual thing and going from back to front, I jumped around a bit, doing whichever shapes I fancied at the time.  There were four main sets of shapes:

- the roofs were mainly yellow and red, with little bits of the three primaries charged in

- the greenery started by laying yellow over the blue sky and dragging it downwards, with blue and red later charged in.  Quite a lot of red, to be honest - I wanted quite a neutral green.  There are three or four layers of colour in those greens.

- the driveway was made by mixing the red and yellow, varying the proportions as I filled out the shape.  I threw in some salt, too, to get a bit of texture.

- for the left facing sides of the building, I started with a very watery neutral mix of all three colours, then dropped in bits of red, yellow and blue wherever they felt right and balanced things.  I ended up dabbing these colours dry to keep them restrained.  Afterwards, I went over them with a watery neutral mix to bring them together in the same way that gravy brings together a main course on Masterchef.

- for the right facing, sunlit, sides of the building I just put on watery red, yellow and blue wherever felt right (leaving lots of white) and dabbed it dry.

And then I was ready to add shadow.  I started with a blue, then put on a layer of purple afterwards (after my first set of shadows ended up too varied after not mixing enough colour to begin with - schoolboy error).  Then I stepped back and looked at the painting.  My impression was that  there wasn't enough distinction between the two planes at every forward pointing corner.  So I mixed up some purple to neutral colour, painted it along the left side of the edges and tried to fade it into the rest of the left facing edge with water.  I did this a couple of times and, to be honest, my faded out glazes ended up more like flat glazes.  But they did the trick.

Fun ally, I applied the finishing touches.  A few tiny details, the removal of masking fluid and stamping in the metal fence with an old credit card.  And that was me done.

The final painting isn’t perfect but I'm happy with it.  Maybe if an inch and a half of boring stuff we’re cropped off the left it would look better.  But the colours in those left facing walls are amazing and I like how the church contrasts against the sky, with some little bits of white paper separating the two of them in places.  This one's up for sale

<Edit: I've just made it to the end of Derek's YouTube video.  I wasn't expecting him to crash one of my paintings from 15 months ago!>

A Moment At Stonehenge

It was supposed to be the start of the big heatwave today but for most if the day it's been exactly the opposite.  For the first time since I had the air conditioning installed, I didn't need it switched on.  I just worked in the studio with the window and doors open and everything was perfect for painting.  Except that I thought I'd better not have music on with the doors open.

I wanted today to try out some of the ideas from the Catherine Beale book.  For subject matter I picked out two different Stonehenge photos: one with this arrangement of stones and one with a very orange sky and the sun shining through the stones and the clouds.  For colours, I picked out Indian yellow, rose dore and Mayan blue genuine and threw in viridian for a bit of fun and hematite violet genuine for texture.  With viridian playing a role as a second cool blue, this is in the key of orange cool.  Titanium white also ends up playing a key role and cadmium red and cadmium yellow appear at the end as garnishes.

After putting down a pretty basic pencil drawing, I put down a very watery underpainting.  I used all five colours in this but with half an eye on the final result, trying to get lots of red and yellow into the sky, hematite violet over the stonework and yellow and empty paper around the sunburst.

The second layer was much more careful, sticking to the boundaries in the linework, trying to make the sky orange and colouring the stones with blue, red and green in mist places but yellow around the sunburst.  After putting this layer down, I put some screwed up clingfilm over the stones and weighed it down; this gave some pretty good effects, even if they ended up hidden by subsequent layers.  I tried to add the odd dark cloud in the sky and to lift paint to give a sunburst through the clouds.

There were several more steps in my process after that, just as there are several in Catherine's process, but I think of them all as tinkering.  I added a two or three more layers to the sky, first trying an orange glaze (red plus yellow) and dropping in some dark clouds, then trying to make the orange shapes more orange and the clouds darker.  For the stones, I alternated between adding more colour to darken them and trying out my new trick (and my own invention) of applying white paint around the edges of the stonework (not too thick but also not too watery), softening it with water and then dabbing it off: it didn't just make the stones look more like stones but it also contrasted them against what was quite a dark sky by now.

Once I was happy with this tinkering, I moved into finishing touches.  I added some shadows and cracks in the stones, with a mixed neutral colour at first but later with the blue.  And I added white spatters everywhere and yellow spatters (with the opaque cadmiums) only over the stones.  And that was me done.

The final verdict?  Well, there are two questions really.  Did I achieve what I set out to achieve?  And is the final painting any good?  The answer to the first question is no.  There's not as much orange in the sky in places where I wanted orange, not enough yellow where I wanted yellow and not enough empty paper where I wanted white.  I've not been fast enough dabbing paint away from the sunburst and I suspect I've been letting other colours contaminate my yellow and red.  And do the stones look a bit too two dimensional?  On the other hand, I think the painting's a success.  I've caught some light in the sky.  Even it doesn't show up in the sky outside the arch, it does show up on the stones and that's far more important.  And there are also some good blue/orange complementary contrasts going on.  It's starting to grow on me.  This one's up for sale.

Contemporary Watercolour On The Go, Marion Rivolier - Book Review

Now this is a book I've had my eye on for a while.  It's been up near the top of my Amazon wishlist and every time I've looked at the list I've see. It there, priced at a pretty extortionate £20  But then I discovered the other day that I could order it from the Books Etc website for about £12.  So I was straight in there like a rat up a drainpipe.  But was it any good?

It's a 160 page paperback, one of those in a square looking format.  I think I prefer the usual rectangular format, although I don't mind the square shaped ones if they come in hardback.  This one has an introduction and 21 enticing sounding chapters.  Books with this many chapters tend to be quite heavy on content: if I'm making notes and find one thing worth writing down in each chapter, that already feels like a lot of notes.

But what happens in those chapters?  Well, Marion sets the readers a number of exercises, shows her attempts at the exercises and another painting using some of the lessons from the exercise.  But the problem is that she doesn't give us any tips about how to complete the exercises.  If we're lucky, we get to hear Marion's conclusion from doing them.  So maybe we get a three part exercise which tells us to paint the scene three times: once in cool colours, once in warm and once using both.  And we get a conclusion; at the end telling us see, when you have both warm and cool the contrast makes for a better painting.  And that's it.  Sometimes there aren’t even any lessons and the exercise seems a bit pointless.  Paint the background on its own, then the foreground in its own, then both together.  Why, Marion, why?  The contrast between this and Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain, is huge: that was a book where the author built up to exercises, giving us tips in advance and told us why they were important.  This one has exercises here, just because.

So this book is just reduced to one where I just look at the pictures and decide whether to be inspired by them, whether to copy any of the author's techniques.  But is there anything worth copying?  Well the idea of putting paint down without doing a drawing first is interesting (not that we're given any tips on how to do this) and it's interesting how much empty space she leaves on the page but, to be honest, after a while ai just get sick of her style.  It's not a pleasure the eyes (not that that's why she does these sketches - she's in interested in documenting her day) and there's too little value contrast in her paintings.  I'm more likely to look for inspiration from a variety of styles in The Art Of Urban Sketching than I am to flick through this one.

So I do regret buying this one.  Which means, I'm afraid, that it only gets one palette.

🎨

Egyptian Sorcery

Just a quick one today.  I had that one crackle pasted board still waiting to be used and wanted to cross it off my list so here goes.

I started with some inktense sticks, running them across all the cracked areas, wetting them and wiping off the ink, leaving the cracks coloured in.  That was a handy discovery.

Looking at the shape of the cracks, I could see a landscape with tree trunks on the right if I held the board a certain way up, so went with that.  My plan today was to give the desert supergranulators a run, so that's what I did, using the yellow, orange and brown in the foreground and the green and grey in the tree trunks and in the area above them.

After that, I did a lot of tinkering.  I don't know what it is about these crackle pasted boards but they seem to soak up paint.  I keep putting more paint on but the values never get any darker.  After I got fed up putting on more of the desert colours, I turned to cerulean blue to liven up the sky a little, cadmium red (which, to be fair, already appears within two of the desert colours) in the sky and foreground and a bit of cadmium yellow in the foreground.  These did succeed in livening things up slightly.  I also tried a bit of forest brown in the leafy area above the tree trunks.  With the tree, I could see a strange figure emerging with raised arms, so I did what I could to bring her out further, throwing on more of the greens and dabbing paint off around her.  And I just kept tinkering, adding more of these colours, dabbing stuff out and dripping on the odd bit of granulating medium until I recognised that things weren’t ever going to improve.  So that's when I stopped.

I guess there are interesting colours and effects there but that's all.  It's some where between abstract and representative but failing in both counts, whereas my better ones on crackle pasted boards have passed on both.  So, yeah, I'm not liking this one enough to put it in the shop window.

Time now for my daily power walk, a bit of reading, then settling down for the West Ham match.  No painting tomorrow as the guy from last week is back to replace a couple more doors.