Secret Tunnel Under The M2

The weather forecast said that this afternoon would be a lot warmer than yesterday, that the morning's wind would have calmed down and that there would be no rain, so I've been out painting.  It was may be a little colder than I expected and it was always threatening to rain (but never did) but it turned out to be a decent day for painting.  I headed out to a place I only discoverer a week or two ago.  It's a footpath that goes through a tunnel under the M2 just East of Medway Services.  The footpath doesn't seem popular: in four walks to the tunnel I’ve never seen anybody else here.

I picked out three cool colours as my main colours; Mayan blue genuine, transparent yellow and quinacridone magenta.  Three cool colours make for a chilly looking painting which suited the day well.  And the grittiness of the Mayan blue seemed appropriate to the subject.  There were also appearances for hematite violet genuine, cadmium red, cadmium yellow and white gouache.  The warm cadmiums played a significant enough role for me to not be able to classify this as being in the key of green cool, the key of cool blues reds and yellows.

I started with a loose underpainting using all three primaries and some of the hematite violet in the concrete for its texture.  After that, I just kept adding layers made up of the three primaries in various mixes.

There's a lot of the blue in the trees at the top: the idea was to make them recede but it do this I should have painted the blue in lighter.

I stared the fenceposts with some negative painting, leaving them white while I painted in the trees behind them.  In a later layer, I mixed a dark brown for the shadowy side of all the posts and a light, yellowy brown for the sunlit sides and allowed these to mix on the paper.  I wasn't 100% happy, so I later added very dry blue to the shadowy sides and some white gouache highlights.  It would have been easy to add too much of the white and leave the fence looking like snow had settled on it but I think I held back enough.

I also used the white gouache in the lift bit at the end of the tunnel, adding in some tree trunks.  It's good to have that dark/light contrast at the focal point but I can't help thinking the light at the end of the tunnel would better match the treetops at the top if those treetops had been lighter.

The most difficult bit, and the bit I was least looking forward to, was the foliage in the bottom two corners.  It was essential to have it there, framing the path and the tunnel.  This is where I used the cadmium red and yellow, in an attempt to make the foliage stand clear of the tunnel behind it and to get the yellows and reds to pop.  The colours have actually ended up a bit muted, which is probably a good thing.

I added some snowdrop flowers with the white gouache at the end.  They've ended up competing with the light at the end of the tunnel to be the focal point as there are big light/dark contrasts in both places.  I still don’t know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.

I'm reasonably happy with this overall.  It's not as good as my studio efforts but it's one of my better plein air paintings.  It feels compositionally right, with a pleasing pattern of lights and darks under the tunnel.  This one's up for sale.