Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Sky Study


watercolour and gouache 17x11cm

I was looking out the window after New Year and I saw this late afternoon variety of cloud forms (love those mottled altocumulus) - a rarity this time of year. ‘Sunny’ Scotland still has very short dark days just now, covered by blanket stratus or dull stratocumulus.

There are some very nice soft effects in this little sketch. The gouache helps, but the main difference to previous water sketches is the paper – Bockingford. The paint lifts off it very easily, enabling soft edges without unnecessary disturbance or tearing of the surface, and it’s very, very helpful to work with – especially with this subject matter.

That’s all there is to say about this piece, really. As usual, I’m piling into other complex oil pieces, but more about them as and when they’re completed. So that’s it for now…

…except, of course, that I’ve re-formatted the blog. I’d been getting rather fed up with all the blinding white, especially as it goes against a bee I have in my bonnet concerning White Walls in Galleries*. The grey, hopefully, will be a lot kinder to the images. It’s early days yet, and I still have to do a bit of tweaking concerning links to larger images – which I think are quite important – so the peripherals may change from time to time.

The title’s changed as well. It seems to me now fairly self-evident that I am indeed doing it properly, and any back-story, if that’s what there may be, is now irrelevant.

So, as they say, New Year – New Formatting for the Blog/Blog-reader Display Interface…

*The light tones in a painting are always less light than the surface they are displayed on, and lighter colours appear duller and more lacklustre because they are drowned out by the base white of the gallery walls.