oil on card 30x18cm
This is based on some photos I took a couple of years ago from the summit of Easter Craiglockhart Hill*, looking South West. The landscape has been flipped left/right (photoshop) against the sky, and makes sense when you know that the far hilltops are Dalmahoy and Kaimes Hills.
This flipping puts part of the nearby Wester Craiglockhart Hill in the lower right corner, in opposition to the dark rain cloud rearing up and advancing from the top left, and centres the arcs of the nearer cloud masses onto the receptive angular nick in the rock profile.
Technique-wise, this was fairly straightforward. The land forms were initially placed with pencil then developed with thin Paynes Grey acrylic before laying on the oil paint. The sky is entirely in oil paint as I didn't want any of the acrylic's hard-edgeness showing through.
I did try something new (for me) in the paint-handling of the sky though. I sometimes use a muslin-covered cloth pad for finer blending and softening, but this time I used a pad covered in velvet. The working properties were great, for both 'printing' the paint on, them fading it out, and for wiping it off too. Unfortunately – even though I'd washed the velvet square two or three times – when the paint dried it revealed fibres and little black bits of the base material. Which is a pity, as it worked the paint very well. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now I'm back to my more reliable muslin. Maybe the Next Idea will work out better
I confess to being a little disappointed in the sky – more specifically the central 'warmer' clouds. I mislaid my understanding of the spaces between them (a danger of using photographs!), and this has resulted in a rather weak and unfocussed centre. An alteration I made in the last stages, patched with an invented rain veil, has left a rather weak 'blue-sky'/'bright-cloud' boundary line which deserves to be stronger. If I were starting again (which I'm not) I'd rethink the central mass, if necessary importing some cloud samples from elsewhere, or indeed reducing or eliminating it, and extending the bright and blue area to sit behind the dramatic rainy stuff on the left.
Given all that, I'm quite pleased with the general efficiency of the landscape, and the contrast between the approaching rain on the left and the clear sunlight on the right. I think the acrylic underdrawing has contributed to the 'rockiness' of the near hillsides – especially on the right. I'm also quite chuffed with the tonal restraint of the rain areas – it would've been very easy to make them darker and over-dramatise the scene, and I think it's dynamic enough as it is.
Which is fine (wish that velvet dabber idea had worked out though...)
* No great physical strain, as the No.23 bus gets you to within a gentle ten-minute walk of the top (where there is a nice comfy bench)...
