oil on card 30x20cm
First of all, here's some music. It was playing as I was finishing this painting, and everything just fell into place. It's one of Shostakovich's 24 Preludes and Fugues - No.16. Quite tasty and atmospheric.
This is a view from a train. It is 11.30am in mid-February, and we have just drawn out of Linlithgow heading west to Stirling. Snow was lying in Edinburgh, and I was a little worried about my bus connection further north from Dunblane to Crieff. Looking south into the low band of yellow light, this is Cockleroy Hill.
The sky is as close as I could get to the source photo, but there have been a couple of tweaks to the landscape. The hill on right – possibly Cairnpapple - was flattened a bit, but as the painting evolved I wished that I'd levelled it completely. If I were to start again, I'd make more of the dip in the skyline directly in front of the light, and move it slightly towards the centre, but there we are.
The actual painting was done fairly efficiently. I dispensed with the finer acrylic under-drawing layer this time; all I did before the oil layers was a bit of placing with pencil, and then I killed off the white priming below the skyline with some very rough thin acrylic wash over the land. It was important to be fairly accurate with the main subjects – the hill especially, and the sky – but I was much looser with the supporting woodland masses, choosing to use the source as a tonal guide rather than as a rigid mapping for individual trees. I tweaked the nearest dark tree lines to form a shallow downward arc – it felt more secure compositionally than straightish flat forms, and that put a bit more focus on the skyline. In the sky, as an experiment, the light stringy clouds (Fractus, if you're really keen to know) were very lightly touched in with turpentine-thinned paint after wiping the surface with Walnut Oil. This gave me very fine, light marks, and the cloud masses were then bulked in with slightly thicker paint – same colour and tone - when those had dried. I think that worked, but it might be more effective doing the cloud bulk first and then the finer shredded bits later – I'll have to try that sometime
Altogether though, I'm quite pleased with the land receding into the yellowish horizon light, and how the glow touches the fields on the right. It does feel like a cold, overcast February day.
Not as Russian as the music, but chilly nevertheless...
