oil on card 30x18cm
This is a little sky painting, as usual on primed card. The source is a snap taken as my train dashed past the industrial estate in Bridge of Allan on the way back to Edinburgh – from some time ago now.
The composition is all about the flat ranks of taller trees against the horizontal cloud forms, and the dark landscape against the luminous sky. I didn't want the factory buildings (United Closures & Plastics Ltd), so I hid them behind a line of gorse and grass imported from Easter Craiglockhart Hill up the road in Edinburgh - one of the obvious advantages of using Photoshop as a compositional tool. I took the chance to make the ground level echo the slant in the clouds. The sky is very mixed - drawn-out lenticulars against the much more massive Cumulonimbus. I like the difference between these giant clouds' slightly warm 'tarry' light lower reaches (a simple thin Raw Umber glaze prior to all the blue murk below the clouds) and the clear cool light towards the tops. It's quite windy, and while I normally prefer any apparent motion to flow from left to right – as we in the west normally read – in this piece the wind is blowing from right to left. Which seems fine.
I'm pretty sure the windbreak screens in the centre and right are Poplar trees, possibly Lombardy Poplars, but possibly not. I shall have to ask my arboriculturist pals, and if they tell me I'm wrong I'll have to change the title.
A lot of the cloud seems very out of focus, which is quite good in a way, except that what I like about lenticular clouds – lense-shaped 'lentics' – is their apparent firmness and definition, and I've maybe missed out on the compositional 'bite' of the group of small lentics at left of centre. This lack of definition works for the giant Cumulonimbus though, but at some point I might actually do some lentics that really do say 'lentics'.
Technique-wise, I got going a bit faster on this – the first session started with basic masses placed with light 3H pencil, some quick tonal indications in thin fluid acrylic, and finished with the first thin oil layer in the sky and distance. From then on it was oil layers over a further nine sessions.
There's some interesting colour stuff going on in this piece. I was pleasantly surprised at how effective the distant blue was between the silhouetted tree masses, and a mysterious violet-ish colour (a Good Thing, though maybe not apparent in the image) has appeared where that distant Ultramarine horizon moves behind them. I'm really not sure what has caused it, maybe it's something to do with the Burnt Umber in the blacks against the Raw Umber in the sky, but I'm guessing here. I'm quite pleased with the texure of the foreground grasses as well – there's some quite nice 'glaze, then scrape away the lights, then glaze again etc' routine going on there which is very effective at this scale.
It feels 'better' to be back to painting for its own sake (I draw the line at saying 'relaxing', as painting is definitely NOT relaxing), without hurrying for an exhibition or closing date. As it happens, I thought I'd finished it after the ninth session, and if I'd been pushed for time, I probably would've left it at that. But, looking at it after a weekend – and after a little humming and hawing, and conducting a risk assessment consultation with Madam - I spent half-an-hour adding some thin blurry layers – blue-grey on the windbreaks, and plain grey on the left cherry tree. This shifted all the trees back from the actual surface and into the rest of the painting, and confirmed the cherry tree to be slightly closer than the others
Madam said that it really did make a difference, which is nice. I think she knew I was going to do it anyway, whatever she said. Which, I think, is probably quite true...
