Three Altocumulus

oil on card 30x22cm

The starting point for this little painting was another photo of trees snapped from a train window, possibly in West Lothian somewhere, but definitely in early May a few years ago. The sky was clear, but the clouds were clipped from a more recent photo taken out of the front window. I quite liked the combination of the turbulent dark foliage below and the stable trio of altocumulus clouds above.

Technically, I went a bit round the houses with this one. The trees and ground were pencilled lightly onto the priming, then the landscape toned in with thin black fluid acrylic. The watery acrylic provided quite a lot of useful foliage texture itself, but I took that further with fingers and thumbs into the blobs and washes. I started the oil layers with thin, even glazes - blue in the sky, and a transparent yellow-green over the landscape – the black acrylic showing through quite plainly. It was then all about pumping light into the sky, and dulling down that acid green - while making the most of the tonal drawing and texture coming through the layers. Obviously, towards the last sessions there was precious little of the finer under-texture showing through the more worked darker areas, but it does still show - with some faint pencil too - in the more lightly developed areas like the right treetops against the sky.

There was a bit of trouble with the near foliage in the lower right corner – it became too detailed and there was so much contrast within those tiny marks that I had to go over them with a thin grey to knock them back and stop them popping. There's also a bit too much cat hair in the sky for my liking as well. I try to minimise the paint-to-hair ratio by covering up the brushes when nopt in use, and making a point of not stroking the cats prior to applying glazes, but I think this problem really is at the periphery of my zone of control. On the good side though, I do like the skyline on this one, where the the trees are faded and bleached out under the bright light. I'm quite chuffed with the restraint of the brighter atmosphere at the horizon – it would have been very easy to overdo it.

To sum up, this one went quite well, and I quite enjoyed doing it. Hopefully I won't have to push future paintings to an extreme state and then rescue them, but that was actually quite an interesting round trip. I'm feeling keener about painting after a rather unmotivated spell, and Covid lockdown's gradually easing in Scotland so (fingers crossed) I'm looking forward to gadding about to see a few galleries soon. 

Oh, and my knee's just about back to normal too...

Window Work: Covid Lockdown - June 2020

watercolour

Window Work again, in unusual circumstances though. During the early part of lockdown there wasn't much activity going on outside in the street at all, just a few intrepid souls walking nervously down the street, widely avoiding other nervous walkers - but there really were a lot of seagulls.

As usual, these little sketches are in Payne's Grey watercolour, all done with a smallish Oriental brush, and I've had some fun arranging them for the final image. 

There's been some disruption to the easel work this month (nothing to do with covid). My regular work pattern was interrupted by preparing and priming some more panels, knackering my back (once) and a knee (twice), and by having to buy a new camera. The previous 'good' camera ceased functioning not long after posting last month's blogpost, and familiarising myself with the new one has necessitated a certain amount of urgent research and finding out which button does what, and why. The daily routine's back to normal now, though. Or soon will be. 

There's not much more I can say about these little drawings, except that remembering what birds look like when they're flashing through the sky can be very demanding. This selection is the best of a (very) bad hit rate over the last few months, but the few passers-by and the mask - in contrast to the raucous vigour of the local wildlife - sort of reflect how this spring has been.

Mind you, reticence has never really been a problem for the Common Gull...