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...