oil on card 33x20cm
This dramatic late afternoon winter sky is sourced from a set of photos I took on Bruntsfield Links, looking north at Edinburgh Castle and the old Royal Infirmary buildings (which have all been photoshopped out). The landscape source is another view of the location used in 'Passing', turned left to right with a treeline added on the left and the feature trees removed. I just needed something interesting but not too dramatic to anchor the sky to, and picked this out from the volumes of landscape images clogging up my computer.
Having finished the painting, it looks like a snowy landscape. The sky is deep winter – it was January – but in the landscape the trees are in full leaf. I altered the landscape colour to match the sky, and it's just 'accidentally' ended up looking wintery. I quite like the fictitious snowy mauve though.
As is usual now, the landscape features were pencilled in, forms and tones built up with monochrome acrylic washes, then transparent and semi-transparent oil layers laid on. There's no pencil or acrylic underdrawing in the sky – the fairly accurately placed landscape features acting as a 'ruler' against which to place the cloud forms horizontally.
I'm more usually trying to find the light in a painting, but this is really more about the supporting darks, and it's a bit of a change of palette. I took a long time arriving at the right tonality, possibly because I was working the earlier stages from a lightened version of the composition so as to see the ground details more clearly. It didn't exactly help that the end-stage pink glazes took a little too long - they were made up with Indian Yellow, Alizarin Crimson, and a touch of Zinc White. These are some of the slowest pigments I have, and I neglected to add extra driers to the mix, so they took ages to dry. Cracking colour though - the Alizarin/Yellow was a combination I used a lot in my Early Phase of painting in the 70's and 80s.
As it happens, combining Yellow and Alizarin Crimson was one of the major building blocks I was given at school – I was trying to paint a fiery phoenix for some reason, and when I added white to my school-grade crimson poster-paint to make it lighter it went an uninspiring cool pink. I must have looked rather obviously at a loss, and my Art teacher, Mr Knight, popped up at my shoulder out of nowhere and suggested I ditch the white, and lighten the dark red with some yellow instead – and a very important door opened in my head.
Which is what education is all about I suppose...
