This is the first piece finished this year, sourced from a photo I took from Blackford Hill, looking northwards across the Firth of Forth to Fife.
There is a very short, light, ambient track to go with it – Max Richter's 'Time Piece'. It floats in the way I wanted the big cumulus to.
This little painting is all about that big cloud, of course, with only very basic compositional input from the earthbound elements. The water, a much wider expanse than in real life, was photoshopped in from another photo during the composition stage – superimposed over the unwanted bits of Edinburgh that were in the Blackford Hill picture.
Technique-wise, it's worth noting that the blue in the sky and the distant haze is straight Indanthrene Blue with Zinc White. This pigment is known under various names, e.g. 'Anthraquinone' and 'Delft' blues, but its pigment code is always PB60. I've seen it referred to as 'Indie Blue', so that'll do for me. I actually bought this tube a few years ago, but hadn't really bothered with it until now. It's a very transparent pigment – great for glazes – and on the palette is as dark as Prussian Blue, but it doesn't have that pigment's strange blackness. To my eyes it's slightly less violet than Ultramarine and doesn't have the malevolent aggression of Pthalo, so it turned out just right for the pure blue of this sky. Its one drawback is that it's a series four colour, so on the pricey side, but a little does seem to go a long way.
While I'm still talking technical, I feel I have to roll back a bit on my previous enthusiastic advocacy for caran d'ache crayons in underdrawing. In this piece they were fine for placing the cloud forms – where the next layer was oil - but when I laid the thin acrylic washes over the very water-soluble crayon of the landscape, the underdrawing simply dissolved. And very efficiently too. So while I'll continue to use caran d'ache for marking out skies, it's back to the light pencil under acrylic washes for now. Sorry about that.
There are three of the many Forth islands in the picture. They're not particularly obvious, which is partly why they're in the title, so you might have to look for them. The nearest is Inchmickery. To the right of that is a lump of rock called Car Craig, and to the left, closer to the far shore, is the largest – Inchcolm. The Firth of Forth is not usually known as a theatre of war, but all of the larger islands were fortified quite heavily as part of the Rosyth naval base defences – and their anti-aircraft batteries were fired during the first air raid on Britain in 1939 (a train was crossing the Forth Rail Bridge at the time, which must have been terrifying for the passengers). Inchcolm – 'Innis Choluim', Columba's Island - is the most developed. It's a strange combination of abandoned anti-aircraft defences, and the medieval religious buildings at the sheltered bay. The island became a monastic and religious centre in the 9th century and Inchcolm Abbey itself was founded in the 13th century. It is now no longer in use and mostly a ruin, the Scottish Reformation accomplishing what multiple English raids failed to do. There are regular tourist boat trips there out of S. Queensferry. The boats' route goes by an island where there are hundreds of puffins, passes over Mortimer's Deep – a very deep channel between Inchcolm and Aberdour - and as the boat returns to the south shore of the Forth, you'll get your second chance to gawp at the two magnificent Road Bridges while staring up at the Rail Bridge as you pass under it.
And if you've of heard of Aberdour, but are not quite sure why, it may be that you heard from the final verse of 'Sir Patrick Spens'...
Tis fiftie fathom deip,
(Anon)
