Far Cumulus

oil on card 36x18cm

There is a music track to go with this. I didn't have one until the very last session, when I happened to have Max Richter's film music playing in the background. The image resonated and came to life during 'The Haunted Ocean pt I' from 'Waltz with Bashir' (an extraordinary film – watch it if you haven't already). Actually, it hit me like a brick.

The basic composition – near, sloping, ground against distant clouds and land across sea – was sparked from photos taken on a bike jaunt around Arthur's Seat. It was an early March afternoon, and when I came round this bend there was this line of majestic cumulus clouds over Fife, lit almost horizontally. It's a wide 2:1 proportion, and this allows more to be made of the actual horizon area without having to fill the upper sky. I've changed a lot of things since the initial stages of composition – photoshopping problem stuff out and possible solutions in. For a long time my source foreground was very bland and formless, so I concocted a more interesting mash-up from a batch of snaps I took on Blackford Hill (getting images for gorse, and grass and path forms for something else ages ago). At one point there was a barking dog – which I've just (this second, writing this! ) realised harks back to 'Waltz with Bashir' (shivers).

A small painting, this is a preliminary problem-solving exercise before starting the large one. I have one very minor reservation about it – that the upper blue sky may be just a tiny bit too dark. I'll go with it though, because I like the intensity of the colour. All in all though, it's paid off – I've changed some of the grass so that the curve of the path is more pronounced. There's now a better visual link between the two sets of figures than had been originally planned. The three militiamen are unashamedly re-cycled from 'Day's Work Done'. In that painting, the results of their work are out of sight, maybe beyond the ridge the men are descending from. Here, they are present.

Technically/paint-wise this one isn't very different from the previous few paintings, so here's a little computer/image/technical tip. I've been meaning to point this out, as some folk may be frustrated by the small size of the images as displayed on the blogpage. (You may know about this already – if so, skip this section). This for Chrome by the way, but bear with.

OK. Click the image above the text on the screen - this will give a larger image on its own. This is nice, but we can do better. Right-click this image for a menu, and choose 'Open image in new tab'. When you go to that New tab, the image will be larger, and your cursor will be a 'plus' sign. Click, and you'll get the largest image the site can offer you, that is, an image 1600 pixels wide, and you may be able to see how much cat hair and 'bits' get onto what seems a smooth surface.

You can make this appear yet bigger though. Right-click, and 'Save' it. You can then expand the saved image even further with your photo viewer – your computer will have come with one installed. The sharpness will go blurry the further in you zoom, but you might get something from it – it will differ from image to image.

That's the rigmarole for Chrome. Firefox is more or less the same, except they have a simpler 'View image' instead of Chrome's 'Open in new tab' function. I presume Internet Explorer and the other systems do more or less the same thing. I hope that's been helpful...

So, as you were. Now for some news.

I'm making my final turn now into September's show at the Open Eye Gallery, in Dundas Street. There's only one other painting in progress at the moment – and that HAS to be done by the end of July. In the meantime, and when that piece is done, I'll be getting on with the organisational stuff so it's not all last-minute. My diary says that the show will be open on Friday 6th September, and be up until 28th September, and I'll give you more info in the next couple of posts.

I think this is a very good little painting, but I'm not sure – at this moment, having just finished it - whether I will be presenting 'Far Cumulus' for the exhibition. I like it very much, and had quite a turn when I realised that I'd finished it. It'll let it go at some point, maybe when the bigger one's done, but I'm not sure that I'll have had enough of it. I know that my best work should be in the approaching show - but, if you don't mind, maybe not quite yet.

Cold Front

oil on panel 81x56cm

There is a music track I listened to in order centre myself when working on this – it's Radiohead's 'Motion Picture Soundtrack' from Kid A. 

The source images for this painting are my own; the clouds are a photoshopped composite from a group snapped out of the kitchen window, but the landscape was photographed from a bus – front seat at the top of course – approaching Perth on the A85, just past the Jet petrol station east of Lochty. I originally had a fully worked-out composition combining this sky with a view across Strathearn, but I had severe doubts about it. I'm glad I ditched that one, this 'second thought' has been much more adaptable and rewarding. I have certainly taken liberties with it - I magicked up quite a lot of depth by breaking-up the hedge and tree line, and re-working distances – but that's made the landscape so much more interesting.

There's an obvious rhyme (and visual cliché to be honest) between the piling cumulus clouds and the full summer trees, but there is also another, less prettily innocent theme running through this. If you look intently at the lower right corner you'll see what could be a paint smudge in the wheat. It's not of course, it's a prone figure. He could be sleeping, or drunk, but I think he's in trouble, and may very well be dead. This figure is the sharp little splinter that catches the viewer unawares. It's there to remind him or her that awful, sad, and tragic events can and have occurred, and will continue to occur, in the most beautiful and peaceful of settings - Et in Arcadia Ego.

Technical-wise, there's a lot of the usual soft and blended stuff going on in the sky, but there's more textured work in the earth-bound areas, a lot of it left unsoftened. Close up, the 'tree' layers are quite fractured, and in some places the acrylic under-drawing texture still shows through the glazed and semi-opaque layers. The even nature of the wheatfield made it very difficult to disguise the figure, and I'm a little unsure how successful that has been. It's much easier to hide an object or figure in a 'busy' patch of bushes or whatever, than in a soft and fairly homogeneous area. All I could really do was make the lush and dynamic clouds on the left the initial point of interest, while compressing the tones of figure to make it less obvious. I hope it works, but once you've seen it you can't really un-see it. I'd also wanted to show the wave effect of wind on the crop (I watched video loops of breezy fields till I was almost catatonic), and a change of wind direction - associated with a cold front - turning around the central trees. That was really ambitious, and while I'm not entirely convinced, Madam felt that that the music made the wheat and clouds seem to swirl with movement – which was very flattering. For me - the light works well, and I do like the difference in paint treatment between the sky and landscape.

There's been some weather technicals mentioned here, so I should maybe explain the title. A cold front – the term was coined in 1919 by a Norwegian meteorologist - is a where a cold, or cooler, air mass meets a warmer one, and this can produce large rising cumulus clouds, as in the painting. It's clearly explained in this video.

And finally, some news! I've been admitted as a Professional Member by the Society of Scottish Artists, which entitles me to use the letters SSA after my name. Which is a lot of consecutive S's, but still very nice.

And I'm quite chuffed actually...

Snow - Linlithgow

oil on card 30x20cm

First of all, here's some music. It was playing as I was finishing this painting, and everything just fell into place. It's one of Shostakovich's 24 Preludes and Fugues - No.16. Quite tasty and atmospheric.

This is a view from a train. It is 11.30am in mid-February, and we have just drawn out of Linlithgow heading west to Stirling. Snow was lying in Edinburgh, and I was a little worried about my bus connection further north from Dunblane to Crieff. Looking south into the low band of yellow light, this is Cockleroy Hill.

The sky is as close as I could get to the source photo, but there have been a couple of tweaks to the landscape. The hill on right – possibly Cairnpapple - was flattened a bit, but as the painting evolved I wished that I'd levelled it completely. If I were to start again, I'd make more of the dip in the skyline directly in front of the light, and move it slightly towards the centre, but there we are.

The actual painting was done fairly efficiently. I dispensed with the finer acrylic under-drawing layer this time; all I did before the oil layers was a bit of placing with pencil, and then I killed off the white priming below the skyline with some very rough thin acrylic wash over the land. It was important to be fairly accurate with the main subjects – the hill especially, and the sky – but I was much looser with the supporting woodland masses, choosing to use the source as a tonal guide rather than as a rigid mapping for individual trees. I tweaked the nearest dark tree lines to form a shallow downward arc – it felt more secure compositionally than straightish flat forms, and that put a bit more focus on the skyline. In the sky, as an experiment, the light stringy clouds (Fractus, if you're really keen to know) were very lightly touched in with turpentine-thinned paint after wiping the surface with Walnut Oil. This gave me very fine, light marks, and the cloud masses were then bulked in with slightly thicker paint – same colour and tone - when those had dried. I think that worked, but it might be more effective doing the cloud bulk first and then the finer shredded bits later – I'll have to try that sometime

Altogether though, I'm quite pleased with the land receding into the yellowish horizon light, and how the glow touches the fields on the right. It does feel like a cold, overcast February day. 

Not as Russian as the music, but chilly nevertheless...

Sky - La Mancha

oil on card 30x20cm

This piece has quite a simple composition – a very firm flat landscape, interrupted only by the clumps of trees, receding back to the horizon and distant hills. The source location is a few miles north-west of Manzanares, on the La Mancha Plain, a very hot, flat area in central Spain. The painting only really deviates from the source in that some trees have been reduced or disappeared, and all the power lines eradicated. The far hills have been shifted around from the right of the viewer. This very simple composition lets the eye take in and enjoy the sky and cloud forms – calmed down a touch - which is, of course, what it's all about.

Technique-wise it follows the current construction sequence of pencil, light monochrome acrylic, then oil paint. The oil paint for the land was placed fairly simply in opaque pigments, but the blue sky was all in transparent Ultramarine/Prussian Blue/Zinc White, with a touch of Paynes Grey in the upper sky - letting the white priming shine through - and thinned out towards the horizon. The clouds were made using several layers of very thin Schminke Fake Flake white. At one point I laid the same blue glaze – a bit thinner - over the whole sky to tint the clouds and the clear blue 'dome' a bit more evenly blue. Later that evening, under night-time artificial light, it looked almost turquoise, and I endured an agony of indecision about whether to wash the new paint off and lay on a slightly more violet glaze. Luckily, under good daylight of the next morning, the sky appeared just 'violet' enough to not need further work. I'm glad I restrained myself from that potentially disastrous over-correction, and I think the clarity of the paint in the sky works very well against that of the opaque terrain.

The clouds are the main thing though. The weather seems to be quite blowy in the source; the altocumulus are quite ragged, and they have wispy trails drawn back down below them. These are called 'virga' – the Latin for 'streaks' - and are inverted plumes of rain, snow, or ice falling from the cloud above. They are very commonly seen falling to the ground beneath a low cumulus shower cloud, but sometimes they can be observed higher in the atmosphere falling from altocumulus clouds, but evaporating before reaching the earth. In still air these are spectacular. A few years back I saw lines and lines of calm, flat, altocumulus clouds receding into the distance, each with a vertical trail beneath. They looked like stately armadas of jellyfish floating through the sky. I took a few snaps at the time, sent them off to the nascent Cloud Appreciation Society, who published them (name-credited) in the first edition of the 'Cloudspotter's Guide' – of which I am immensely proud.

I could go on about that for quite a while, but I shall close by simply noting that the source picture is indisputable documentary evidence that, while it does definitely Rain in Spain, it doesn't necessarily get to actually Fall onto the Plain...

Window Work – February 2019

pencil and watercolour

It's been a while since I've put up live sketches from the street outside. Looking back it seems the last lot was May 2018, or June if you're not counting the live World Cup footballers off the telly. What this means, obviously, is that I've miscalculated my drying times on a still-tacky little painting that should've been posted this month, but I digress...

I've returned to watercolour (Paynes Grey) for the odd window session recently, and it's interesting to note how these rapid drawings in different mediums differ. With the dry pencil, I can make very vague and light initial marks and immediately correct them with slightly heavier ones. This can often add a bit of energy and dynamism, as in the windblown cyclist with the trailer.

With the fluid watercolour, if the initial mark is wrong or misjudged it's difficult to correct immediately as the secondary marks will just pool into a soggy formless mess - which has obvious disadvantages in terms of the speed these things have to be done at. What you do get from watercolour is block tone. This can give an immediate sense of light, or local colour – whether clothing or hair is light or dark, as in the skateboarder – which the more linear pencil has to work harder to achieve. 

I think the success rate is probably greater with the pencil than the watercolour, but when the watercolour comes together - and 'draws itself' - it can be very effective.

Anyone who draws will have their favoured ways of making marks, and it is a good idea to switch about. But, there is one very simple, very important thing to keep in mind whatever medium you're using.

It's all about the looking...

Calton Hill

oil on card 30x20cm

The main source for this little sky piece is a photo I took last summer, from the National Museum of Scotland roof terrace looking towards Calton Hill. The scene depicted doesn't actually exist, as the foreground and the trees are in Perthshire, and were photoshopped in as part of the composition process. I took the liberty of removing the celebrated buildings and tower from this well-known landmark, and replaced all traces of Edinburgh below the hill with tree texture. I think that does two things; it makes the landscape anonymous, and pushes the viewer towards the sky – which is the real subject of the piece anyway.

My interest was in the contrast between the darker cloudlets against a light background, and lighter cloudlets against the dark background. There's also an interesting play on cool blues and warmer greys, and cool neutral and warmer creamy whites.

I'm quite pleased with the landscape though, and as usual, that was the bit that painted itself with very little thought from me. The source was a summer photo, but I coloured the monochrome layer with a lazy, ill-considered browny-yellow mix, which – unexpectedly - looked very good, so I changed the season to a dark and wintry autumn, and let the painting lead me in developing that fiction. 

I was also pleasantly surprised by how well the band of thin glaze (Burnt Umber/Ultramarine) between the horizon and the lower edge of the near cumulus layer worked. It's kept its warmth where it shows through the overlaid blue-grey glaze, and describes the distance between the cloud banks quite well – it's a good use of transparent pigments in thin glazes.

My working method seems to have settled - for the present anyway - into placing and positioning the picture elements lightly in pencil, developing form and tone with some monochrome 'flow' acrylic underdrawing, then applying oil paint layers in degrees of opacity and transparency. This was my first outing with Schminke's new 'Flake White Hue' - mentioned a couple of posts ago, and the sole white used here. It's a good 'Fake Flake', not bad at all actually, though I have yet to use it as thickly as I used to in the olden days. It dries at about the same rate as genuine Lead Flake White - and that's great - but I do wish Schminke had ground it in Linseed Oil, not Safflower, as it has a slightly greasy – as opposed to creamy - feel to it. Someday perhaps, a manufacturer will produce the perfect Lead White Alternative...

Summing up, this isn't a bad little piece, and fairly efficiently painted. Here's hoping the rest of the year's work goes as well as this one did...

Sky Sketch – October 2018

acrylic 15x10cm

More of a currently-showing news event than a recent painting post...

This is a little sky sketch done out of the front room window a couple of months ago. It's been a while since I've done 'live sky' in real time, so I did a little batch of them. What's interesting about these were that I used acrylic paint, as opposed to the usual watercolour. It's 'Fluid' acrylic, and has the consistency of thin cream - unlike the thick 'toothpaste' of the more usual 'tube' acrylic - but has very high pigment density. It dries fast, can take rapid subsequent washes, and the white is so much more reliably white than gouache. Useful stuff...

The real meat of the post is that I've had a painting hung in the annual SSA* open show. It's 'Down to the River' - never been out the house before. This is one of the rare exhibitions where pieces don't have to be for sale, and it's there for display only.

The show is in the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) - the Greek building on Princes Street at the Mound – and is open to the public from now till Thursday 17th January. It's free to go in and wander round. It's a very varied exhibition of current Scottish artwork, sculpture, prints, installations etc, and definitely worth a look. 

So, if you're in Edinburgh for Xmas, New Year, or just hanging around in a gloomy January way, you could good do a lot worse than popping into the RSA gallery and seeing what's what in contemporary art in sunny Scotland

* Society of Scottish Artists

Fence

oil on card 21x15cm

The last of the four little paintings for the Open Eye Gallery's 'On a Small Scale' show, and there's a music track to go with it - Richard and Linda Thomson's 'I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight' (1974). I'd never heard this song until earlier this year, when it rather gloriously played out the last episode of Channel 4's 'Derry Girls'. Great song, and for some reason it fitted this grey, rainy day.

The source image comes from another photo from a train - hastily snapped in the brief gap between Stirling and Bridge of Allan - looking north at the tail end of the Ochil Hills. Roughly across the field from here

Compositionally, it's an almost entirely unaltered transcription of the photo. I've omitted some unwanted tree stumps, simplified the mid-distance, and left out some optimistic blue tints where the cloud had started to thin out, but that's about all.

I think I got my choice of materials just right with this one. The greens and earths are all in mixes of Stand Oil and Damar Varnish, and all the paint in the sky is mixed with Walnut oil, and softened, smoothed, and blended on the surface with a very fine-haired fan brush. This difference in materials has maybe enhanced the soft, wispy, appearance of the sky. 

The dull colours and close tones in the sky are, for me, a very fulfilling mix of cool and warm

greys. These are made from cool Paynes Grey and warm/neutral Ivory Black, and cool Titanium and Zinc Whites, and Michael Harding's Warm White Lead Alternative*. 

This one just about painted itself, and is the best of the four. As it happens, all four 'On a Small Scale' pieces have sold. I'm happy to say that I know who's bought this one, and I'm very pleased at where it is. 

Which is nice...

*An interesting blend of Titanium and Zinc Whites with a touch of Yellow Ochre. Not like any Lead White I've known: takes ages to dry, and way too yellow, but is a very useful warm white. Schminke have actually recently produced an 'erzatz' Lead White. I'll be using it in the next piece, but an initial test against real Flake White looks very positive indeed

Arran - Altocumulus

oil on card 21x15cm

A short post – with very little tech stuff for a change.

This is a view of Arran from Bute spliced into a sky of altocumulus clouds snapped from a train. Or vice versa.

In the original composition there was another – distant, more solid - bank of stratus cloud that sat behind Arran. Like many ideas, it seemed a good one at the time. I just couldn't make it work convincingly though, and overpainted it at quite a late stage so that it was more like atmospheric haze - quite a dramatic demotion, but an effective one.

I think I've made a fair enough stab at the clouds here, though I fear the upper cloudlets have ended up a bit too lumpy. These altocumulus rafts are very complex, and I'm sure I could've achieved a more ethereal feel – which is what I love about them - over more time and a larger area (and with probably a bit more thought). The island and the sea aren't too bad though and I'm very pleased with the clear transparent blue* in the right half of the sky. 

Lastly, this little painting seemed extraordinarily difficult for me to photograph – in real life it does actually look a little better than the image above (especially the blue). I usually manage to produce something not too far removed from the actual piece, but I do not claim to be an experienced photographer, and I have no idea why that should be with this particular painting. Very annoying.

That's all four taken in to the gallery this afternoon. Hopefully they'll be on the wall (with 350 others) when the show opens. That's at 'On a Small Scale', the Open Eye Gallery, Dundas Street, Edinburgh, from 26 November - 22 December 2018. Definitely worth a look just for the sheer variety of the work on display. I'm going to leave posting the last piece – Fence - till December, for the very pragmatic reason that I won't have anything even half-ready to post for that month.

* First thin layer - cloth dabber - Ultramarine + Zinc White, in Stand Oil + Damar Varnish: second layer Ultramarine + barest touch of Red Shade Pthalo Blue and Zinc White in a mix of Stand and Walnut oils, printed/modified/faded with cloth dabber...

Luminous Cumulus

oil on card 21x15cm

First of all, here's some floaty 'Nuagist' music - Brian Eno's 'Ambient 1: Music for Airports'. This helped my concentration when doing the fine softening layers of the cloud masses.

This is the second of the set of four postcard paintings for the Open Eye Gallery's pre-Xmas 'On a Small Scale' show. It's another composite piece splicing a cloud photo through our front room window with a quick snap of trees from a train. Like the previous one, I've had to extend some of the main cloud base a little to hide the roofs, but that's about it – and it hasn't altered the 'character' of the cloud at all. 

Compositionally, it's a bit flat distance-wise again, but this piece is more about the variations in brush-work than the spaces. The trees and ground are painted with small jittery, un-softened, brush-marks in fairly transparent varnishy mixes. The paint of the sky and clouds is opaque, but lightly placed onto the surface then blurred softly to soften out edges, and this goes a long way towards the luminous atmospherics in the sky that I was aiming for. The construction of this piece is quite interesting, and can be seen – along with everything else - stage-by-stage through the 'Works in Progress 2018 – development and technical' link under 'Evolution' in the column on the right of this page. 

Now, it's come to my attention that some people aren't aware of the notes attached to these 'Progress' images. Once you've selected and opened one, and have it on your screen, it's worth clicking the 'info' symbol at the top right – it'll make the tech notes visible. Note: materials, brushes etc are abbreviated after their first use. It's mainly for my own own reference, but it's open to anyone interested.

If you do take a look at this painting in the Works in Progress you'll see that I couldn't decide where to place the grass line – it wavers up and down a few times – and how the softness in the sky was built. As hinted at above, walnut-thinned paint was touched onto the walnut-wiped surface, then spread and moved with a very soft fan brush (not a hog bristle one). I bought a couple of very, very soft fan brushes when in Van Beek's art supply shop in Amsterdam earlier this year. They have a golden synthetic hair – very fine and pointed – and facilitate delicate soft transitions with thin paint. I'm currently researching who can supply these in the UK.

Two bits of news. Two paintings have been pre-selected for the SSA Open show (Society of Scottish Artists) – not always a guaranteed inclusion. I once delivered two pieces pre-selected for the RSA, and had to pick both up after being rejected on sight by the selection panel. Oh, the humiliation. So, fingers crossed for December's final selection. And... I've signed a contract for a show at the Open Eye Gallery - September 2019. 

About which I shall no doubt post as and when...

Cumulus – Box Hill

oil on card 21x15cm

I have four little paintings on the go just now for December's 'On a Small Scale' show at the Open Eye Gallery. The others will be along as they get done.

This is a combination piece. The sky is from a photo I recently took through the front room window, and the hillside is from a set of photos from when we visited Box Hill a few years ago (which turns out to have been quite a productive day - see 2012's 'Madam – Box Hill').

Cloud photos from out of the window are tricky to use as source material – the buildings across the road block out quite a lot of the lower sky. This curling cumulus was too interesting to pass over, so I put my brain in gear and worked out a composition to utilize it. The sunlit hillside covered most of the problem roofs neatly, and some sky and cloud from another photo - taken a few minutes earlier - helped on the right. Bits of original roof and chimney-pot still showing were photoshopped away quickly and easily. It's a fairly conventional composition, if a little lacking in depth. The eagle-eyed might spot that the sunlight in the sky shines from the left, whereas the hillside is illuminated from behind the viewer's right shoulder, but I think it works fine.

This current set of four is taking longer than they should, maybe because I'm being a bit more precise than usual during the initial stages. The measurement and layout are in fine pencil, filled out slightly with weak monochrome acrylic, then the main work is with layers of oil paint. These are, as usual, thinned – mainly with Stand Oil and Damar Varnish. The latter, lighter, stages of the cloud were done with Walnut Oil (not fancy - off the shelf at Waitrose). This is a tremendously fluid medium, very good for wafty soft areas, especially when the surface has been wiped with a Walnut Oil:Turpentine mix (1:2 if you must know), and I'm having a little period of using it again for skies. I have soft fan brushes for manipulating the paint once it's on the surface, using a horizontal, dragging motion - unlike the vertical stippling and 'printing' actions used with Stand Oil. The surface has to be very smooth, as any dried paint flecks, or cat hairs, will show up quite a lot as the paint gathers or is swept off them. As with the Stand Oil, it's a good idea to add a few drops of Driers or Siccatives to the paint before using it; as an ancient Chinese proverb says 'The more oil in yer paint, the longer it'll take to dry. Especially in winter'

The best bits? Surprisingly not the wafty walnut - I'm actually quite chuffed with the birch trunks. Their 'whites' are the primer showing through where I've scratched out the wet paint with a shaped lolly stick. 

Inevitably, current events will shoehorn themselves into the creative process, and the image above cannot help but suggest to me some kind of approaching... what? Let me turn it around, and suggest that anyone who thinks the Sun is going to be shining on that hillside for much longer is a damned fool. No allusion or allegory meant here, oh no, perish the thought...

Low Sun - Lomond Hills

oil on panel 73x52cm

There's no music as a scene setter for this piece, but I did revisit The Skids during the last few painting sessions. They were Fife boys from nearby Dunfermline, so here's 'Animation' as a bit of local colour (Not at all mandatory).

The sources for this image were some photos of the Lomond Hills, in Fife - taken from the train coming back to Edinburgh from Perth. It was late afternoon last October – just south of Ladybank I think. 

The real Lomond Hills don't look anything like this though. The one on the left – East Lomond – is really a lot higher than appears here, but that would've been a bit unbalanced. I wanted to make the other hill – West Lomond – the more important of the two compositionally, so I reduced 'East' and enlarged 'West' through the magic of photoshop for an 'improved' source image. The clear sky reaching down the right edge to the low horizon is entirely invented; in the original source the cloud extends, uninterrupted, way past and far beyond the picture boundary. The open 'new' sky defines the central cumulus more, balances East Lomond, and stops the whole composition from sliding off to the right and out of the picture. The hedges, and trees and bushes receding back into the murk were a gift for describing the distance, but they did need something more.

I knew I would have to have figures in the painting somewhere, but I only found them quite late. They are a group of four, taken from a German TV drama on the telly earlier this year, and screen-shotted directly from the BBC iPlayer later. I saw them (and they were in an interesting dawn setting which may come in useful at some point) and knew they were just right, though I do admit that they might be a little bit shoe-horned in. Only a little bit though.

It's all about the horizontally-lit cumulus of course, and I'm quite pleased with the colour and the apparent lightness of the cloud - it's difficult to imagine that such masses really weigh thousands of tons, and are kept aloft purely by rising air currents. I would've liked the paint surface to be finer and softer close-up, but it'll do from a small distance away. I did use the dreaded velvet pads (see August 2018 post) at one point, but luckily they didn't deposit too many 'bits' into the paint surface. I switched back to plain muslin after the velvet debacle, and I think I've got away with it.

Technically, this piece is all thin layers, and for some reason it took me a long time to get to grips with it. I wanted to get the central cloud 'solved' first, postponing the establishment of the overall tonality – it was about the twelfth session (of twenty in all) by the time I had any depth to the hill tones. It's as if I didn't really want to do the painting at all. Which can happen.

West Lomond is a strange and deceptive hill. From Strathearn, going along the A85 from Crieff to Perth, its conical summit pokes above the Ochil Hills, and seems to be a mighty distant peak, like Everest towering over the Himalayas. When you finally see it in its own, it doesn't really seem high at all, and, while an interesting feature in its own right, can be a slight anticlimax if you've been looking forward to it all the way from Perthshire. 

This particular hill group – in Eastern Scotland – are nothing at all to do with Loch Lomond (of Bonny Bonny Banks fame) in the West. As the Interweb says: “The place name 'Lomond' may be from Gaelic – leamhan - elm, though the more popular explanation is that it is from another Gaelic word laom meaning blaze, hence Ben Lomond - beacon hill (though beacon loch is less satisfactory, unless the loch is named from the hill above it)”. The two Fife hills would be pretty good 'beacon' hills, so I'll go with that. 

They are easily visible from Edinburgh when looking north across the Firth of Forth, and are known very colloquially as 'The Paps of Fife', which is very rude indeed. And, frankly, stretching it a bit...

Approaching Rain - Craiglockhart

oil on card 30x18cm

This is based on some photos I took a couple of years ago from the summit of Easter Craiglockhart Hill*, looking South West. The landscape has been flipped left/right (photoshop) against the sky, and makes sense when you know that the far hilltops are Dalmahoy and Kaimes Hills.

This flipping puts part of the nearby Wester Craiglockhart Hill in the lower right corner, in opposition to the dark rain cloud rearing up and advancing from the top left, and centres the arcs of the nearer cloud masses onto the receptive angular nick in the rock profile.

Technique-wise, this was fairly straightforward. The land forms were initially placed with pencil then developed with thin Paynes Grey acrylic before laying on the oil paint. The sky is entirely in oil paint as I didn't want any of the acrylic's hard-edgeness showing through. 

I did try something new (for me) in the paint-handling of the sky though. I sometimes use a muslin-covered cloth pad for finer blending and softening, but this time I used a pad covered in velvet. The working properties were great, for both 'printing' the paint on, them fading it out, and for wiping it off too. Unfortunately – even though I'd washed the velvet square two or three times – when the paint dried it revealed fibres and little black bits of the base material. Which is a pity, as it worked the paint very well. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now I'm back to my more reliable muslin. Maybe the Next Idea will work out better

I confess to being a little disappointed in the sky – more specifically the central 'warmer' clouds. I mislaid my understanding of the spaces between them (a danger of using photographs!), and this has resulted in a rather weak and unfocussed centre. An alteration I made in the last stages, patched with an invented rain veil, has left a rather weak 'blue-sky'/'bright-cloud' boundary line which deserves to be stronger. If I were starting again (which I'm not) I'd rethink the central mass, if necessary importing some cloud samples from elsewhere, or indeed reducing or eliminating it, and extending the bright and blue area to sit behind the dramatic rainy stuff on the left.

Given all that, I'm quite pleased with the general efficiency of the landscape, and the contrast between the approaching rain on the left and the clear sunlight on the right. I think the acrylic underdrawing has contributed to the 'rockiness' of the near hillsides – especially on the right. I'm also quite chuffed with the tonal restraint of the rain areas – it would've been very easy to make them darker and over-dramatise the scene, and I think it's dynamic enough as it is. 

Which is fine (wish that velvet dabber idea had worked out though...)

* No great physical strain, as the No.23 bus gets you to within a gentle ten-minute walk of the top (where there is a nice comfy bench)...

Passing

oil on panel 90x70 cm

When I looked up the date I actually started this painting, I was very surprised to find that it was the first week of February – I thought I'd been working on it a lot longer. In fact, I started composing it last summer, but for various reasons I didn't begin the actual painting till earlier this year. It's seemed to have been a very intense, and very complex painting to do, and it's a relief to see it's done now. I don't know why, but it does now seem to be the case that some time has to elapse between my finishing a painting, and my being able to judge whether it's been a success or not, so I really can't tell just now how it's turned out. I'm still not really sure about the title. I'll know in a few weeks – but here it is.

I wouldn't say that this painting had specific mood-settering, 'zoning-in' music – if I felt particularly lethargic I'd just shuffle a batch 60s, 70s, or 80s pop - but if I wanted a settled, restful atmosphere to work in, I'd probably reach for the Max Richter. His hypnotically minimalist 'Sleep' provided that for many work sessions. Most 'Sleep' youtube extracts are too long and bad quality, but here's a gentle 9-minute live version of one of the themes.

The landscape source is in western Russia, near the village of Belenikhino, and I found it while looking at the Prokhorovka Tank Memorial and the surrounding countryside on Google Streetview. There was a huge tank battle in that area in 1943, but I should stress that the location is not specifically relevant to this painting, and is coincidental.

I liked the arrangement of the masses and open spaces, and the bright, diffuse light. The sky in the source was difficult to work with (though there is a beautiful cumulus round to the left), so I imported a similar one – with just a bit more sparkle and blue - from some photos I took in France some years ago. 

I was baffled by the diffuse jumble of fuzzy grasses and shrubs, and at first I simply had no idea how to depict them. To some extent I made forms out of accidental marks because I had a lot of trouble finding the structures in the sources - and used the streetview images on each side of the original for more information about the masses and spaces. Once the figure was settled in, I realised that there needed to be a finer texture and some delicacy around it, so I planted some daisies and grass that I'd sourced for a painting a couple of years ago. It improved the whole painting a lot, I think, both in terms of marks and texture, and as a more sympathetic bed for the figure.

Technically, this is quite an interesting piece. It's on hardboard panel, with white acrylic priming, gridded, and initially set out with light pencil. The forms and tones were developed with fast-drying thin monochrome acrylic paint – effectively an extension of the white priming. For some bizarre reason I used Violet Brown – which I realised was a mistake by the second session, but felt I had to carry on for the colour continuity, though I did switch to Raw Umber for the figure. My first task for the second phase – building up the surfaces with 'true' colour in oil paint – was to start killing off the violet with broad yellowy-green transparent oil washes. Which was annoying.

If the right under-colour is used this could be a very fast method of establishing drawing and tones, since the drawing shows through the thin oil paint. Substance and weight, and corrections where needed, can be built with opaque paint which can itself be glazed over if required. Indeed, where I had to re-stated light-toned forms – e.g. in the foreground plants - they were painted in white, then glazed with transparent pigments with added Stand Oil and Damar varnish. This may seem quite a roundabout method – and the white seems very anomalous and alien before the colour goes on - but the result is quite a rich surface with a very luminous, almost crystalline, effect. (Which may not be evident from the screen image)

Would I paint with this technique again? Yes, absolutely, and it's worth finding out which paints and pigments are transparent, and which are opaque. Done correctly, it should be a huge time-saver, and next time I'll be using something like Payne's Grey or Raw Umber.

The most efficient painting here was in the sky. Most of it was done with very little paint in about one hour (the whites and light tones are the untouched priming and a mere staining coat of paint) and the darker soft greys are a semi-opaque layer stippled on and faded with my new badger blenders, and cloth dabber pads. That would have been the sky done and dusted had I not decided to lower parts of the far tree-line, which meant very careful tone and colour matching when overpainting the unwanted (quite dark) ex-treetops.

The figure, which I've tried to re-direct the viewer away from, was in a photograph I found on the web. I had always known that there would be someone tucked in at the edge of the grass, and I had been about to start the painting when the nagging doubt about my very first figure made me stop, and look for another. I thought my second one, facing away, was again good to go, but at the last moment I felt that I could do better, and again halted, and did yet more picture searches. As soon as this image, a dead Finnish soldier, came up on my screen, I knew that it was exactly what I was looking for. The face was fully visible, and there was a hurt, drawn-in, fragility in the body. I angled him so that his head was lower than his hip, and his shape rhymed more with the bushes, and he was just right. As usual, I found it very difficult to draw or paint a prone figure, so I cheated slightly by turning the source image and the panel 90 degrees, and worked the figure as if upright.

I took a lot of time to get the face right, touching in small developments and corrections, letting my eyes rest, then refining the image over several sessions. It was a painful subject to paint, and I freely admit that the figure is steeped in my mother's death last year - and there is something of her last breath in the lower lip.

As I said above, it's been a very complex painting to do. I'm glad I took the time and didn't hurry it. 

That's it done now, and I'll move along, and get on with the next one

Footballers

pencil

I have a larger painting carefully approaching the final turn, and I don't want to hurry it just to meet a blog post deadline, so this month's post was going to be either a wee watercolour or a few more figures. The figures won.

Some may have noticed that the World Cup 2018 is currently running its course. I've never really played the game myself for two reasons; a) I was sent to rugby-playing schools (which I loathed), and b) When I did finally find myself being in a football-playing school playground I was rubbish at it and was always stuck in goal (where I hadn't the faintest idea what I was doing). However I got very interested when we started doing the Fantasy Footy at work, and began watching Match of the Day just to be less of an ignoramus. Turns out that it's a lovely game with genuine beauty, indeed Madam gets very involved in a good match, and delights in a classy move when she sees it. This late appreciation has occasionally paid off, and I'm very happy to put on the record that my team – the Prussian Blues – won our little 'Crapleague' this last season – against some clever late plays from Young Mr Richardson's Xhaka Flocka Flames.

The World Cup is an excellent excuse for sitting in front of the telly pretending you're doing something, and I've taken full advantage of that opportunity. Sometimes, though, the guilt breaks through and I feel that I should be doing something a bit more constructive. When this occurs I pick up a pencil and doodle away the dull periods of play. These are some of the more presentable results. 

It's actually a very difficult extreme drawing exercise – I find it so anyway – as the action moves very fast (usually), and the camera cuts tend to be rapid. There are dozens of cameras covering every angle of play, and the directors frequently shift from the more static wide shots to close action shots for replays. Some of these are in slow motion, which is fine for the Video Assisted Referees to spot the Bad Boys at work, but I - perhaps rather sniffily - regard sketching through slo-mo as cheating. These drawings (loose squiggles really) have to be done very rapidly indeed, before the visual memory fades, so they are mostly tiny – for instance, the (Brazilian) figure sidefooting the ball, and the stick figure chasing the ball are 4cm and 2cm high respectively.

Anyway, here's a few marks saying 'footballers', normal service will be resumed shortly...