Links Lenticulars

oil on card  30x15.5cm

The original source for this little sky study is a wide panorama I took from the Bruntsfield Links, looking north. There was a lovely mixed sky featuring a lot of very stable, lens-shaped Lenticular clouds (years ago, I used to think of these clouds as ‘whale’ clouds), and I used the section containing the glowing white one on the centre right.

Done on mid-blue primed card, I had a lot of trouble with the tones, then realised that my composition was a bit formless. There was a band of cloud stretching across the middle that didn’t do anything, so I had to import the sharper, more slender band now present from along the panorama. Likewise, I imported some trees from another part to fill up the middle foreground and break up the regularity of Glengyle Terrace.

I’m meant to be learning stuff from these exercises, so what have I learned from this? Well for starters, don’t use a mid-blue priming – it completely screwed up my control of the blues (odd-sounding but true). Get the tones sorted quickly – by looking at the sources properly. Keep the shapes and textures right – by looking at the sources properly. Finally, sort the composition out from the start – by looking at the sources properly – so that I’m not mending and playing catch-up all the time. The painting is on card, so I could’ve solved the composition very simply by cutting the top third off, but then that would have been for too easy. I do have a (slight) excuse for the tonal miscalculations too, seeing as I’m still coming to grips with the whole ‘Not-Using-Lead White-just-Titanium-and-Zinc Whites’ thing. But I shouldn’t push it.

Madam says it’s not as bad as I think it is, and some of the low horizon work is quite interesting, but it did take far, far too long for a small study. However, it’s done now, so I’ll just move on…

…into 2015 that is. Time for a song – should be Auld Lang Syne, but it isn’t. Happy New Year everybody, here’s hoping the next one’s better!

Post Publishing Edit: This was still annoying me, so this morning – 5th January 2015 – I sliced 1.5cm off the top edge. The image at the top is the amended one. Much happier with the painting now, though in making this edit I seem to have reverted to an earlier draft of the post and have lost a load of interesting stuff about measuring angles of view with your hand . So, my apologies for that - it's as if that little paragraph has been trimmed along with the top 1.5cm...