Another View from a Train

watercolour 24x16cm

That’s right - another view adapted from another photo taken from another Perth trip, this time coming back to Edinburgh. It’s looking southwest, I think, just north of Dalgety, and if the hill wasn’t there you’d have a fine view of the sea and the Forth Bridges. Anyway, it’s just another little filler to keep me ticking over while my energies and attention were being taken by a bit of a family crisis. 

There’s been a little bit of juggling around - I shifted the track in the foreground and altered the mid-distance line of trees to fit better, and imported the upper left triangular cloud from along the coast (on another day). I quite like the sky in this one - the scraping down for pristine whites was easier because I’d used better paper (Bockingford 300gm) - and that was really what I was exploring. Having said that, the light should be the more creamy yellow that you’d expect from a late afternoon in March, but that didn’t quite come off, and I’m not going back. I did learn a pretty basic trick though (which probably everyone knows except me), about warming the masking tape before pulling it away from the paper. Knowing that little nugget will hopefully save me, going forward, from tearing the top surface of the paper away when finished, and sometimes taking some of the paint away with it too. So that was good.

For now, my visits to Perthshire are less fraught, and while things are by no means back to normal, I am again working at the easel with the oily paint. I haven’t touched oil paint since the end of January, so I’m slightly out of practice.

Who knows, I might even find myself working faster…