Mohkkejavri

oil on card 21x15cm

This is the last of the four Small Scale pieces done for the Open Eye gallery – finished on time for the end of November, but un-blogged due to my not having anything else finished to post about. I did have a mood-setter for this - the track 'One World' from John Martyn's album of the same name. Apart from his voice, it's quite a sparse and cold sound that seems to match the landscape.

The source image is taken – google Streetview of course – from the wilds of Finnmark, the most northern part of Norway. I'm pretty sure that 'Mohkkejavri' is this lake's name, but there seem to be four or five other lakes called that too, and I suspect that it may be just Finnish, or Sami, for 'Little lake' or something. The composition is a fairly straight transfer from the source, though the the foreground has had some water shifted in from along the road so that the bank is visible all the way to the right corner, and a couple of trees have been edited out. It's really all about the golden colour against the blue, and the clear low light.

As usual, the masses and forms were lightly pencilled in, then reinforced with quick-drying fluid acrylic underpainting, in Ultramarine this time. Once that first stage looked secure, the more natural colours and tones were built up in (mostly) transparent oil and varnish layers. The slightly exaggerrated orange colour is a mixture of modern transparent 'Indian Yellow' and a very fine-particled oxide red (on his company's website, Michael Harding's comments about this pigment include an amusing anecdote involving the painter Frank Auerbach). To maximise the effect of the glazing, once this piece was done I finished it with a light coat of straight gloss picture varnish to lush out the surface and make the light bounce back through the paint layers like stained glass.

I suspect this little painting could have been a bit better if I hadn't had to hurry the last stages due to the possibility of jury service (I actually did get selected and had to spend four days attending the court) but I was pleased with how the water turned out, especially the near channel. I had a couple of false starts with it – involving way too much toxic Pthalo Blue – but I managed to re-assert a sensible base colour, and then built up the depth with Ultramarine, and a final Burnt Umber and Ivory Black layer for the warm dark darks. I think the scratched-out and re-glazed near foliage is very effective, especially on the right foreground bank, and I have to admit that I'm very pleased with the single stretched-out cloud.

Well, that's all the arty excitement over for 2019. I've finally got a couple of 'normal' paintings under way, with a few more planned and ready to start once the panels are made and surfaces prepared. With a bit of luck the first one on the go, a small sky painting, should be ready early in the New Year, and that should be me back in a regular rhythm – hopefully fairly uninterrupted – for the rest of the year.

Hope you all had a good Xmas holiday, and here's wishing everybody a happy, and above all healthy, 2020

Les Fourquettes

oil on card 21x15cm

The third of the four small scale pieces. The source landscape is in France, so here is some small scale French piano I listened to while working on it - Erik Satie of course, Gnossiennes No.5. The location is near a cluster of small villages in Normandy which seems be called 'Les Fourquettes'.

This is a fairly straightforward little painting, mostly about the colour and light. It's not my usual Ultramarine/Prussian Blue colour of sky here, it's more of a greyish/lilac-ish mix using Ultramarine/Ultramarine Violet. I've slightly exaggerrated the source's 'violetness' a bit – and I suspect that the automated 'streetview' colour is more an accidental artifact and less the actual sky colour at the time – but I think it works though. My general foliage and grass colour was way too blue just before finishing, so I applied a thin Cadmium Yellow and Raw Sienna glaze (in thinned Stand Oil) touched on lightly over it. That did the trick, and also brought out some of the red-browns. I'm quite pleased with the colour on this painting, and I like the light, fuzzy, final white layer over the nearer clouds – it makes them seem brighter than they perhaps really are

As you'll have gathered, the source image is a Google streetview screenshot, from about ten years ago. When I set it up in photoshop for the required 21x15cm, I realised that the composition needed tweaking. Usually it's fairly straightforward to go back to the original location and see what can be pulled in or shifted across to solve any problems. Unfortunately, the only clues to where the original location was were the previous and following screenshots and the road number – D87. The previous screenshot (taken shortly before) was from the D126, so, having finally found the correct D87 (there's another one in the south-east France) I concentrated on where those two roads are close. After following them, and looking down on several spots that looked promising, I engaged Streetview and saw some trees that looked familiar – the stand on the left. I'd found the place! The weather and season were not the same, but luckily Google stores images from previous streetview runs, and I was able to 'go back in time' for the images I wanted. I shifted the clouds around a bit, and pulled in the trees on the right to get a better balance. So all that palaver was very much worth it, and quite rewarding.

So that's all four of the set finished, photographed, and delivered to the gallery in reasonably good time – at least the first three were – and are now up on the walls for the 'On a Small Scale' exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery. I haven't started the write-up of the last one yet, but it should follow on fairly soon, later this month.

West of Lochty

oil on card 21x15cm

This is the second of the four Small Scale pieces. The source is a photograph snapped through the windscreen, from the passenger seat, going westwards along the A85, just west of Lochty – about here. It's a setting I've noticed while flashing past many times, and I'm glad that I finally did something about it. This painting has a very grey and limited palette, but then Perthshire's sometimes like that.

I'd always liked this group of trees, and the slight hump in the land. So it's a pity that I had to 'evolve' them all about to make them work. I disappeared three trees altogether and expanded the more distant tree blocks coming in from the left and right. I discovered fairly soon after starting that I wasn't at all happy with the large cumulus mases either, so they got an ad hoc tweaking as well. All for the best I suppose, but that meant that - because of the various tree-fellings and subsequent overpainted corrections - this piece took a lot longer than it should have. 

Not much to say about the technique here except that I used some very careful application of methylated spirit to soften and remove the unwanted trees. Meths will destroy both dried oil and acrylic paint, so you have to be very careful not to let it sit on the surface for a moment longer than necessary. Too long and you may find that you're through your (acrylic) priming and looking at your base canvas/panel/card, and that's really not going to help with anything

It seems to have all worked out in the end, though, but I still prefer to get my compositions solved and in order before I start laying actual paint. It's a little wild in places – I wanted the ragged grey low fractus clouds to have been somehow a little more 'aerie' and insubstantial - but Madam quite likes the dynamism and energy, and I have to admit that she has a point.

Wow. Me, living on the edge. Who'd have thought...

Smotrova Buda

oil on card 21x15cm

This is the first of four postcard-sized pieces for the Open Eye Gallery's pre-Xmas 'On a Small Scale' show. The other three are lagging slightly behind, but will duly turn up over the next few posts. Re-starting at the easel after even a couple of month's break needed some aural kick-starting to blow away the accumulated cobwebs, quicken the senses, and get me keen at the easel. Something like, for instance, 'Bling (Confession of a King)'.

The source location for this piece is near a small Russian village called Smotrova Buda – in the area between Belarus and Ukraine. It's actually nearer to some even smaller villages called 'May' and 'Bee', but as this is an early autumn scene, I went for the less confusing title. 'Smotrova' sounds like it has something to do with looking or seeing (a lookout point?), but my Russian's really not quite good enough to make a meaningful translation. 

Compositionally, it's all about the clouds of course, and the low evening light; and the receding open ground encourages the eye to realise the scale. The painting is more or less a straight transcription of the source image.

It's mostly painted in quite thin transparent paint – possible a little too thin, as some of the pencil underdrawing is a little too visible through the layers for my liking, and I wish that I'd been a bit lighter with my initial marking out. It's not bad though, and there is a nice 'aeriness' to the sky which in some areas could pass for watercolour.

Now, you may - or may not - have noticed, but I didn't produce a September blog post. I simply didn't have anything worth putting up. I'd ground to a complete halt artywise preparing for, and being part of, September's show at the Open Eye Gallery, and I didn't even produce any half-decent Window Work over that time. I definitely felt a bit wrung out by being, literally, 'on show'. Being the focus of attention is generally not my natural thing – I was perfectly suited as an antique restorer, where a successful job meant that the restored piece should look as though it had never been anywhere near a restorer.

As it happens I thought that the exhibition went not too badly. I had some sales – five of the bigger pieces, and six(or was it seven?) of the smaller 'sky' ones. Many good things were said (at least within my earshot), and I think most people understood what I was getting at. I do know that most of the folk who actually bought pieces did so after having had conversations with myself about the imagery, and that they 'got' them. I think the gallery were very happy with how it went, and so am I. Which is the way it should be.

Well that's done now, so I'm back on the conveyor belt again. Gently at first, with this quartet of very small paintings, then back to normal.

And that includes upping my Window Work efforts from not even half-decent to, hopefully, fairly presentable...

Window Work – August 2019

watercolour

Since finishing last month's 'The Picnic of Mephistopheles', I've been getting organised for my Big Show – more of which below. As a result, there's been very, very, little artwork done in the last month. So here's some Window Work for the August post.

As usual, they're very small rapid sketches in Payne's Grey watercolour, done looking out the window at people passing by. These ones are fine as far as they go, though I have to confess that due to the break-up of my regular routine, I've not been as concentrated or regular in this drawing exercise as normal. Luckily, though, from quite a low hit-rate, I've come up with a few worth posting.

I've been chopping and changing the brushes I use for these recently. I was using a brand of cheap synthetic (see the cyclist) which was quite good; the hairs are quite stiff and I like the feel of the handle, but their big drawback is that they just don't hold an awful lot of paint, and needed recharged very quickly. I then had a go with an oriental brush (girl on left). I used to use these all the time for watercolour - they hold huge amounts of paint and allow you combine both large wide shapes and fine sharp ones in single strokes. This one, though, had quite a lot of very soft goat hair, and very little stiff hair (whatever that was, might be ferret or stoat), and I found it very difficult to keep to a fine point (not always the case – depends on the individual brush). I then started using a sable which I have, but had rarely used (no example). This held a lot of paint for its size – much more than the synthetic. Its marks tended to be very rounded though, not as precise as I'd have wanted, and it had a weird bulky handle. I finally went out and bought another sable the same size, but with a normal light handle and an extra long, fine point. Now that really did feel good (bloke with shades, and schoolgirl) – it holds enough paint, is comfortable to hold, and easily makes light, fine, fast marks. Which is nice.

Now, the news bulletin bit. The show I mentioned at the top is at the Open Eye Gallery – the one on the corner of Dundas Street and Abercromby Place. There's no title for the exhibition, just 'Keith Epps'. I did think about 'Indifferent Skies' for a few hours, but the next morning realised that that maybe wasn't a very good idea. 

I think there are thirty paintings altogether – fourteen larger canvas or panel pieces, and sixteen of the smaller 'sky' paintings on card - and can all (currently) be viewed on the Gallery's website. It's open to all from 7th September, so if you happen to be in Edinburgh, pop along - it'll be up until 30th September.

I'm not too nervous – not just now anyway. I will no doubt be dropping in and out of the gallery for a while (unless they get fed up with me!), but after that it will be very nice to get back to normal and resume my painting routine, hopefully fairly soon. The next set of work is planned, and the surfaces prepared. Palettes are clear, brushes cleaned, and the composed image files and sources have been transferred to the studio laptop. 

Feels good...

The Picnic of Mephistopheles

oil on panel 91x71cm

There's no specific music associated with this, though I did scare myself silly for while with György Ligeti's Lux Aeterna from '2001 a Space Odyssey'. I spent some of the last couple of months listening to an audiobook of William L. Shirer's 'Rise and Fall of the Third Reich' – which was pretty scary too. I did spend a very nice afternoon listening to early Elvis Costello albums though, so here's something a little more upbeat from the first album.

The working title for this in my 'hours book' was 'Hell/Satan', and it was only in the final couple of weeks that 'The Picnic of Mephistopheles' occurred to me. The phrase sounds like something that might exist in a tale somewhere, like 'The Labours of Hercules' or even 'The Damnation of Faust', but it's quite obviously not. 

This painting took a long time to compose, and it took a very, very, long time to paint (175hrs 20mins easel time if you must know). It started with an idea – What if Satan, like everybody else, got fed up with work and had a day off? If he did fancy a day off, where would he go? Well, he'd go to the seaside of course. My starting image was a photo of a very dark and sulphurous sky taken on the shore at Cramond, on the Firth of Forth, and I spent ages trying to construct a hellish 'beach scene' from it. Genteel Cramond wasn't quite giving me that, so I ended up – via the harsh landscape of Iceland – in a Galapagos lava field (I'd actually used this 'walk' before for 'Lava'), and gave up on the seaside. The final concept was of this melted landscape, with a cave maybe leading down to another subterranean world. There are at least two different rock landscapes stitched together here; the main area, and the rocks on the left. The sky that I ended up with – again not the original Cramond one – was imported from a midwinter Perthshire dawn, so not a single one of the original sources survived from the initial idea. Towards the end of the work I even shifted the male figure from being Satan to the demon Mephistopheles – mainly because that's a better name. 

Looking back, I think I got too distracted by the forms, and lost sight of the tones in the ground and figures. The surface is a strata of pencil and monochrome acrylic underdrawing, and semi-opaque/transparent oil layers, and somewhere along the way I lost sight of my lights and darks. I only really got a grip on them with some final clear glazes on the landscape and figures right at the end. The upper sky - not the sunlit low misty cumulus - started off badly with a horribly miscalculated opaque blue-green grey. After realising this wasn't going anywhere, I obliterated it under a couple of layers of Titanium White. After a bit of planning, and thought, I laid in thin oily veils of yellow, mauvy-blue, and warm grey. That new upper sky is quite subtle and supports the flashier 'sunny' glazed lights very well. I'm quite chuffed with it now, but I should have done that right from the start.

The Mephistopheles demon figure is based on the Austrian actor Anton Walbrook, who is probably best known for his roles in 'The Red Shoes', 'Gaslight', and 'The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp'. I had previously used him as a model for 'The Serpent' in a painting that, while it doesn't really stand up any more, does feature Madam as the cherubim/guard at the Garden of Eden. (Never mind, you really have to see it). The source picture of him that I used here lacked the proper evening jacket I wanted, and having tweaked him into one, I had to find some suitable legs/trousers to stand him on to give me the pose I wanted. Photoshop is a wonderful thing...

I added the two young ladies for company and entertainment. I found them and their spread of rugs, cakes, and bottles while searching for images of picnics. They're both definitely quite posh – I think they and their companions were actually snapped at Glyndebourne, where those that can afford the tickets slum the breaks between operas with Hampers & Champers, which looks jolly good fun. As it happens, I only recently found that, according to Goethe’s version of the story, Faust’s soul escapes from Mephistopheles while the demon is making improper advances to two angels that have come to the rescue. These two girls here might not be angels, but Goethe's twist could explain why this Mephistopheles looks so miffed.

A lot of attention has been paid to the terrain detail – for a very good reason. A strange thing happens in our brains when we look at random shapes; we try to 'see' recognisable things, usually faces. It happens all the time to me when painting, and I thought I'd utilise those 'faces' in the rocks to make the scene more hellish. I've no doubt a new pair of eyes would see things I've missed, but I'll start you off by pointing out the obvious 'cat skull' at the bottom left hand corner. 

This is the last painting done that'll go into my upcoming (imminent!) show at the Open Eye Gallery. It goes public in just over a month - on Friday 6th of September, till Saturday 28th September. I've already sent the gallery the images for the printed cards, and my biography, CV, artist statement etc, as well as other personal back-story and general interest stuff. I now need to concentrate on choosing which pieces are to go in, organize the carrier (there and back), get the associated info in order, tidy up canvas edges where necessary, sign and date pieces that are unsigned and undated, acquire bubble wrap, arrive at prices, and make sure everything's labelled and ready-to-go. And with the continuing warm weather, this painting should be cured enough to be there.

Within the gallery, I'll be in the room on the right as you go in the front door. By a curious coincidence, the painter who'll be showing across the hall, in the left-hand room, will be James Fairgrieve, who was my painting tutor in my second year at college. He introduced our group to oil paint, and taught us how to stretch a canvas.

Which is a very neat coincidence...

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...