Thorney Hill – East of Auchterarder

 

oil on card 30x20cm

Another sky painting, the source image for which was a forgotten snap taken a few years ago. We'd driven up to Auchterarder to see a friend's exhibition, and decided to come back the pretty way through the Ochil Hills. We had stopped to snap some clouds to the north-east, but turning to get back in the car I saw this view and a much, much, more interesting sky. Thorney Hill is the small hill to the right-of-centre.

I've disappeared the central farm, lowered the wooded hill and slopes on the left, and covered the road with some fields and lines of bushes from somewhere else (not sure where).

After the drawing and acrylic wash stages, the paintwork - very thin - is mostly stippled directly on to the surface, or brushed on, then stippled out with very soft nylon brushes. The reason for that is some Bad Priming; I'd carelessly left some quite large vertical brushmarks in it. They're not exactly trenches, but they were deep enough to gather too much paint when blending laterally with a fan brush. The perpendicular stippling lays the paint more evenly in these 'gullies'. What 'streaking' there is in the clouds is more visible in the photo image, but in real life the sky is quite pleasantly ill-defined and 'gauzey' (honest!). I think it's turned out OK.

I've not much more to add about the painting itself, but I wish I had known at the time of putting this one together what else there was in the landscape. Just the other week I was following an internet rabbit-hole about brochs. These are large dry-stone built Iron Age towers – largely ruined and dismantled – with chambered walls, which I had thought were limited to the very north of Scotland. I was surprised to find that their distribution was a lot wider and a lot further south than that, and the remains of one is on top of a hill just off the left edge of the picture - called Castle Craig. I'm fairly sure that I would have made something of it if I'd known it was there, but even knowing that it's there is a bit of a thrill.

I also wish I'd known that there are a couple more in the Lammermuir Hills, within cycling range of Edinburgh, and a well-researched broch complex (Edin's Hall Broch) just a few miles north of Duns, in the Borders.

Pretty sure that I'd be planning to go and have a look if my knees were still trustworthy, but again, just knowing they're there is a bit of a thrill.