Downs Prep Sketch

oil on card 33x16.5cm

This little exercise is about solving a problem in preparation for a larger painting. Three landscapes have been cobbled together here quite passably, but I was totally unconvinced by the extreme foreground. For reasons which (hopefully) will become apparent in due course, I needed to know how I would describe the ground about 3ft away fairly clearly, and then take the eye back down the path, through the valley, and into the wider landscape and beyond.

Being just a little work-out sketch, I haven’t gone to town on the paint surface/layers thing, so it’s mostly fairly raw. I shifted a few of the bushes in the valley around to describe the form of the rising path more easily, but that was pretty straightforward.

The extreme foreground was the persistent nagging problem. What I needed was a close-up source photo looking 50 metres straight down a chalk downland path between gently rising sides of lush green grass. Getting nowhere, I gave up combing the Interweb, and as a last resort, stomped off up Blackford Hill yesterday with my camera. Which was a good idea, as I got some reference photos which, happily, have provided enough detail to construct what I wanted. So, I’ve just finished this little sketch after lunch today, relieved to have solved my original problem, and confident that when I do start the Big One – with sky and stuff – my sources are strong enough.

No doubt a botanist might notice the discrepancy in the flora, but frankly I’m not that good a painter. Anyway, that certainly wasn’t my primary concern while lining up my shots of paths and grasses - lying prone on a damp bit of Edinburgh, half-under a gorse bush, trying to avoid the rabbit pellets and the scent of fox wee…

Strathallan, near Braco

watercolour 22x18cm

The No.47 bus runs from Crieff to Stirling, and it drops me off directly outside Dunblane station for the train back to Edinburgh. Its route cuts across the tail end of Strathearn, threads over some higher ground to join Strathallan at Braco, and can be very picturesque. Coming back on it from last week’s visit to Crieff I managed to snap a few interesting photos through the window, one of which I based this little watercolour on.

It’s been pushed around a bit compositionally, but nothing’s been transplanted and the essential elements aren’t that far away from the original wonky snap. The actual watercolour technique is still pretty ropey, and the paper texture – the good Bockingford 300gm - shows unfortunate results in the sky where I’ve been too casual in scraping it. It’s passable from a distance though, and the composition is very sound, with scope for development into something else on a larger scale. Which was a nice surprise.

It’s my first use of Indanthrene blue – mixed in the sky, but purer in the hill line. It’s not dissimilar to Ultramarine, but is much darker, more transparent, generally richer, and has the huge advantage – in watercolour anyway – of not granulating. It’s pricey (Winsor & Newton series 4) but it’s very intense, and I can see a little going quite a long way. I haven’t tried it in oil yet, but I’m sure I’ll mention it when I do.

Just in passing, the A9 trunk road runs along Strathallan, and last month Madam and I were driving back on it to Edinburgh. We were in dire need of a cuppa, so stopped at a service station. We got our teas, and were just about to leave the counter when I suggested a Twix* each.

‘Never had one before’ she said – not knowing how these words would change her life.

We had some there and then, and she has never looked back, having laid aside her Twix virginity, with me, in the car park of the Little Chef at Balhaldie.

Ah, the romance…

* They’re very nice, but very more-ish. They seem smaller than they used to be and I often find I’ve eaten the second stick without realising it. Which is annoying.

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…

Two Views from a Train

watercolour 18x12cm

It’s February, and we’ve had to be travelling up and down to Perth a lot recently - more than a couple of times on the train. I’m always ready with my little compact camera to snap little bits of interesting sky or scenery, and these two little pieces are my first gatherings from these journeys. It’s quite a pretty route, and of course we go over the Forth Rail Bridge. That’s always a treat, and this year there’s the added bonus of seeing the new Road Bridge being constructed. Well, these aren’t anything to do with them.

The first little watercolour is the view of Edinburgh across the Firth of Forth from Burntisland. It’s just about midday and the Sun is shining down through some aerie altocumulus. The tones and colours are just about right but the drawing is not spectacularly accurate, which is a shame. The interesting thing about this is that the bright whites have been made by scouring and scraping the paper back to white. A bit brutally in this case, but as I said before, the tones and colours are just about right.

The second is a view from the train window later on another afternoon, featuring the Lomond Hills. I think we were just north of Ladybank. The Lomond Hills are quite a strange grouping, and deceptively low; from the west, passing them on the M90, they loom steeply and dramatically from the flat land around Loch Leven. From the east, though, as here, they just sweep up a bit and consolidate into two round lumps. West Lomond, the highest of the pair, can be seen peeking above the Ochil Hills from the north, and is eagerly anticipated by the simple traveller as a mighty peak to be wondered at as he drives southward, towards inevitable disappointment. Actually it was the intense blue light in the clouds which I was after in this one, which has proved elusive. I’ve never been fond of the way that Ultramarine watercolour granulates on the paper, but I do quite like the texture here of the wintry trees and bushes in the foreground. I’m sure that should I re-interpret this idea with oily paint I would make a better fist of it, but at present I’m trying to catch up with my (rather neglected) watercolour technique.

And, of course, it’s February. Never really liked February…

Strathearn Sun Study

oil on card 34x26cm

Madam and I spent Xmas day last year at my mother’s, near Crieff, and drove up there first thing in the morning. It was a beautiful clear day, but all along the Earn Valley – Strathearn – there was a bank of mist. The Sun was low, just above the Ochil Hills, and was brilliantly diffused by the mist. A Very Good Subject for a Sun Study.

I tried to utilise the whiteness of the primer by using my oil paint very thin – like watercolour, but it didn’t work as well as I’d hoped and I had to resort to the opaque Titanium white to even out some unwanted roughness in the atmospherics. I quite like the coarse texture of the grass and hedges though – it’s quite efficient, though I say it myself.

Not much more to say really, except that the fog bank hung around all day and was still there on Boxing Day as we came back.

Just wish I’d taken more photos… 

Halo - Sky Study

oil on card 34x22cm

Another Sky Study, adapted from photos I’d taken from the Roof Terrace at the National Museum of Scotland. It was mostly Altostratus cloud – very milky – but the Sun had just the hint of a halo around it. 

The halo was painted onto the primer with a brush taped to a compass (yes, there IS a mark at the centre of the Sun). It was partially obscured by thinly overpainting the rest of the sky with oily (walnut) paint, then lightly dabbing off over the halo with a dry, clean, soft brush (one of Madam’s old make-up brushes). The city was quite loosely done, and I should apologise to Edinburgh University’s Medical School for omitting their Italianate tower. It’s very grand, but its silhouette was way too strong for the centre skyline.

The sky was initially built in fairly cool colours, the only warm areas being slightly creamy yellow around the Sun. The present warm soft pinks and yellows were very thinly glazed on at the last session, using a Winsor Orange base, with Chrome Yellow Hue and Alizarin Crimson additions. All very transparent and thin, sort of like a watercolour wash. By the way that’s the very first time I have ever bought a tube of Orange. I was going for the Cadmium, but then realised, in the shop, that the more transparent Pyrrole was what was needed (and that it was considerably… er… cheaper…). The drawing of the foreground is, admittedly, a bit ropey, but I think I’ve done what I set out to do with sky, which was the whole point.

The Museum Roof Terrace is a recent discovery for me, and quite the thing for the city sky watcher. It’s ten minutes away from home by bike, and I can get the lift direct from street level. There’s very nearly the whole 360° far horizon panorama, some of which is sea-level towards the North Sea. A few degrees of Fife are blocked off by the Castle and some of East Lothian is behind Arthur’s Seat, but what other city has a castle on a rock and dirty great mountain in the middle?

(Rhetorical) 

Down to the River

oil on canvas 90x70cm

Again, it’s that clear, birch tundra landscape. The masses and light are very strong, and colour-wise it’s all about the oranges and blues. The river recedes into the distance, and the two ridges – one lit, one shadowed – are nicely set in opposition by the flat crossing light. Very early on I chose a mood-setting track - The Haunted Ocean I, from ‘Waltz with Bashir’. The music was a useful constant when looking at the painting and making decisions about where to take it, especially when re-starting after a gap.

Following a small ‘dry run’ on card, I dropped some of the central birches. The right bank and the foreground were re-worked from sources along the road, and this allowed more water to be visible, and gave a better idea of space across the valley. The further reduction of the central trees opened up the area where the river bends into view, and enabled the hard-edged rhyme between the two staggered headlands. It’s a very satisfying space for the eye to rest.

I knew that the very subtle colour and tone shifts of the empty sky - nearly two thirds of the painting - would be difficult, and to be honest I found it quite intimidating. The dabber technique didn’t seem to work so well over such a large area, so I resorted to very mobile thin veils of oily (walnut) paint stroked with large flat brushes. While not exactly perfect, the transitions are smooth enough, though they took ages to dry.

Some of the paintwork of the trees and land is pleasantly loose. I ground away at similar birches in ‘Runner’, and I think all that work really paid off here, especially in the backlit areas towards the right edge. I’m also quite pleased with the efficient, glazy paintwork of the river and the shadowy reflections.

As I worked away, I started to pick up un-planned resonances in the landscape. What started as simply a beautiful setting began to trigger ideas of both transition and division. The title, shared with a spiritual hymn, has baptismal, cleansing references, but there is also the idea that rivers are boundaries to be crossed. There’s the Rubicon of course, but what kept coming to my mind were the Underworld rivers – the Lethe, Styx etc. That thought gave extra weight to the way the shadow of the dark bank encroaches on the passive sunlit left, and chills it.

There were always going to be figures somewhere, but they didn’t crystallise until quite late on. Watching the telly one evening, there was a scene in which two men were hauling a bound figure along between them. It struck me as soon as I saw it, so I replayed the scene through the computer and took a screen grab. I turned them round, tilted them slightly, and there they were. I find the contrast between their violence and the peaceful stillness of the landscape very effective, and it somehow follows up the Underworld reference.

Two, small, passing, things. First, there are no clouds. I could’ve put some in, low, just left of the central horizon. They’re in the source, but I just chose not to. 

Second, the close runner-up for the painting’s title was ‘Into the Valley’. It’s good, but I couldn’t bring myself to use it. For me, this has other, more glorious associations from another era…

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...

Orange Sky Study

oil on card 30x18cm

Another sky study from a photograph I took last month - I saw this sky developing from the window and nipped out to record it. I’m not really a sunset person – they can be spectacular, but I think they’re a bit obvious. Anyway, that’s the exercise done, and because I was dealing with colour problems different from those I usually face, I would say that it was worth the effort.

Laying a thin, warm, light layer over a darker base was an everyday problem when I was in furniture restoration - colouring patches and disguising glue lines. If I was using a coloured glue – a translucent glue to which I added my own pigments – there was less of a problem than when using the naturally-dark traditional bead glue. This was very useful stuff indeed, but couldn’t be coloured, and no matter how well a patch fitted, there would always be a dark line in the surface. If I simply painted that over to match the surrounding wood, it would just go cool and grey. I had to overpaint the dark line in Cadmium Orange (usually in Gum Arabic). This dried to a cooler colour, but warm enough to be a base for all the tricksy grain and figuring work that would camouflage the mend. Which was what I got paid for. 

No Gum Arabic in this though, or Flake White. I’ve had a shock concerning the (most) recent prohibition of Lead White, so I’ve decided to learn how to do without. This piece has only Zinc White, which has it’s own glow, but I’ll have to get to grips with the Titanium/Zinc permutations which are the only whites you can get in the shops now. (If anyone knows of a Lead White speakeasy, let me know…)

Anyway, this little painting was done over three sessions, total time 9hrs 35min – not great, but about right I suppose. It’s an adapted view from the canal bridge at Viewforth, just down the road. The trees suggested on the right are imported from Blackford Hill; what’s actually there is a new student accommodation block – higher and more rectangular than the building that it replaced, but the influx of students and their cash will no doubt be beneficial to the neighbourhood. I wonder how many of them will see my three paintings selected for this year’s Society of Scottish Artists Open exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy building at the Mound/Princes Street, and whether they know it’s on from 5th till 20th December, and is free. Probably not many.

By the way, I knew we were a bit low on milk when I went out, so I got another litre - and some biscuits - from the corner shop on my way back. (So efficient)…

Cloud Study - Braids and Pentlands

oil on card 38x21cm

Another quick-ish cloud study. This one is taken from some photos I took in September 2013 when I was sourcing clouds for some other piece. The view is looking South from Blackford Hill, Edinburgh, taking in the Braid Hills and the more distant Pentlands. 

It’s all about the clouds though, and having a look at describing the shine of backlit Altocumulus. I think it works at first glance, but again the surface has somehow become lumpy and possibly overworked. I wish that the sky had the economy of the landscape sections, which I think are Quite Good. Oh well.

These small studies may actually be more useful than I think at the moment. Last week, when trying to buy another Flake White, I discovered that it is now unobtainable in UK, or Europe for that matter. It has been under restrictions for some time – being only available in tins – due to the fact that it’s Lead Carbonate, but it’s now totally banned, except for use in conservation. This means that I will have to adapt to painting with the ‘replacement’ whites produced by the various manufacturers – most often blends of Titanium and Zinc Whites, both of which are very cool whites and bad driers – and these little exercises will be very good for finding a New Way With Whites. Which, in My Humble Opinion, I think is unnecessary.

(A word of warning to other Artyfolk, the Cadmiums colours – strong opaque Reds and Yellows - are under threat as well.)

Today, as you can perhaps tell, I am Quite Grumpy. However - to paraphrase Scarlett O’ Hara - “Tomorrow is another day… and who knows, there may be Kelvin-Helmholzes* or the newly-categorised Altocumulus Asperatus* hangin’ about, which’ll be nice…”

* Two uncommon but spectacular cloud types, as if you didn’t know.

Blackford Hill Cumulus/Grass Study

oil on card 28x21cm

Another quickie, done in parallel with the first, again from a photo I took a few years ago. I had gone up Blackford Hill to do watercolour sketches of the big Cumulonimbuses that were sailing by that afternoon. I was in the lee of the hill, but suddenly got hailed on from behind. I turned round, and there was this shining billowing thing looming up on me. I took a quick photo, gathered my kit and legged it.

This small painting is a very near transcription of the photo image, mainly looking at, and trying to describe, the soft luminosity of the cloud. Used Flake White in soft, mobile, walnut oil – I think done in three layers – and this time I’m happy with the surface.

The grass was unexpectedly interesting to do. It’s only about three or four feet away from the eye, and while I didn’t want to make it a token blur, I didn’t want to describe every blade either. I ended up scoring the wet paint (very thinned out walnut oil, laid on a wipe of walnut oil) with a curled-up bit of stiff paper, which gave quite an effective grassy texture - especially in that tricky turf/sky silhouette area. Very likely to use this technique again, I think it would have been quite useful on most recent work.

It’s felt very refreshing to cut loose on these small ‘throwaway’ pieces, and it’s good to return to the Bigger Pieces with more energy. 

Mind you, I have prepared a whole new batch of primed card…

Backlit Altocumulus Study

oil on card 38x23cm

First of the New Quickies, taken from a photo I took in late summer 2011. 

It’s Bruntsfield Links, below some brightly backlit Altocumulus clouds, and not really mucked around with at all. The tree line (I’ve omitted the rooflines) is cropped slightly from the photo to give me the ‘bookend’ tree masses, but I’ve used the entire width of the sky in the source.

I’m very happy with the efficiency of the trees and grass, and there does seem to be some light in the sky, but I’m disappointed with the paint surface of the clouds. It’s somehow got very lumpy and rough, and will probably gather dirt and dust in quite a short while – negating whatever brightness there is now. Which is annoying.

I’ve made the trees and ground elements a bit darker than they would appear in life to exaggerate the shine in the sky, but lighter than in the source photo. There’s a dynamic range problem that arises when trying to photograph the sky – either the brightness throws everything else into impenetrable gloom or the sky is so overexposed that the cloud forms don’t register in the general white-out. It was a problem solved fairly early on by the 19thC French photographer Gustave le Gray - combining two separate exposures of sky and sea in one print to produce an acceptable optical solution.

So there you go.

Ten hours max over five separate days, which is like greased lightning for me…

Moment

oil on canvas 51x51cm

Here’s another woodland scene, this time featuring a man and a black dog. It’s taken long enough, and perhaps slightly misses the painting I had in my head, but there’s really nothing more I can do with it.

It’s meant to be about that moment of uncertainty when you hear something unseen and don’t know what it is. In that context, the viewer is aligned with the figures – we are watching them reacting to something in the murky area at the centre.

The setting is an adaption from a google streetview location in Hampshire. The open area was originally wider, and I moved the right trees inwards to make it a bit more claustrophobic – which caused a few problems where the two sides of foliage overlapped in the upper space. I also removed some of the more intrusive branches from the left to unclutter that central zone. Structurally, it’s very similar to Crow (July 2013); there is an open central area, a nearer block of lighter trees on the left and a darker row on the right leading back to a sunlit clump of trees. There’s even a sightline going back on the left, and in both paintings the light shines in through the trees on the right. I only noticed the similarity when I was about a third the way in, and honestly don’t know whether this is a Good or a Bad Thing.

During the initial stages of composition there were just two men; one on the right - as now - and another by the trees on the left. This began to look a bit shifty, so I removed one man and gave the other one a dog. This change, where the animal is suddenly very alert while the human peers into the gloom, introduces more acute senses, and is a bit more potent.

The dog is a pointer* - found on the interweb and originally white – and was exactly the pose I wanted. The man was taken from a BBC TV News report. He’s from Sloviansk, Eastern Ukraine, and was part of a crowd of men watching something going on from afar – again, exactly the pose I wanted

Technically, the initial progress was quite fast. I omitted the charcoal drawing step and went straight to drawing the elements into the grid with oil paint – quite finely in the case of the dog and man, and the left tree trunks. It was fast and efficient, and I think I’ll carry on doing this regularly. Another development is that I find myself using linseed Stand oil more. If you don’t know it, it’s a stiffly viscous substance – like thick honey – and takes an era to dry. To make it more manageable I dilute a batch of it 50/50 with turpentine. This makes it easy to use as a measured ingredient in damar resin and walnut oil mixtures (not forgetting to add the required drops of cobalt driers!). Recently though, I’ve been using it without damar - further thinned down and with different amounts of driers added (still experimenting). I’ve found that as the turpentine evaporates, the oil content tends to stick to itself, and can be controlled quite finely. It can produce a softness I find very pleasant to work with, and, once cured, is very tough. Which is always nice to know.

Now, thinking aloud, I’m getting concerned at how long these pieces are taking to complete, and how the regularity of my monthly blog posts has collapsed recently. This may be subjective, but it seems to me as if I’m only painting long novels, and I feel the need to be producing short stories and essays as well. I’m going to start breaking up my work habit with smaller, faster pieces, on easy-to-prepare card or panel - and just get some churn going.

Subjects? Well, who knows, but seeing as how the sky is always there and always changing and clouds are constantly fascinating and just an up-look away, and I have thousands of photos of them idly cluttering up my computer… 

* To the disdain of my Spanielist friends

August Window Work

watercolour

After a period of relative inactivity on the rapid drawing front, I’ve had a bit of a burst during August, with quite a high success rate as well.

I’d got into the (bad) habit of not looking properly, so I made sure that I had my initial good look for an extra 3-5 seconds before making the first marks.

I’ve been using a Pentel Aquash waterbrush – it’s a watercolour sketching brush which has a reservoir of water in the handle. If you need a bit of water, you just squeeze and there’s a flow through the hair. It saves a bit of time, which is very valuable in these exercises. Some people fill them with a ready-mixed wash - a good idea which I haven’t tried yet. The hair is an artificial fibre, but it feels OK and the point is pleasantly flexible and responsive.

I’ve selected five sketches, but I could have included at least three more. They’re the usual size, between 10-5cm high, and in my regular Payne’s Grey. There’s a bit more dynamism in these ones – I’m quite chuffed with the twisting man. It’s the whole figure and I really didn’t have long, and I think I’ve got ‘im. The mother and baby is a partial figure, and the marks are a little bit style-over-substance, but I quite like it. I think the best one is the central man – he was just a guy going up the road, but he’s got a touch of the classical about him, and he did actually have that poise and balance. 

Nice to know that when I do get down and concentrate I’ve still got it.

Well, some of the time…

Runner

oil on canvas 61x51cm

Just for a change, here’s a painting that doesn’t rely on greens. It’s adapted from a found google view from way up in Northern Norway, where the landscape seems entirely composed of swathes of dwarf birch.

It’s finished now - with quite a nice surface - but, its production has been a good example of why working an ill-thought-through idea, and grinding it out without really knowing where it’s going, is not always Good Practice. The initial thinking was all about the colour and the raking light, and in the (too brief) compositional stage I added a running figure, and it all seemed like A Good Idea At The Time.

Unfortunately, I didn’t concentrate enough on my drawing at the very start (February!), which meant that I was constantly playing catch-up and correcting the forms from the word go – except for the distant trees, which were actually painted quite efficiently. After a while, I realised that the elements of my original source weren’t adding up very well. I had wanted a very positive, fresh atmosphere, but then I became aware that half of my foreground birches were dead, leafless, and skeletal – and had to be changed pronto. Unfortunately I replaced them badly from various sources, and finally ended up composing clumps of trees from some (summery green) birch trees in the park, and the pair across the road that I see every single day.

I had realised fairly early that the scale of the figure – the Runner - was problematic; because the trees were dwarf birches (and not drawn well enough to indicate that), the figure was reading as a giant, so there had to be yet more coming and going on that. His back was meant to be lit by the low sunlight, but the resulting shape was a very awkward diagonal, so I hid him in deep shadow and blurred him to a mere suggestion.

Despite all my hand-wringing and grief, there are actually some very nice bits of painting here. The ground is done quite well, especially the shadowed dip on the right that leads back to the little valley in the mid distance. I’m quite chuffed with the clear blue sky too – quite a mobile walnut/stand oil mix, applied and blended with a cloth-covered dabber. I wasn’t planning to have any clouds (I know… heresy) but the minor additions left and right do imply a further distance over the last line of trees. So that was good.

Summing this piece up positively, it has been very pleasant to work in yellows and reds again. I have another idea along the same lines primed and ready to go - much, much, much more considered this time – and working through this piece has probably been very valuable in organising and working that up.

And at last - having eased this out of my system - I can move forward, and concentrate on the more interesting stuff…