Harvey’s Brewery, Lewes

And here’s the first outing for the M Graham watercolours. I picked a view of the Harvey’s brewery in Lewes because the River Ouse alongside it gave me a chance to try out some of the ideas I’d read about in the Rob Dudley book on painting rivers, including using a sparkle brush for the first time. Harvey’s is my all time favourite beer. I was lucky enough to live in Lewes for a few years and at one point owned a house close enough to the brewery for me to be be able smell everything. Not my favourite ever smell, though, to be honest.

Anyway, on to the painting. At the drawing stage, I masked out a few white areas, including ripples on the water, some of these using the sparkle brush. The marks the brush has given me are a bit up and downy. I think I’ll get better with practice.

I like the sky today. Blue at the top and yellow ochre at the bottom (in the style of a YouTuber who’s blocked my comments so gets no publicity here) and with some violet added into the blue to create some clouds and some darks. I brought the yellow down into the rest of the painting to create some warmth everywhere except at the nearest bit of the river where I reflected the sky with the blue instead.

And then I just filled everything with colour. Being unused to this set of colours, most of my mixing was on the palette but as I get more experienced with these colours, I’ll start mixing on the paper more. To answer the obvious question, yes, I did miss a saturated yellow and a red but I did enjoy the challenge of working with one hand tied behind my back.

I did some tweaking at the end, adding birds in the sky (more loosely than usual, not just flying vs), some grasses poking up from the left (stupidly before removing masking fluid from the river) and some white gouache over white buildings that I’d meant to leave white but had painted yellow over in the underpainting. And that was me done.

It was an interesting exercise and the brown, green and purple do create an interesting understated mood that I don’t normally get in my paintings. I won’t be throwing these paints away in disgust. But I must say this does look like one of my plein air paintings, the ones where I’ve tried too hard to recreate what’s in front of me. Probably because I was mixing too much on the palette. I’m going to put it up for sale, though, as it does seem popular in Facebook.