Long Hot Summer Night

This is another painting that’s been brewing for a while. If I don’t look at the clouds and see naked women, what else is there to see? Well, maybe I could see a pub. Specifically the Rose And Crown in Hartlip. Just like my previous cloud painting, this was painted in soft pastels. The title is the name of a Jimi Hendrix track. Looks like my idea about naming all my sky paintings after lyrics from Telegraph Road has died an early death.

With the sky being the star of the show, that’s where I started and where most of my time was spent. After putting down some rough cloud outlines with the edge of a grey pastel, I looked through my photos for a suitable Queeendown Warren foreground and marked it in with the edge of a green pastel but then went back to the sky. I went through the usual process, adding lots of layers and smoothing them out, using smaller, more detailed marks and smoothing them out with smaller tools as I went along. The further along I got, the more I seemed to have to work on making the cloud look like a cloud: getting it to look like a pub was easy. I blended lots of different colours into the clouds, based on colours I could see in my pub photo. Whatever colours I introduced, I was careful to introduce in all the clouds. When the tooth of the paper was starting to feel full, I introduced white borders around the clouds and around the subclouds in my big cloud that were supposed to suggest windows.

Then I moved onto the foreground and, to be honest, didn’t spend much time on it. I wanted the edges of the trees to be fresh and rugged so didn’t overdo them, just dabbing in dark greens and fiddling with them with a pointy plastic colour smoother. I tried to use the direction of my marks with the edges of green pastels to show how the ground drops away quite sharply from the footpath on the left and I think I achieved this. Making the further field a lighter, warmer green and adding in the fenceposts made the foreground more interesting and immediately recognisable to anyone local. And that was me done.

I’m happy with this one. The foreground is great. Most of the sky is too. The big cloud gives off hints of the Rose & Crown but these are subtle, which is good. My only issue is the dark areas at the top of the main cloud. Clouds are normally darker on the bottom unless there’s a lot of light coming from below. I tried to lighten the bottom of the clouds at one point but without success. Still, the cloud had to be darker on top to suggest the pub, so I was always going to be faced with a problem. I’m just happy that the pub isn’t immediately obvious but that once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it. That was my main objective and I managed to nail it.

This one’s at the front of the queue to be displayed in the pub restaurant the next time one of the paintings there is sold and needs replacing.