The Invitation

Will it be third time lucky? This will be another made up landscape. And the colours will again be Payne’s grey, Mayan blue genuine and burnt under, with little buts of viridian, transparent yellow and quinacrinone magenta. This time, though, the dry paint will only be applied along the top horizon.

So that’s what I did. I applied dry paint along the horizon line with a palette knife, wet the area above it and allowed the paint to run into it. At various times while it was drying, I tried to drag bits of the dry paint upwards into it, trying to suggest wet into wet trees. And at some point I lifted off a moon using a penny wrapped in tissue paper. For the foreground, I wet a brush, dipped it into the paint sitting there along the horizon and painted it all in, leaving lots of white snowy areas and including a few dry brush textural marks.

As finishing touches, I added in some clearer trees and three unequally spaced foreground fenceposts. Then some snow on the fenceposts, some grass around them and some white gouache and Payne’s grey spatters. Payne’s grey spatters? Yes – I experimented on some scrap paper and found that I could make some marks that looked like grass showing through the snow. And that’s where I stopped.

And I can finally say, after this one, that today has been a success. I really like this one. The background trees are great and the understated grasses around the fence posts do a great anchoring job. The colours are great too – somehow they came out as grey, neutral greens that feel really cold. This one’s up for sale, with the price to be found here,