A Bit Of Wood

I admit it doesn’t sound great but It looks OK to me.  I only had time for the one painting today (heading off to lunch at the Rose & Crown soon) so thought I’d go for another if the crackle pasted boards.  I was thinking of doing one with Shire supergranulators and one with desert super granulators.  I went for the one where the paste formed lots of vertical bands if the board was held up in landscape format and chose the Shire supergranulators thinking this could end up as a forest scene with lots of trees and one big tree at the front playing a starring role.

I started with loads of cadmium yellow along the middle of the board, hoping this would show through as sunlight later on.  Then I reached for the Shires.  I used Shire blue and grey on the main tree, forest brown and green apatite general at the top of the background, Shire green, yellow and olive in the middle background and whatever I fancied in the foreground.  I tried a couple of layers of this but it soon became clear that my choice of colours was too weak and too green.  I was going to have to change plans.

And my planning was replaced by anarchy, so I can’t describe in detail what I did. I reached for my normal palette of transparent colours and used most of them in the painting: two yellows, three reds, three blues, two browns and viridian, along with all the supergranulating colours I’d been using up until now.  At one point I squeezed some colours directly out into the paper and spread them all over the central tree with a palette knife.  That seemed to work, although I did need to do some dabbing with kitchen paper to prevent things turning to mud.  I tried adding background tree trunks in red and blue without any luck: they just kept diffusing away into nothingness.  So, instead, what I did with the background was to:

– keep the darkest greens at the top (forest brown, Shire blue and green apatite genuine)  with brushstrokes fanning out from the top middle of the board

– put lots of interesting colours in the bottom background (viridian, Winsor red and Winsor blue green shade are always good value)

– dab paint out wherever the cracks were biggest.  This made them even more prominent and gave a cobwebby impression.

Just as last time, I had great fun tinkering as the tinkering never actually made the painting worse,  but eventually I decided to stop.

So here we are.  I quite like this one.  There’s light, texture, atmosphere, the feeling of there being a story behind it all.  This one’s up for sale.