A Long Time Ago Came A Man On A Track

The sun is out so the tour starts today. I picked the soft pastels because they’re what I’ll be using if I make it to Landscape Artist Of The Year and I’ve only used them in the studio so far. Before today I didn’t even know whether the box fit in my backpack. It turns out that it does but that there’s no room for the shelf on the easel so I’ll need a wall to sit my pastels on if I want to be standing up and not having to keep bending up and down. Anyway, I drove out to White Horse Wood Country Park and wandered around a but before settling on this view. I’m pretty sure that the path on the left, going past the two trees, is the North Downs Way.

You know the process by now. I block out the main shapes with the edges of pastels, then work from the back to the front, keeping my layers of pigment as faint as possible for as long as possible, using whatever colours feel good (either because I can see them or because I think they’ll look interesting) and blending them in whatever manner feels appropriate.

So the sky was first, using mainly sensible colours for a change, although there are traces of red, pink and purple in there. Clouds were smoothed out with rubber blending tools and the rest of the sky with swirly marks with the fingers and with the white pastel. I didn’t go over the top on the amount of pigment either, keeping the sky quite light for a change.

Then came the background. I really wanted to keep this light to give the impression of distance, and achieved this aim. I do like the colours and the general haziness, helped out by some crisscross finger smoothing giving the impression of fields. I added too much detail of trees in the nearest bit of the background at one point but managed to soften it down.

Then came the hill and the trees. I used a lot of weird random colours in the hill and kept smoothing them out with my fingers until I got to something that was warm and variegated. It feels green but when you look closely it’s brown, red and yellow. I’m happy with that. With the trees, I was more interested in suggesting 3D shapes than in getting the colours right, so I put down lots of yellow and orange highlights and some random darks underneath, I smoothed them with rubber blenders, working from the highlights into the dark after finding that dark into light didn’t work. I was in real danger of being beaten by the tooth of the paper and having to stop, being unable to add any more colour, but reached something acceptable just in time.

And finally there was the foreground. This one did need a foreground. Not enough planes otherwise. I blocked out a simple shape at the bottom rising upwards from left to right (opposite direction to the hill) and filled it with multicoloured grasses. I deliberately included a couple of woody things on the left and right to frame the painting but the one on the right should probably have been bigger. And I made the grass look thicker and the foreground more three dimensional not by adding a similar second layer but by adding a second layer where most of the grass only came up to half the height of the first layer. I also dotted in a few flowers and seeds and then put in some random smoothing strokes with the rubber blender to soften things a bit. And that was me done.

This was a successful exercise today. I now know that I can use soft patels plein air and that a painting like this takes about three hours without rushing. I managed to create the sense of distance that I wanted. And I came up with a warm, colourful landscape where the sky was mainly blue and not a riot of reds, yellows, oranges, pinks and purples. So I’m confident I won’t embarass myself if I make it to LAOTY. Although I’m not saying that I won’t go crazy with the sky if I’m given the opportunity. I still wonder about these multicoloured grassy foregrounds though; I’m still not convinced that they’re what’s needed. Do they come across as a bit childish? There’s still room for improvement here but this one’s going up for sale, with the price to be found here.

And here’s proof if you need it that I was out in the blazing sun.