Abandoned Quarry Ruins, Carbilly Tor, Bodmin Moor

So I had a go at painting a scene on a Bodmin Moor with the tundra supergranulators.  There’s not a huge stack of rocks there but it was rocky and stony enough for my purposes today.  I’ve only used the five tundra colours plus titanium white.

It was important to get the perspective right on this one and it’s something I screw up far too often, so I don’t feel guilty about using a grid and a ruler to get things right today.  Once I had a pencil drawing down (without the tree) and had softened on some masking fluid, I was ready to start.

I went for the sky first, wetting it all and then dripping in some quite wet colours.  All five tundra colours are in there, even the green (albeit only in a grey mix with one of the other colours, might have been the pink).  For once I let the sky dry naturally rather than dabbing it with kitchen paper.

Next up was the building and all of the ticks in the hillside.  The building started with a fairly random but very wet underpainting, looking to get some granulation going.  More layers were added on top, including a lot of layers in the darkest places.  A thin glaze of purple and green (I think) on the shadowy walls (in particular the right side of the chimney) helped a lot.  I went to town a bit on all the rocks with all five colours dropped into a wash of water, creating lots of granulation while trying to keep the top edges hard and bottom edges soft.

At this point, with the sky, building and rocks all colour in and a white hillside around them, things looked pretty good and I seriously considered turning this into a snow scene with some very thin blue, pink and purple glazes over the snow.  But, no, that wasn’t sort of painting I’d had in mind.  So I filled in all the white on the hillside.  I used all five colours again, trying to create granulation while keeping the hard and soft edges that I’d worked so hard to create.  I guess my subconscious plan was to keep the rocks darker than the rest of the hillside and not have identical colours to each other on and behind the rocks.  And I added some grassy bits with dry paint on the Merlin brush to ground the rocks.

Looking at the painting at this stage, there wasn’t enough distinction between the rocks and the rest of the foreground, so I reached for my new secret weapon, the titanium white.  I added a watery glaze of white along the top edges of the rocks, put on more water to help it spread a downwards, then dabbed it off.  I did something similar to the left facing faces of the building to lighten them up and make them look more mam made.  This titanium white trick is my big new discovery for 2023.

And then I was ready for the big decision that I’d been putting off right from the beginning.  Whether to include that tree branch.  Although the painting would have been acceptable without it, I felt that things were slightly unbalanced.  So I put in the branch.  I started with a mix of the green and the purple, with a medium brush before moving in to a thinner brush.  I dropped all five tundra colours into the branch in various places while it was still wet.  I stabbed in some leaves with dry paint and the Merlin brush.  Rather than sticking to the green, I also used the blue, purple and white.  Maybe even a bit of the orange and the pink.  And to help the branch stand out against what was behind it, I played the titanium white trick again.  And that was me done.

I like this one a lot.  The sky, the titanium white effect on the branch, the shadowy side of the chimney, all the granulation going on in the hillside.  So much to love.  If the tops if the rocks he’d been more jagged and if the foliage in the tree didn’t gently touch the cloud and the building, it would have been perfect.  Definitely going in the shop window, though, this one.