And My Radio Says Tonight It’s Gonna Freeze

After yesterday’s triple landscape using the M Graham watercolours, I was always planning in following up with a full sized l landscape using the same colours and the same loose style, so that’s what I’ve been doing today. I thought a Scottish highland scene might give me a good opportunity to keep things loose, so I picked a view in Trotternish, the Northernmost peninsula on the Isle Of Skye, the bit the guy has his hand on in this painting.

I worked from the back to the front, starting with one of my greatest ever skies. For the hills, I worked one layer at a time, gradually building up colour and working from the back to the front within each layer. That should have been it.

But what I ended up with wasn’t good. There were two main problems. The first was that the hills were all in different colours and didn’t seem to belong together. Normally when faced with problem with this, I’d apply a thin unifying glaze in a single colour over all the hills but I didn’t trust the M Graham colours to be transparent enough for this to work. So instead I tried to coax the hills together by adding extra layers of whichever colours individual hills were missing. This wasn’t really working, so I went for plan C and added some cadmium yellow to the sunlit edges and planes of the hills and this did bring in a bit of harmony. Cadmium yellow is now officially a rescue colour.

The second problem was the vertical rockface along the top of the dark hill on the right. No matter what colours I tried, I couldn’t get the rockface to stand out against the hill behind it and to look as if it belonged with the hill below it. Even the titanium white trick of painting over a watery white and dabbing it off to create texture didn’t work. Cadmium yellow or white gouache highlights long the top didn’t work either. After four hours I finally gave up trying and turned the painting into a snow scene. I put white gouache on the tops of the hills and dragged it downwards with the brush. In a few places, the gouache picked up some colour from the paint underneath it, resulting in grey snow, which looked good. In places I also added broken up snowy marks with the edge of a dry brush. I finished off with lots of white spatters for falling snow. And that was me done.

As a final painting, I think this is fine and it’s up for sale, with the price to be found here. The sky is brilliant and I like the colours in the hills. The vertical rockface halfway down on the right still isn’t great, though, and I still know deep down that this wasn’t originally intended to be a snow scene.

Just like yesterday, this is named after a line from Telegraph Road,