Barbed Wire Fence, Queendown Warren

With the football on three times a day and me needing to fit in my four hour walk, the days are looking a little short at the moment. Not too short to fit in a watercolour painting but short enough that I’ll feel rushed and screw up. So I’m back on the coloured pencils because I’m happy to spread these paintings over a couple of days. Having said that, I’ll be going for a walk after writing this one up and will miss the first half of the 2pm kickoff.

It’s another scene from Queendown Warren, a simple one that lets the shapes and the colours do all the talking. The fence post in the foreground and the barbed wire attached to it were the real stars for me and I marked out the wire (and some of the wires in the middleground fence) with an embossing tool right at the beginning before applying any colour.

And then I added all the colour, jamming along to the Grateful dead as usual, throwing on whatever colour felt right at the time and dancing all over the paper with the music.

To finish, I blended the sky with blending medium and everything else with a paper stump. The background hills were looking a bit too heavy, so I went over these with more of the blending medium. I then added some foreground brambles and some textural marks around the outside of the trees on the left and right. And that was me done.

I’m expecting this to be popular locally, so I’ll be putting it up for sale. My favourites bits are atvthe top and bottom: the blended sky, the foreground fence and the weird colours in the brambles at the bottom. I’m thinking I’ve put too much pigment down in the distant hills, though, and that the tree like shape on the lefties a bit weird.

I’m not done with the coloured pencils just yet though and, after flicking through the Helen Hanson book yesterday, will be having another go at a landscape with fineliners and coloured pencil in the very near future.