25 June 2018 I'd had some feedback that I was good at painting trees, so…
Blast Wall, Glazing House, Oare Gunpowder Works
I took a trip out today to Oare Gunpowder Works Country Park near Faversham. It’s a forest with lots of walks through it, along with a private fishing lake and the ruins of some old gunpowder works. After taking a stroll around, I thought I’d start with this view. That’s not a bright but the remains of a wall that had an archway in it, allowing a stream to pass the glazing house inside the blast walls. I’ll definitely be coming back: there are plenty of interesting views there.
There was a lot of greenery about so I thought I’d give the Shire supergranulating colours a go, along with cerulean blue and rose dore. Sepia and titanium white made an appearance at the end.
After sketching out the main shapes, masking some trees and spattering some masking fluid, I got to work with the watercolours. I started with an underpainting today and ended up painting over multiple coats: if I put the paint in too thick, it won’t granulate, so I kept my individual layers quite thin. At some point I removed the masking fluid from the trees but I was careful to add big green shapes both before and after removing the mask so that they appeared both behind and in front of the trees.
Once I thought that adding more layers would only make things worse, I added some detail using the two opaque paints: highlights in opaque white and some shadows, branches and bricks in sepia.
The end result is mixed. There are some interesting green shapes in the trees and the rose dore is doing a great job both toning down the greens and vibrating against them in the trees and the wall. But the archway’s not quite the right shape and the two banks in the foreground don’t really work for me. And I’m starting to reach the conclusion that the Shire supergranulators just don’t work for trees and should be kept for rolling fields. I won’t be putting this one up for sale.
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