Bunnahabhain Distillery

I’m still making my way through my birthday presents but it isn’t new art gear today: it’s a new malt. An 18 year old Bunnahabhain from Islay that’s been fired in sherry barrels. Very complex. And I’m using this as an excuse to paint the distillery. This is a posterised painting, using the tundra supergranulators.

I started as usual by putting down a pencil drawing and using the Notanizer app to divide the image up into a decent looking combination of four values. Then I masked out all the highlights and a few foreground grasses and spattered on some random masking fluid. But then I did do something new. Rather than going straight to the tundra pink for the first layer, I put down a very watery underpainting of tundra green and tundra orange in all the hill and foliage areas. Not that it shows at all in the final painting.

After that, business as usual. A layer of tundra pink over all the light, medium and dark areas but leaving the water and the sky white. Then some more masking fluid for grasses over some of the pink area in the foliage in the bottom left. Then a layer of tundra blue over the medium and dark areas. In some places in the foliage I applied this layer with a foliage brush and applied the paint quite thickly but, again, this doesn’t really show up.

The final layer was tundra violet over the darkest areas. Again I applied the paint thickly with a foliage brush in the foliage areas but this time you can see the results.

Finally I removed all the masking fluid and painted in the sky and water wet into wet, using the pink, blue and violet. After standing back from the painting, I decided that I needed to darken the hill behind the buildings to create a big value contrast around the centre of interest. I lost a lot of detail from that hill but I think that helped things, preventing it from competing for attention wit( the buildings. And that was me done.

And I’ve ended up with another successful painting. Truth be told, it’s impossible to go wrong with a posterised painting in tundra colours, so this feels like a bit of a cheat code. On the other hand, the sky and the water are great and the textures in the bottom left foliage work. And I’m feeling good about my compositional thinking in darkening that hill. This one’s up for sale.