The other book I got on Fathers' Day was Painting Expressive Watercolour by Bridget…
Clearing In Newington Woods
So, after all that swatching, here’s my first go with the Shire supergranulating colours. I trekked a mile or two across some fields in the blazing sun to Newington Woods, where I thought this little clearing might offer the opportunity for those Shire colours to shine while also letting me stand in the shade. With all the sky blotted out by trees, the lack of a sky colour wasn’t a problem. The main colours were the Shire five plus rose dore. Four opaques came on to offer support at the end: cadmium red, cadmium yellow, titanium white and sepia.
I started by masking out the benches, which makes it all the more odd that I didn’t go into this painting with a proper value plan, instead hoping that some shadows would make everything look sunny and that the values would take care of themselves. I also spattered on some masking fluid, trying to only put it on the backdrop of trees.
After that, I worked from back to front, starting with an underpainting. I,m not sure multiple layers are the best way to acticvate the granulation, so that my have been a mistake. It may also have been a mistake to have too big a foreground: I was struggling throughout this painting to make the foreground interesting. I ended up putting on too many layers everywhere, especially in the shadows on the right of the foreground where I couldn’t decide in the best shadow colour.
I also struggled with the benches. The shire yellow wasn’t bright enough to show off the sun and I dismissed the idea of leaving white highlights a bit too quickly. White highlights (and some light values) would have been great for making the benches stand out against the grass. I just couldn’t bring myself to add white highlights to a bench that was mainly in shadow.
To make things look more interesting, I resorted to dibbing in some opaque whites, yellows and reds. I also put in some bigger yellow dabs along the top to look like sunlit leaves, dabbing in a bit odd shire blue on top of them to give some greens and a bit of variety. I also had to bring in the sepia to help make the benches stand out, painting in some very dark, opaque shadows. I used the sepia in some other places too, just to balance things out.
There were a couple of things that worked out well today. The trees in the background look good, some of them even looking cylindrical and three dimensional. The other success was the decision to include rose dore in the palette. It did a great job in calming down the greens in some places while vibrating against them in other places as a complementary colour.
Overall, though, this one goes down as a flop. Too many overworked layers destroying the granulation, the lack of a value plan. The lack of value contrasts, apart from maybe the light bench against a dark background at the top. It’s not a great first outing for the Shire supergranulators, although I did learn that rose dore belongs with them and that (based on limited evidence) they seem to work better for trees than for grass.
Oh, and this was a first proper outing for my new art backpack. Everything fits in (apart form the bottle of water that I carry separately) and it was comfortable in my back, even roasting under the midday sun.
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