Climate Change

It’s been a while now since my last painting but I decided earlier in the week that today was going to be my first watercolour day of 2023.  The days have been feeling a bit warmer but not warm enough to head out for some plein air painting so I was only out in the garden.  I may have been a bit premature digging out the watercolours as it was much colder outside than I thought.  The 20 minutes up to sunset were freezing.  Most of the afternoon I spent indoors waiting for paint to dry.

The view is one in Queendown Warren, where I’ve been taking some long walks lately.  It has some magnificent views across the valley that would be great to wake up to but are a bit lacking in the sort of big shapes that I need to make paintings interesting.  This view was the best I could find.  Colour-wise, I’ve used all three of my sets of supergranulators (tundra on the left, Shire in the middle and desert on the right) plus some cerulean blue in the Shire sky.  I just wanted to give these colours a go and couldn’t decide which to use, so went for all three in different sections.  I could have divided the paper into three with masking fluid or masking tape but thought I’d have a go at blending the three subpaintings together.

After putting down a drawing, I masked out the fenceposts, some snow on the rocks and branches and a signature and then spattered over some masking fluid for snow in the tundra section.  And then I gradually built up the rest of the painting using my supergranulating colours.  I was in the mood for multiple layers today, so started with an underpainting before adding on medium and dark values.  Rather than strictly dividing the paper into three, I allowed the three sets of colours to invade each other’s sections and blended them together in places.  Lacking the patience to leave paint to dry and worried about the falling temperature, I used the hairdryer at times to speed things up.

I think this one has to go down as a success.  It’s probably the best that the Shire colours have ever looked and I think this is because the tundra and desert colours bring out the best in them.  Maybe I should try some tundra and Shire or desert and Shire paintings of the warren.  My plans to replace the Shire supergranulators with forest when they run out might have to be changed.  The worst bits about this one are the tree on the right, which should either have been left out or painted on a lighter value, and the foreground rocks, which don’t exist in reality and that I only included in an attempt to let the supergranulators do their thing.  But the colours in the hills and the tree lines are amazing where the different colour sets have mixed together.

An encouraging start to the year.

This one was put on display at the Rose And Crown and sold to a former local visiting from Australia.