Back to the artwork after a few days off, and this is looking like…
Colours On The Path, Queendown Warren
Once again I’m letting the iPad tell me what to paint. Today it was telling me to paint a landscape using the Artgraf blocks but to put down dry marks and wet them. I’d only ever painted one landscape before in Artgrafs and that was using them like watercolour pans, so this was going to be a new experience.
As subject matter, this was never going to involve buildings as the Artgraf blocks are too big and clumsy to come up with detail. So it was going to be a countryside landscape. Faced with a choice between a shady tree walk and rolling hills, I went for the trees, thinking that I might be able to get some interesting color in the shadows and on the tree trunks. This might have been a mistake in retrospect.
My pencil outline was minimal, being not much more than the outline of the path. After that, I put on a little colour, then wet it. I remembered to keep the dry marks pretty light, and things came out looking too light:
So I added more colour, trying to make the tree trunks darker and more colourful, trying to make the shadows darker (to make the day look brighter) and trying to put in more leaves to cover up most of the sky. With the medium being quite opaque, I thought multiple layers of leaves in the top half of the painting might work out OK. But things just ended up looking worse. So I kept adding more layers. I struggled to get the yellow to be opaque enough to cover what was underneath it and ended up having to use the black watercolour block in an attempt to rescue things by just having a dark canopy. And having to do that is a sure sign that the painting has failed..
Yes. This is a big flop. I should have just gone for rolling hills with a distant tree line: that would have suited the Artgrafs better. I want to forget today ever happened.
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