Headed over the road to the Rose & Crown at Hartlip To order a lunchtime…
Craiglea And Sanquhar, Hartlip
It’s freezing outside so I only have one painting to add to the Hartlip collection today. I picked this pair of cottages because they were white. It’s another three colour painting, this time using French ultramarine, transparent yellow and quinacridone magenta, in the key of purple cool. I say three colours but at one point as tried some titanium white in the windows. It didn’t work out so I removed as much of the white as I could and drew in some white lines in pen instead.
Values and composition were all carefully planned, in particular the two left-facing walls where there are large areas of untouched white. I did mask out some white highlights on walls, roofs and chimneys at the beginning but these looked a bit too bright, so I yellowed them out.
At one point I had problems with the roofs looking too garish and the wall looking too multicoloured (yes, this really is possible) but I solved both problems the same way by laying over a thin blue glaze.
The sky is interesting. I put a lot of purple in there so that it could contrast against both the orange roofs and the greenery. Rather than letting it dry, I experimented with dabbing it dry with a kitchen towel, which make it look colder, so that was interesting!
There are some great colour effects in this one, in particular the shadow colours on the two sunny left-facing walls and the rainbow colour in the street. Somehow this painting has managed to get across the idea that it’s a sunny but cold day. This one was snapped up quickly and now sits proudly on the wall in Craiglea.
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