Dinarić Fortress

I’ve been busy with another soft pastel landscape today. This is Dinarić Fortress, a 15th century fort in Croatia. I worked from two photos of the fort: one from this direction and one from a different direction with a great purple and pink sky with a yellowish band through the middle. Maybe working from two photos is why this one looks mixed, with the greenery clashing against the sky.

I followed my usual process, blocking out the big shapes first, then working from the back to the front, adding whatever colours felt right at the time and smoothing them out with either fingers, light pastels or colour shapers. I kept the hill on the right really light and later smoothed the sky colours into it to lose its edges. The road up to the castle started as grass but I couldn’t get to a colour that would harmonise with the rest of the painting and still look right. I tried changing it to rocks but had a similar problem, so I smoothed it all out with my fingers and turned it into a road. The long horizontal triangle of greenery was where I had the most problems. It took me. Long time to get to an acceptable colour. Even then, the colour looked boring and the painting wasn’t looking harmonious, so I dotted in some spots of colours that I’d used in the foreground foliage. To soften the dots of colour, I stabbed at them with my fingers, being careful not to smooth the marks out. And then I stopped as the tooth of the paper was full and not accepting any more colour.

The final painting is OK, although I’m still wondering whether the colours in the foliage harmonise with those in the sky, the road and the fort. And it feels weird that, while the fort is supposed to be the subject of the painting, it’s the foreground foliage that’s in focus. Still, this is going up for sale, with the price to be found here.