Fog Over Queendown Warren

There’s a lot in this medium that I’ve not really mastered yet.  Skies aren’t that great yet, although I feel like I’m making some progress.  The background greenery wasn’t too bad for a while (this was before I turned this into a foggy painting).  The wood in the stile, though, is the big problem in this one.  I don’t think it’s because I didn’t draw this all in pencil first.  I think it’s because it’s all too small and detailed.  I did the right thing in negatively painting it all first by putting in the grassy shapes in the gaps but I’ve not got enough colour variation in there.  And I think this is because I’m working at such a small scale, having to be really careful adding colour and then having to use tools rather than fingers to smear them all together.  This painting has convinced me that my next Senelier pastel pad needs to be the one with the 9.5 by 12.5 inch pages – so far I’ve been using 7 by 9.5.

The fog is something I only decided to add near the end.  Where I’d tried to lighten background hill on the left, it was looking foggy.  And because this looked so good, I thought I’d put some fog in the foreground too.  Just so that it starts a little further away up the hill but so you can see the tops of the trees.  I guess it adds a horizontal band to go with the big diagonal line, so that has to be good from a compositional point of view.

I had some fun adding evergreens by putting on bands of green and stroking them upwards with my finger.  In reality, the great majority of trees that can be seen from here are deciduous.

The best bit about this painting is the nettles on the left, with leaves and stems in lots of different colours including a sun catching yellow and some more leaves scraped off with a scalpel.  The barbed wire that I scraped off is good too.

But it’s not one for the shop window: that stile spoils it for me.