Freedom

Right, time to give the huge set of 125 oil pastels a workout. I picked a view in Queendown Warren. I don’t think it’s a view I see on my daily walks.

I started with the sky, putting down random light areas in blue and grey and then smoothing them out in little circles with kitchen paper. There was still the capacity there for more colour, so I put on more blues and greys plus some red, yellow and purple and smoothed it out again. I was very happy with the result. I was already benefitting from the huge range of colours.

The came the trees: some big trees on the right and two tree lines on the left. I followed the same process as I’ve been using with soft pastels, starting with yellows in the highlighted areas. Then it was greens for the mid tones, with some random warm colours thrown in. And for the darks, I used blues and browns; I could have used dark greens too but didn’t bother today.

And finally there was the foreground. I started by putting down lots of random colours, making sure to include enough greens and trying to have lots of yellow around the centre of interest. I blended and smoothed with kitchen paper with downhill strokes. The result was a bit too stripy for my liking, so I added another layer of colour and tried to blend more randomly, with circular movements. This didn’t really work and things were starting to look dark and muddy, so I added some brighter colours, including the iridescent and the flourescent yellow and green. This time I blended the colours in grassy strokes, generally up and to the right. This looked better. There was now some texture. There were still downhill stripes but they were now jagged stripes showing grassy bands, which was fine. To finish off, I scraped out some grasses and some ambiguous rocky/snowy shapes. And that was me done.

This one’s not too bad, especially for a first effort with some new gear. The sky and trees are great but I need practice with foregrounds. Maybe I need to use fewer colours but in bigger blobs before blending. Or just stop after the first layer. But that’s for another day and in the meantime, this one’s going up for sale, with the price to be found here.

And I’m naming this one after a Jimi Hendrix track, one on an album that I got for my birthday.