From Out Of This Darkness And Into The Day

Back to the pastels today. I need to keep practicing with this medium so that I’m ready for Landscape Artist Of The Year if selected, and to show the judges that I’m ready if they come visiting this website. For subject matter I picked two photos: a view of Queendown Warren and a sky photo that I’d seen someone post online somewhere. The sky was yellow at the top with a couple of wisps of grey cloud, then underneath that were some amazing blue and purple clouds going all the way across the sky. Then, underneath that, the sky was a vivid orange colour. It just had to be painted. Unfortunately I can’t remember who posted it. Apologies.

I worked through the painting generally from top to bottom, but occasionally revisiting earlier sections higher up. Once I’d finished the sky, though, I decided things weren’t hanging together. The yellow sky at the top, the grey wisps of cloud and the blue clouds below didn’t gel together. So I darkened the grey wisps of cloud and made them much bigger, obliterating most of the yellow sky and coming down to overlap the blue clouds. With a sky like that, the ground below needed to be bright in the background and in shadow in the foreground, so this is what I aimed for in the rest of the time available. It took a long time but I eventually ended up with colours I was happy with. It doesn’t make sense for the tops of the foreground trees to be so bright but this was necessary to help them stand out against the background. With the ground looking ok and the tooth of the paper in the sky full and unyielding, that’s where I stopped.

It’s not my all time favourite, this one. The sky still feels a bit disjointed with blues, yellows, greys and oranges. But the difference between the shadowy foreground and well lit background is a big win. The orange band at the bottom of the sky immediately grabs the viewer’s attention, especially when next to almost complementary blues and greens. And check out those hints of orange in the background hills. This one’s up for sale with the price to be found here. It’s also in the queue of paintings waiting for a for a vacancy to arise on the wall of the restaurant at the Rise & Crown.

I’m naming this one after another line from Telegraph Road by Dire Straits. I’ve set myself a challenge to reproduce all the lyrics in the track with paintings. It may take me a few years.