Hartlip House

I made a couple of early decisions.  First the colour scheme is in the key of orange warm, using only French ultramarine, Indian yellow and rose dore.  I picked this key because all three colours are warm and I wanted to see whether the painting would suddenly change from being warm to being cold when I added the shadows (the opposite of what happened in my Place Meadow painting the other day).  The other decision was to paint this one in landscape format and to make the tree the star.  It have me a chance to be adventurous and impressionistic with the colour rather than just churning out chocolate box paintings over and over again.

This was my first painting using Arches paper and I have to say I’m impressed.  Even though it’s cold pressed paper rather than my usual rough, it has amazing textures as you cam see from the sparkles in the road.

The fence poles in front of the house were stamped in with the edge of a piece of cardboard and worked well, resulting in something that occupies the ideal middle ground between being too washy washy and too detailed.  Maybe I could have used the same technique for that gate too or, better still, just left it out.  One thing I did leave out was a public footpath sign pointing down the drive between the two houses – That was a smart move as the sign would have been an unnecessary distraction.

That tree though – it came out exactly how I wanted it to.  That’s amazing.

At the end I had a long think about whether to spatter on my usual bright opaque colours to add a bit extra.  On this occasion, though, I decided to just leave everything as it was.  Probably all for the best.

This one works for me and is up for sale.