He Put Down His Load Where He Thought It Was The Best

Today was a day for (i) a watercolour landscape, (ii) some neglected colours to see some action, and (iii) to be inspired by a YouTube video in which an artist painted a landscape with just burnt sienna and a blue and did some great wet into wet work. I’m not naming the artist as my policy is to not give publicity to artists who don’t allow me to put links to my website in comments on their videos. I picked my favourite view in Queendown Warren as my subject. For colours, I went for Mayan blue genuine, cerulean blue, burnt sienna and raw sienna. With two cool blues, a cool yellow and burnt sienna playing the role of warm red, this painting is in the key of green warm. This might be the my first painting since September that I’ve been able to attach a colour key to. You might notice that all four colours listed are granulators, which is why I painted this one on rough watercolour paper and why I introduced Potters pink as an extra colour. Winsor blue (green shade) gatecrashed the party t some point too. With the pink being neither warm nor cool and the blue being cool, the colour key was unaffected. White gouache and cadmium yellow made cameo appearances at the very end, so that’s, what, eight colours in total?

I just worked from the back to the front in this one, using whichever of the colours in my squad felt appropriate at the time. The sky is interesting but doesn’t have enough white space in it for my liking, despite me using a paper towel to remove lots of paint. The background trees and fields are fine; I like the random colours that have been subtly charged in and the light values giving a sense of distance. Then there are the closer trees. These are the highlight for me. The colours are great and it was a good decision to introduce some coniferous shapes that aren’t there in real life.

And finally we have the foreground hill. It’s a bit overworked, as evidenced by the hill line in front of the trees being a bit too sharp. The footpath is also a bit too obvious for my liking: at one point it was much more subtle. I added lots of grassy marks, scraping them on with the corner of a palette knife and adding them with one of those Terry Harrison foliage brushes. I was a bit too free and easy with the grassy marks and ended up with the whole foreground was looking much darker than I’d intended. So to create some interesting light/dark contrasts, I stabbed in lots of white gouache and cadmium yellow to suggest cow parsley and buttercups. I tried to make the spots bigger at the bottom and smaller further back.

Finally, a drip of cadmium yellow in the sky me to some birds. I put in more birds than usual: still three in some detail but also another fourteen so far away that they could be painted with one strike each. I can’t remember if it was Chris Stephen but it was definitely someone on YouTube that gave me that idea. And that was me done.

I quite like this one and it’s going up for sale, with the price to be found here. The squad of colours picked for this one give it a look and feeling that’s different to reality, so it’s very much my own interpretation and not a photographic reproduction.