Hear My Freedom

Yesterday was a cracking day for artists. There was that feeling of rain in the air, the sky was overcast and everything felt wet without actually being wet. It inspired this painting of a scene in Queendown Warren.

The idea was to keep loose, use a dirty palette, paint everything wet into wet and leave a vignette style white border around the outside. It was a rare landscape outing for the Shire colours and these five colours were supported, as usual, by green apatite genuine, forest brown, cerulean blue, burnt sienna and cadmium yellow.

I started by putting down a very rough pencil composition guide and then making out the foreground grasses, the tree branch in the top right and some fence posts. The plan was that lots of white would be left around the outside of the painting but this never happened.

I painted the sky using Shire grey, cerulean blue and burnt sienna. I knew when I saw this sky yesterday that I would be using those colours. It came out exactly how I wanted it to. I tried to leave some optimistic blue bits behind the branch in the top right but everything’s still pretty grey. Before doing anything more, I mixed up more of these colours in my wells to dirty the palette and contaminate all the rest of my colours. After that, I worked from the back to the front as usual, using all ten colours. I worked wet into wet and tried to make the trees paint themselves, with paint diffusing out into areas that I’d already wet. After painting each area, I would apply a thin coat of the same colours to all of the unpainted areas in a bid to create some harmony. The most distant trees ended up too tall and these and the trees on either side in the middleground ended up darker than I’d intended, ruining the wishy washy atmosphere that I’d set out to create, but I did try to lighten them all by wetting them and dabbing off paint.

Once everything was down, I stood back and decided to take some corrective actions. As well as lightening some of the trees, as already described, I made the closer bushes harder by dabbing on almost dry paint with a Merlin brush. I quite like how these ended up. I also added some grassy marks in the foreground and some birds in the sky. I think the birds are a bit too dark. And, after removing the masking fluid, that was me done.

This wasn’t a very satisfying painting. I failed two key objectives. It’s too heavy and not wishy washy and there’s no white border around it. The sky was a big success though. The white areas in the two corners are unusual. I won’t say whether they’re good or bad but they’re a talking point and they distract from the heavy colours. Being a local landscape, I’ve added this one to the queue for display at the Rose & Crown, which means it’s up for sale. The price can be found here.