Hoodoo In The Chinle Formation

But it’s not an oil pastel today.  I fancied doing a watercolour but will be waiting until the studio’s built before I go back to serious painting with my first choice palette.  Until then, my watercolours will all be using the Schmincke supergranulators, effectively a cheat code for getting a set of colours that harmonise together without the need for much thought.

The subject matter today is a hoodoo in the Chinle Formation, near Moab, Utah.  I just love to paint piles of rocks, especially with the desert supergranulators.  The sky has desert grey in it along with three of the tundra colours (blue, pink and violet) everywhere else I’m only using the five desert colours (yellow, oranges brown, green and grey).

The sky westbound first.  No masking fluid involved today: instead I was really careful to only wet the sky areas.  Once I’d wet the sky once, I added more water to it more heavily, trusting the first water coat to keep the sky within the boundaries.  And then I dropped in the colours.  I started with the tundra blue and desert grey but thought the grey was a bit too neutral, which is why I introduced the Tundra pink and violet.  A bit of dabbing with a kitchen towel and a little sprinkle of salt helped bring out the granulation.  Good job.

The rest of the painting was all in desert colours and it took I guess two layers.  The first layer was an underpainting, just putting down colours fairly randomly but with one eye on the values. With yellow and orange generally in the lighter areas and green and grey in the darker.  For the second layer, I had two different strategies.  First, for the background I kept most of the underpainting and just added a few shadowy brushmarks on top.  But for the hoodoo, I took a lot more time and care and added a lot more paint.  I was frequently consulting my source photo to get shadows in the right places and trying to get the granulation working by (a) charging in little spots of colour in places, and (b) lifting paintbox with a dry brush.  At times, there were little bits in the hoodoo where too brown/yellow/whatever and I would go back and add more colour to bring them back into line.  The immediate foreground took a few more layers to get right because I needed it to closely match the colours in the hoodoo, giving me a “reverse L” compositional pattern.

I stopped there and I quite like what I ended up with.  The colours work well and there’s a decent contrast between the sky and the rocks.  I think it was a smart move to keep the background mountains really simple.  If there’s a downside to this, it’s that it’s so similar to Dragon Path from about a month ago.  It feels weird having painted two watercolours that are so similar in  colour and design.  But maybe that’s just me.  It’s still a success, though, and is up for sale.

Oh, and a couple of afterthoughts:

– The only blue or green pigment within any of those five desert colours is a pthalo turquoise that’s mixed with cadmium red to make a very grey looking desert green.  So why does the hoodoo have a greenish tinge to it?

– Schmincke supergranulators are on special offer this week at Jackson’s, so I’m taking the opportunity to restock my shire supergranulators with 15ml tubes.  Shire’s just about managing to hold onto its place within my top three sets.  But I’m also bringing in an extra tube.  I’m giving forest brown a go.  It’s more like a neutral green than a brown but I do need a calmer green to go with my shire colours.