Hovis Hill In The Snow

After two posterised watercolour portraits this week, I took a break today from Artist Of The Year promotions to do something different. I was aware that I’d not done anything crazy abstract or used charcoal or the Artgraf blocks so far this year and thought I’d cross one of those off the list. So I went for the Artgraf blocks and painted Gold Hill in Shaftesbury, Dorset, which to those of us of a certain age will always be associated with Hovis ads on the telly. Why attracted me to this scene was the wafer-like arrangement of whites: going from top to bottom we have coloured sky, a white hill. Coloured trees, white rooves, coloured houses and a white road. An amazing arrangement of shapes that was crying out to be painted.

I did start by putting down outlines using a grid: this was a scene that demanded accurate draftmanship to give a proper impression of the hill. Then I added loads of colour using the dry blocks and stopped for lunch.

After lunch I wet all the marks on the paper, with no idea how things would turn out, and got this:

I thought the sky was amazing. But the rest wasn’t really working. The trees, houses and wall on the right all needed to be darker to make all those whites shine. And the viridianesque green in the bushes on the left was not only unnatural looking, it also unbalanced the painting with nothing similar in hue anywhere else. So I tried darkening everything, mainly with browns, and added more green to the background trees and to the wall. Where I tried to use the green with reds to create a neutral colour. And here’s how that turned out:

OK, that solved most of my problems. And made the shadows on the road more interesting. But it presented me with lots of new ones. The houses are too brown. The background trees are too saturated, too green. And the wall is too brown in some places, too green in others. Oh, and maybe my bushes could still be darker in places. So I made the houses more colourful, replaced some of their brown edges with blacks, added blacks to the bushes and to the background trees, neutralised the green background trees with reds and neutralised the browns and greens in the wall with green and reds respectively. And here’s how that tinkering turned out:

This was looking really close to being complete. All I did after this was to add some snow in white gouache, making the handrail outside one of the houses clearer, making some of the snow on the wall and rail posts clearer, adding snow to windows, rooves, chimneys and bushes and adding grids to a couple of windows and sputtering over some falling snow. And that was me done.

And I think I’ve ended up with something half decent. It’s up for sale, with the price to be found here. It’s now well balanced with greens everywhere. The bushes look like bushes. But best of all is the shape of the background trees, effectively negatively painting the rooves and chimneys of five houses. And the way the sky negatively paints the hill and one of the houses. I think these bits of negative painting are what I was really after when I talked about a wafer of whites at the start.