I Am The Eye In The Sky

So, AA, when are we going to see what you’re doing with that painting of an eye from the other day?

And why is it exactly that you’re needing to practice snow scenes?

Listen, son-in-law, when you came round to help me move that old fridge outside and I said you could take away anything you might use in your art hobby, I still don’t understand why you took what you did.

And hey, AA, it’s been a while since we saw you really push some boundaries.

Listen guys, your questions are all about to be answered.

I went round the in laws the other day to help them move an old fridge outside the house.  The father-in-law told me that I could take away anything I wanted, thinking that one of the drawers could be useful for storing gear.  Instead, I took away a couple of glass shelves with the idea of painting on them.  Over the next couple of days while I was waiting for some new, white watercolour ground to arrive, I came up with two interesting extra ideas.  One was to have a painting of an eye stuck on the other side of the glass looking through a gap in the painting.  The other was to make it a cold, snowy scene, fitting with the whole fridge thing.

So, first I painted the eye, as described earlier.

Next, surface preparation.  I cleaned the glass, then roughed up the front of it with some sandpaper, dusted it off, then applied a first coat of watercolour ground (Daniel Smith titanium white watercolour ground).  In the sanding and the grounding, I was careful to leave a gap for the eye to peek through.  The gap needed to be the right size, to let the best bits of the eye remain visible and to look like the sort of shape that you make when wiping away a hole to look through the condensation on a window.  Once dry (a 24 hour wait) I added a second coat.  After waiting another day, I taped the eye to the back of the shelf using really thick gaffer tape.

And then I was ready to go.  After yesterday’s experiments, I wanted to use both salt and spattered masking fluid for falling snow.  And I’d decided to use a palette of French ultramarine, burnt sienna, quinacridone magenta and transparent yellow.  With both a warm and a cool red in there, it’s been painted in a mixture of cool purple and triadic right keys.

So, masking fluid spattering first, then the sky and trees.  Wait until the paint starts to lose its shine, then straight in with the salt.  Then foreground, wait for just the right moment and, bang, salt again.  Finally I added some “superforeground” (a term I just invented) in the form of a happy tree trunk and some grasses.  I’ve been watching too much Bob Ross.  The grasses were added first, using paint squeezed straight out of the tube onto the palette with no water and a Terry Harrison “Merlin” brush.  The tree was painted using the same brush and only a very tiny addition of water to the four paints from the tube, and with very little mixing.  I also added a bit of snow on the tree trunks in titanium white, with some of some of the blue on top.  And after letting it all dry, I rubbed off the salt and masking fluid.

So what went well and what went badly?  As I experienced before, as a wild card at Landscape Artist Of The Year, in a post that I can’t publish until the episode airs, it’s hard to get dark values when painting on watercolour ground.  This worked to my advantage, with the sky and foreground coming out at sensible values, not too dark.  The superforeground has also come out at a sensible value, thanks to me using paint almost direct from the tube – something that I need to remember to do in future.  Masking fluid turns out to be quite difficult to remove when working with watercolour ground on glass – you can see a bit above the eye where I accidentally rubbed off the paint and ground.  I was lucky that this happened at a spot where there was white paper behind the glass.  If and when I paint on a fridge shelf again, I won’t be using masking fluid.  And then there were the lucky accidents.  The way the colour of the snow near the eye looks like flesh tones.  The white squares on the fridge shelf, which you can see on the top half of the eye, looking like falling snow.  The brush strokes in the watercolour ground still showing up and making the painting look windy.  And the greens and reds showing up in the tree trunks.  The worst bit about the painting is the snow on the tree trunks – the painting would have been better off without it.

Overall, though, a big success.  The whole batshit mentality of it all and the amazing colours in the sky, background trees, snow, grasses and superforeground tree trunks.  It’s up for sale.

Finally, here’s another picture of the painting, looking more like a fridge shelf: