I See The Gods In Battle Rage On High

I don’t know why but when I have something to do later in the day it affects my painting.  I need to take my youngest to football training for 5pm and was out in the garden by 10am but I still felt rushed.  I was also suffering a bit from not having source material in front of me as the iPad was indoors charging.  So this wasn’t a great bit of painting today.  Sorry.

I dug around and found a photo from the Arches National Park that I could at least use as a starting point, doing all the pencil work indoors in front of the iPad.  After all, I should be able to turn any outline of sandstone formations into a decent painting by now.

I went for the experimental 24-pan palette and chose as my main three colours today Payne’s grey, Winsor red, Winsor orange and Winsor yellow.  With Payne’s grey playing the role of cool blue, this is in the key of orange cool.  There are also appearances for sepia, cadmium red, light red, sap green and olive green.

So, after sketching the outline, I protected the edges of the sky with masking fluid and spattered over masking fluid spots.  Then I started painting.  I wet the while sky area first, dropped in some red and yellow bits and dropped Payne’s grey around the them to fill up the sky areas.  I added more of those three colours in a thicker consistency in places.  And then things started going wrong.  A couple of big blooms had appeared – maybe I’d accidentally dried some water onto the sky.  I decided that the solution to the problem was to fill the sky with blooms, so I added lots more drops, then sprinkled on some salt.  The sky ended up going a bit crazy.

After removing the masking fluid, on to the foreground.  With such a crazy sky, I needed to be a bit more boring with the rocks.  I started with a variegated mix of Winsor yellow, Winsor red and Winsor orange.  This looked good.  I added some wet into wet rock cracks in sepia and cadmium red – remember these are opaque colours, so won’t spread out of control like transparent do when applied wet into wet.  I also used a  bit of sepia in some shadows on  the right.  This wasn’t entirely satisfactory for two reasons.  First the wet into wet cracks didn’t diffuse at all – maybe it was too hot a day and paint was drying too quickly.  And second, the rocks all looked a bit flat and boring.  I know I didn’t want the rocks to compete wit( the sky but there’s not competing and there’s not showing up at all!

So time for tinkering.  I added a second layer of the red, yellow and orange looking to exaggerate the best bits of colour and add in a few more shadows next to cracks.  I also brought in light red to help with the shadows – this is a warm red that used to be in my first choice palette but that lost its place a long time ago (being too opaque for my style) but that still sits in a tube in my tupperware takeaway tub of tubes.  With this second coat, I was careful to soften and fade away any edges.

And finally the finishing touches.  First I added some grassy bits at the front in sap green and olive green, although I should probably have mixed up a green from Payne’s grey and Winsor yellow. But how else am I ever going to use up those green pans?  It’s the second finishing touch I’m most proud of though.  It’s an idea I’ve never seen anywhere else and that came to me on the spur of the moment.  I painted my left index finger first with Winsor red and later with cadmium: red and dabbed it gently onto the oranges and yellows in the rocks.  Where I was gentlest, the texture of the paper came through in the dabs, adding texture to the rocks.  Where I was too firm, I smoothed out the resulting fingerprints with my finger.

Overall, I don’t rate this as a success and won’t be putting it in the shop window.  I might have been able to get away with that sky if I’d make the rocks look like rocks.  I suspect it was a mistake to not include a blue (or maybe even green?) in there: red, yellow and orange are only ever going to make orange.  Still, the finger painting seemed to work out well.