I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day

A soft pastel landscape feels well overdue, especially when soft pastels have been put forward as my medium of choice for LAOTY. So that’s what I’ve been up to today. As my subject I’ve picked a footpath through a field of Christmas trees somewhere a little to the West of the village of Hartlip. It’s a path I wander long on those rare days when I go for a six mile walk rather than my usual four.

I forget just how quick these paintings are. This must have taken me only two or three hours. I didn’t start by drawing an outline, instead using pastels on their sides to mark out the major shapes as a guide. Once those shapes were down, I worked from the back to the front, putting down whichever colours felt right and smoothing most of them out with polystyrene chips. I say most. The house was smoothed in detail, for want of a better term, with colour shapers. And I smoothed the insides of the trees with the chips, then moulded the chips into points and used these to drag out branches into the surrounding areas.

At one point, I added some foreground grasses and shoots by rolling the pointed edges of pastels. But then I realised this was putting the foreground into focus as well as the house. So I blended them away, leaving only the house in focus. I need to remember to leave my landscapes focused on only one depth like this. And, to make the foreground more interesting, I created texture rather than detail by sanding sown some pastels, sprinkling the dust over the foreground and pressing it in with a palette knife. And that was me done.

I’m feeling pretty happy with this one. I always like creating three dimensional trees by highlighting the sunlit side in yellow. My compositional plan of having a dark band through the middle , with a lighter sky and foreground, has worked. And I like the oranges and the dust specs in the foreground. This one’s going up for sale, with the price to be found here. It may well end up on the wall of the restaurant at the Rose & Crown at some point.