If You’ve Never Failed, You’ve Not Experimented Enough

After that huge flop, I needed to have another go. I switched to my regular palette, making my main three colours Payne’s grey, Mayan blue genuine and burnt umber, a triplet that worked well once before, but decided to include some tiny bits of viridian, transparent yellow and quinacrinone magenta among my dry colours to add some unexpected colour in places. I also decided to go with an invented landscape.

I started by using the palette knife to put down lots of zigzagging lines of dry paint. I know now I should only have done this for the top line, the horizon. Still, I cried on, wetting the areas above the lines, letting paint run into it and tipping the paper around. Then I wet the areas under the paint and drew the paint down into them, keeping it watery to suggest reflections in the snow. And that’s about where I stopped.

This is definitely better than the last one, but I still rate it as a flop and won’t be putting it up for sale. The zigzag lines are too pronounced, too thick with paint and too indistinguishable from background to foreground. There are some great colours here though, as expected.