Inverie In Tundra Colours

So, outline down first, looser than normal (I’m slowly trying to tone down the draftmanship).  I made a compositional decision to make the hill at the back much taller than it is in reality: I wanted the hills to dominate the village.  And after reserving whites on the building, in the water, on some carefully chosen stones and spattered on the beach , I was ready to start.

I generally made my way from top to bottom.  The one exception was when I painted in the rooves and some ‘ the windows while the sky was drying.  Anyway, it was the sky first.  I wet it thoroughly, then dropped in loads of colours and sprayed it hoping to get a repeat of last time but to no avail.  Maybe the supergranulating watercolours just behave differently.  Still, I did experiment.  Today’s discovery was that I can make the sky granulate by laying a bit of kitchen paper gently over it with no pressing down.  At one point I did press down and ended up with a weird spot in the middle with paint out, so had to put down another layer of sky colours to get rid of it.

Next wet the hills.  The big challenge here was to keep them distinct from the sky and from each other and I thin’ I managed to do that.  I might have tried a bit too hard, though, which is why I ended up with some really hard edges along the tops of two of them.

The trees behind the buildings went OK today.  I found myself reaching for cadmium yellow (an opaque yellow but one which seems to go well with the tundra colours) to help the green of the trees to contrast against any greens in the hills behind them.

There’s not much to say about the buildings except that I was smart enough to add shadows on any left facing surfaces and under the fronts of the rooves.  And there’s even more cadmium yellow in the thin band of lawn in front of them, which I wanted to shine.

Then there’s sea wall, painted pretty well like last time by dotting in all the different colours plus titanium white, then dabbing slightly at it with kitchen paper.

And the black and the water were the highlight for me today.  I got the colours bang on; it helped that by this stage my brushes, water and palette were all pretty dirty.  And the salt that I added to the beach worked out well.  I added shadows to the sides of the most important rocks in tundra violet: there are some important rocks in the middle at the bottom leading the viewer up into the painting, although I guess I could have made the line curve more.

And that was me done.  I achieved my two of objectives of creating a scene that looked cold and where the buildings were dwarfed by the hills.  I didn’t get the sky I wanted though.  The high spots of this one are the sea wall, the beach and the water, the worst bit the middle right hill which is too hard edged and starting to turn to mud.  Still, the feelings in this one are spot on.  This one’s going up for sale.