Islay Beach Cottage

After reading the Robert Brindley book, I was itching to get started on a new soft pastel painting. I picked out a view of a cottage for rent on the whisky strewn island of Islay. With lots of sky colours and greens in my collection and barely any reds, purples or yellows (yet) I wanted to go for a hilly landscape and I needed a break from the pressure of painting local landscapes and feeling the pressure of needing to come up with something worth displaying at the Rose & Crown.

You might be able to spot that I incorporated into this one some compositional lessons from Robert’s book:

• the buildings are placed about one third of the way in from the edges
• even though the buildings are about halfway down the page, the horizon and the top of the beach roughly divide it into three roughly equal horizontal bands
• the biggest tonal differences are at the centre of interest, along the top of the buildings
• there’s no attempt at creating any detail away from the centre of interest
• I’ve deliberately included a path into the painting, and it’s zigzaggy
• there’s a strong diagonal line in the foreground, adding energy and pointing to the building on the right

And not only that but my style has changed thanks to Robert’s book:

• the colours have been applied gradually, in thin layers, with no use of the “points” of the pastels until the very end when I added detail to the buildings
• there’s minimal smoothing in this one: just a little bit behind the houses, smoothing the trees away from the roofs with a colour shaper
• I generally tried to put in dark shapes before lighter ones

A couple of other things are worth mentioning. I used some browns in the green to tone them down a bit. And I dragged a white pastel over the sky and into the hill to soften the edge and give a misty impression.

And the result is my best landscape for a very long time. There were some good ones in the Newington series but, being drawn with a grid and then painted in posterised style using the Notanizer app, they feel like borderline cheat jobs compared to this one, which was drawn freestyle and painted with feeling. This is a Doctor McCoy painting, not a green blooded Vulcan computer brained Spock job.

This one’s up for sale and the five palate rating I gave to Robert’s book has been well and truly justified. This painting is a huge step forward and I can’t wait to get my hands on some reds, purples and yellows at Christmas.