Julijske Alpe, Slovenia

Back to watercolours today. I’ve played all the Grateful Dead in the box of CDs that currently sits in my studio, so I won’t be jamming with the coloured pencils for a while. England are playing Slovenia at the Euros today, so I thought I’d check out whether Slovenia had any good mountain landscapes. And it does. I found loads of photos of the Julian Alps or Julijske Alpe. And I could see so many oranges and greens in the mountains that I had to use the tundra supergranulators on this one.

As well as the five supergranulators I used cadmium yellow, the colour gets thrown in with the tundra colours more often than any other colour. I wanted to use this to get a sunny yellow band in the sky and to subtly drop into the mountainsides in places to give the impression of sunlight on the slopes. I also used titanium white and white gouache at the end.

If there was ever a painting that was more obviously painted one shape at a time from the top to the bottom, I’ve get to see it. There’s not much more to say about the main process today. There was quite a bit of fiddling at the end, though, in an attempt to get the different planes of mountains distinct from each other. I used the white gouache to add snow to the top of the three biggest mountains on the right to separate them, then put on and dabbed off titanium white just below the snow to transition from snow to rock and dropped a tiny amount of tundra blue and pink into the snow to tint it. I wet and dabbed out some paint in the middle to create a bit of fog in the hollow. And I put on lots of pigment in the foreground to darken it and distinguish it from the mountains behind it. And that was me done. I didn’t add any birds because I didn’t want the eye distracted from the yellow band in the sky.

Because, my friends, it’s that yellow band in the sky that’s the star of this one. And that’s saying something because the colours in the sky, the mountains and the foreground are amazing. This one’s a big success and is up for sale. I don’t know whether I have a cold but I can’t smell imposter syndrome anywhere today.

Right, I’m ready for the football now. Bring on Slovenia!