Life On Venus

I needed to do some painting this week.  I enjoy doing portraits with markers and figure drawing with inktense pencils but painting is my bread and butter and I don’t want to go too long without posting some paintings up on this blog.

So today was a painting day.  I wanted to paint outside too, so needed a plan that wouldn’t take too long (it’s cold out there) and didn’t involve having to clear too much snow off the decking furniture.  So a conventional painting was out of the question.  Instead I thought I’d try out an idea by Sri Valle that I’d seen on YouTube.  What she did was to start by making the paper very wet, squeezing out some random colours direct from the tube onto the paper and smearing it all out in a bandy sort of way with a palette knife.  She then dropped on what might have been liquid watercolour and tipped the paper around and added the odd watermark.  It looked good.

So I got the paper wet and squeezed on four colours: quinacridone magenta, cerulean blue, Indian yelllow and viridian.  So this was in the key of triadic left.  I wanted cerulean blue for granulation and quinacridone magenta because I wanted some purple in the sky.  Of my selection of yellows, the Indian seemed to fit in better with that blue and red.  And I smeared it all out with a palette knife.  Things didn’t seem to go as well as they did on the YouTube video, probably because it was so cold outside, but it wasn’t a complete disaster.  I also chucked on some salt and snow just for the hell of it.  There’s a circle in the sky in the middle, just above the horizon: this wasn’t deliberate – it was just a bubble that has somehow appeared in the paint.

After leaving the watercolours to dry, I added the foreground using acrylic inks and granulation medium.  I used all my usual ink colours and kept adding more ink until I reached something I was happy with.  I got some decent horizon hills quite quickly, so most of this reworking was  below that hill line.  Like the watercolours, the inks weren’t at their best in such low temperatures but you live and learn.  At times, I would do some scraping of the inks using the palette knife – I didn’t use any brushes in creating this painting.

I’ve decided this looks like Venusian landscape.  Hot, volcanic and with a lot of orange in the sky.  The name of the painting is the name of a song by The Tornados.  I’ve no idea who they are/were.  The painting also has this weird thing where it looks like a landscape from a distance but not closer up, where it seems to fall to pieces.

I’m not sure why I originally put this one up for sale.  It’s not very good.  One for the bin really.