Lonely Avenue

The chess is still going on today but I was expecting four boring draws in the mens’ games, so thought I’d get back to painting with a loose landscape that didn’t need a source photo on display and that, like the chess, only demanded 50% of my brain’s attention. This would also mean that I don’t need to paint tomorrow and can finish a book I’m reading, make notes on it and review it here. So watch out for that tomorrow.

I picked a view of Queendown Warren that was all about the big shapes and not the detail. For colours, I decided to use my main four blues (French ultramarine, Mayan blue genuine, cerulean blue and Winsor blue green shade) along with potters’ pink for some granulation, viridian and raw sienna to create greens and burnt sienna because it mixes so well with blues. Cadmium yellow, cadmium red, sepia, titanium white and white gouache all came off the bench to play a part later on.

I started with the sky, then the foreground and background and finished with the middleground row of trees. The sky was OK but everything else was a disaster. The background was too dark. I lightened it by wetting it and lifting paint off and by layering on and dabbing off some titanium white. It didn’t look great but that’s not a problem as I ended up being overenthusiastic with the trees and covering it all up. The foreground is really muddy where I’ve gotten carried away and painted on too many layers. I do like, though, the way I created a grassy effect by running a Terry Harrison brush through the paint when it was almost dry. There are some spatters of cadmium yellow, cadmium red and white gouache there too. And then there are the trees, yet another overworked area. I used sepia to darken their undersides and to try to create a value contrast between the trees and the foreground. And I tried to use cadmium yellow to lighten the tops of the trees (like I do with soft pastels).

Look, I’m going to stop the description there, OK? This one was a disaster. Everything’s overworked and muddy and there are no midtones there, only the sky, the path ruts and a load of muddy darks. Needless to say, this one’s not going up for sale.