Oil pastel paintings are (for me, for now) faster than watercolours, so are the ideal…
Malayavanta Hill, Near Hampi
I’m still on the watercolours and, yet again, I’ve gone for some precariously balanced rocks. These seem to be my thing in 2021. They’re great, though, for practicing the use of light and shadow to create three dimensional forms and for being brave with the use of impressionistic colours. This is a collection of rocks on Malayavana Hill, near Hampi in India.
For colours, the first two I chose were Indian yellow and rose dore because I wanted some orange in the sky. I picked cerulean as my blue not for its granulating properties but just because it mixed to the sort of grey and green (with my red and yellow respectively) that I was looking for. So this is in the key of orange cool. I also wanted to use some burnt sienna and burnt umber (two colours that have been underused this year) to get a bit of earthiness into the rocks.
After putting down some masking fluid and spattering some of it on the rocks, I painted in the sky using all three primaries and including some diagonal stripes for energy. Then I painted in the background triangle on the right, using my earth colours as well as the primaries. I kept this bit of the painting simple and tried to use light values, not entirely successfully
Then it was on to the rocks and the foreground. The idea was that the sitting figure would be in the same colour as the rocks, and ideally ambiguous (is it a figure or is it rocks?). So I painted in everything using all five colours but mainly the red, the yellow and the burnt sienna, with the blue and burnt umber tending to appear in the shadows. I variegated things a bit, tried to keep them interesting. But when I was done, I realised the mistake I’d made. Orange sky and orange rocks? Really? So I glazed over the figure, the rocks and the foreground with a thin, watery glaze that was mainly blue but with a bit of burnt sienna. This resulted in a better contrast against the sky. I also dropped in all three primaries in interesting places and burnt umber and cerulean blue in the shadowy bits. And I threw on some salt but it wasn’t behaving today.
So I ended up with this painting. I like the sky and the colours in the rocks and foreground are amazing but the rocks themselves look a bit flat and two dimensional. Still, I’ll put this one up for sale. I’ve come a long way in three years – there was a time when I’d have been celebrating this one like a World Cup win.
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