May Day Eve

Wednesday is Landscape Artist Of The Year day and I believe tonight’s episode is at Stonehenge. So at some point tomorrow, I expect the Artist Of The Year Facebook account to be asking artists to post up paintings of Stonehenge. I thought I’d get in there early and have something ready for when that post goes up. I’ve painted Stonehenge in soft pastels, the medium I plan on using in my LAOTY campaign this year.

So I dug around, found a decent source photo and put a pencil outline down on paper. And then I added all the colour, generally working from the back to the front, and using whatever colours I felt like using, but with one eye on the values on the lit up stones. The sky was smoothed out first with a white pastel and then with fingers. For the stones, I used a combination of fingers and colour shapers. Right at the very end, I decided to heighten the drama by resmoothing the sky: I went over everything with the white pastel but then smoothed it out with my fingers with strokes editing outwards. It now looks like the light in the sky is coming from bonfires rather than from the setting sun. And that was me done.

It’s a pretty simplistic painting but it works. Simple does that sometimes. I like the impression of bonfires. I like how the rocks and foreground share so many colours with the sky. And I like the illusion of depth form the changing temperatures of the foreground colours. I’m naming this one after an Algernon Blackwood short story and putting it up for sale, with the price to be found here.

Oh, and something else. This took just one hour and forty five minutes. I know because it was exactly the same length of the first set of The (Allman) Brothers reunion concert in 2020 which helped keep me loose throughout the process. Soft pastel pintings are ridiculously fast and won’t be remotely stressful if I make it to LAOTY as either. wildcard or a podster.