Monument Valley

Two weeks since the last one and I’m finally back on the soft pastel landscapes. I wanted to paint a natural landscape with no buildings, and one somewhere hot so that my preferred colours would be a sensible choice rather than a personal quirk. So I searched round for photos of Monument Valley and found something looking like this. I say like this because I took an executive decision to move all the background rocks a bit to the left for composition reasons. The view of the foreground rocks is unchanged, though, so this is a view that doesn’t exist in real life.

As usual, I worked from the back to the front, throwing in whatever colours took my fancy. Sometimes I smoothed out colours with colour shapers, sometimes with fingers. I put down a lot of layers of colour in the foreground rocks and ended up filling the tooth of the paper: the are places where I can’t add any more colour. I did a bit of tinkering at the end, the important bit being the hardening of a lot of edges in the foreground. And that was me done.

And what an interesting result I ended up with! This was supposed to be all about the warm colours but the foreground colours are highly unsaturated. If anything, this painting is all about depth and three dimensionality. The foreground stands out really well against the background and there’s some amazing 3D rendering on those rocks. Looks like the tooth of the paper filled up at just the perfect time, making me stop painting at the optimal moment. I also like all the red showing up in the foreground. And is there a greenish tinge to those foreground rocks? I’ve no idea how that got there.

Needless to say, this one’s up for sale, with the price to be found here. Soft pastels are going so well for me. I’m feeling good about my prospects of making it to Landscape Artist Of The Year.