My Sunset’s On Fire

See, this is what happens when I go in without a real plan.  After all that experimenting with triads, I wanted to have a go at a painting using only three primaries.  No earths, no opaques, no white or Payne’s grey.  Just three colours.  And I thought I’d give triadic left a go after it performed so well yesterday.  So that’s Prussian blue, Indian yellow and quinacridone magenta.

I started with the idea of dropping colours on randomly and seeing what happened but ended up with a sunset, so went for painting the tried and tested mountain pass with closeup hills on the left and right and distant hills in the middle.  I’ve done this so many times before.

I contrasted the hills a bit, making the one on the left darker and the one on the right lighter.  The one on the right also has more visible, angular brushstrokes in it, the one on the left being more “blended”.  To make the light look right, I glazed over with Prussian blue at the end to put the left hill and most of the path in shadow.

There were some accidents along the horizon that looked like houses, so I turned them into houses, then added some faint houses behind them as the houses were otherwise looking too sparse and too evenly spaced.  And as a finishing touch I added three birds (an odd number) in one of the hotspots, about one third down and one third in from the right.

And I’m shocked at how this planless piece of work turned out.  It looks amazing to me.  So fiery.  I need to (a) try similar exercises with other primary triad combinations and (b) try painting other subjects with this triad.  I just worry that this Summer’s work may have peaked too early.

This one has been gifted to one of my nieces.