New Rising Sun

I’m back in action today after three days off. With the plan being to check out the National Portrait Gallery on Thursday, I really should be painting today and tomorrow. At one point in those three days, I skim read through the Michael Reardon book again and decided to have another go at a painting in his style. I picked a view that I see every day towards the end of my walk. The wall here is one that I’ve painted before but from the opposite direction.

I used the honey based water colours today because I have an orange in the set and wanted to put down a Michael Reardon style blue and orange underpainting. The underpainting is still visible in the sky and on the sunlit section of the road, where I’ve used the blue, the orange and a little of the violet. There was also some green in the underpainting, behind the trees.

Once the underpainting was dry, I worked from the back to the front, putting down thicker layers of paint. There are some houses in the background that I painted over faintly in blue. Then I moved on to the trees, created with stabby marks with the brush with lots of different colours. I brought in white gouache as a ringer for the tree with the white blossoms, but otherwise only used the six MGraham colours in this one.

Next was the wall and the grassy verges on both the left and the right. For the grassy verges on the left, I’ve used orange within the mix to create a sunny effect. For the wall I used all the colours in different places, deliberately creating dark colours to bring out the vertical features in the wall. I also added in some random horizontal marks to create a bricky texture. Strictly speaking, not horizontal on the paper but pointing towards the wall’s vanishing point. The grassy verges on the right have a lot of violet and brown in there as well as the green and might be a bit too dark.

Then I added the tree on the left and the telegraph pole and wires. I grounded the tree by extending its dark colour into the ground area around it. The wire lines are too thick in places thanks to my clumsiness but I think the painting needed the pole as a vertical feature and it would have looked silly without the wires.

Then there was the stage that I’d been looking forward to: the shadow. I created a watery mix of the blue and the purple, then painted this over the road, the grassy verge on the right and all but the top of the wall. And that’s when the painting sprang to life and when the orange light permeated everything.

As a final touch, I added some white flowers in the gardens in the left, then some white highlights on the telegraph pole and the top of the wall. And finally some birds to cover up some rogue marks in the sky and to attempt to disguise the thickest telegraph wire by suggesting it might be bouncing up and down. And that was me done.

I quite like the final painting, even if I wouldn’t call it a galactico. There are some great oranges and greys in the sky. The orange light permeates everything, including the shadows. And it’s a pleasing arrangement of shapes. But is the grass on the right too dark? And is there confusion over the centre of interest with the most in focus feature (the white blossomed tree) not lying at the one point perspective vanishing point? On balance, though, as I said, I like this one. It’s up for sale, with the price to be found here, and is near the front of the queue for when places become available on the wall of the restaurant at the Rose & Crown.

Oh, and one more thing. I do like the sunny colour that I’ve created in the grassy verges in the left by dropping in some orange. Having recently done similar things with soft pastel and oil pastel, I’m wondering whether 2025 will become The Year Of The Orange.