I'm still painting Hartlip scenes. Next up is Stonehall. There's something I like about houses…
Number Eighteen
I was approached a week or two ago by a guy on the village who said he’d be interested in buying a painting of his house if I ever did one. I finally found the time to do it this weekend and here’s what I came up with. I had a sneaky photographic reconnaissance trip during the week and quickly decided that the most interesting view would be one like this with the two trees framing the house. I had to get down low to be able to see a gap between the tree and the top of the house, so this is an upward looking photo and the perspective vanishing points (of which there’s only really one, on the left) are above the horizon.
The main three colours today were Mayan blue genuine, quinacridone magenta and Indian yellow. Cadmium yellow (also warm, like the Indian) was used in all the leaves on the trees and for some tiny flower heads on either side of the front door. And cadmium red also contributes some flower heads. So this is in the key of triadic left. The idea was to make things warm and sunny by having cool blues and reds in the shadows and a warm yellow for a bit of sunlight.
As usual, I put down a pencil drawing and reserved some whites with masking fluid. I also put on a little spatter of masking fluid to make things look a little windy and to reinforce the impression of the house being high up (it does have good views out the back). After that, I got to work on filling shapes.
For the roof and wall shapes, I started with mixes of all three primary colours that I thought approximated the real life colours, and then charged in drier versions of the individual primaries while it was still wet, generally using the yellow in the sunniest bits and the blue on the darkest. Afterwards, I glazed over both shapes with the same mixture, maybe with a tiny bit of charging. For the brickwork, I wasn’t entirely happy, so laid over some kitchen paper to try to dry it. I was shocked to take the paper away and see that it had left the impression of brickwork. That was a lucky break.
The trunk of the tree was where I had the most fun, not mixing anything on the palette but just putting on all three primary colours, allowing them to mix and occasionally charging in more of the three primaries. At the bottom of the tree, I didn’t have any sort of line separating the tree from the grass – I just dragged the tree colours out into the grass and everything just blended together.
Next came the leaves of the trees. Here I just squeezed out some dry cadmium yellow and Mayan blue genuine and stabbed them onto the paper with the Merlin brush. There are some great greens in there but these just emerged naturally as the blues and yellows mixed on the paper and as the blobs of blue and yellow on my palette became more contaminated. I also stabbed in a little quinacridone magenta to keep the greens under control and brushed in the odd branch.
Then it was time to add the shadows. I mixed the Mayan blue and the quinacridone magenta and watered it down to get my shadow colour. When I added the shadows to the house, everything burst into life. It was as if the sun had come out. Watercolours can be amazing. My final step was to stab in some cadmium red and cadmium yellow flowers in the pots on either side of the front door.
I’m more than happy with this. Everything stands out against the granulating sky and the cadmium yellow helps the trees stand out against the houses. The colours in the tree trunk work brilliantly. Burnt umber must be really worried by now about its place in my palette. The worst thing about this one is the roof of that building on the far right. It’s too dark, drawing too much attention. When I frame this one and things get slightly cropped, I’ll be losing as much of that roof as possible.
The owners loved it and bought it.
Leave a Reply