Two paintings in one day! It's as if the hardest bit about painting is the…
Steps Up From The Street, Hartlip
The World Cup is over and there’s only four days to go to Christmas. It’s hard not to switch to wind down mode and watch Westerns all day but I do need to get back to painting with some regularity. Today I went for the oil pastels and picked a scene that I walk past most days. It’s a set of steps from The Street, Hartlip up to somebody’s back garden. People must walk past them all the time without noticing them but they make a great painting subject.
I put down a starting drawing in pencil. I did use a grid and worked upside down but the grid was only three squares by four, so nowhere near as fine as what I’ve been using for portraits. I then went over some of the more important lines with the black oil pastel. I didn’t erase any pencil outlines or grid lines – there’s no point if they’re all going to be covered up.
After that, I just worked from the back of the painting to the front. For most of the layers I started by putting down lots of spots in different colours. For the sky, this was just white and my lightest blues but for the wooden fence, tree trunks and concrete, I threw in just about everything. Once I had enough spots down, I smoothed them out with my finger, sculpting the paint as I went, with finger strokes in the most appropriate feeling directions. For the sky, some of this smoothing was done with a white pastel to get things even lighter.
The gate and the foreground greenery were the exception, not being smoothed. The gate was drawn in with raw umber and a bit of white for highlights. The greenery was stabbed in with lots of colours, most of them greens and yellows but also a bit of red deep and delft blue, my favourite two colours. Some very thin branches were added in a dark green.
I also used the scalpel in this one, not just by scraping out twigs in the foreground greenery bu5 also to mark out wooden slats in the fences: I drew in some thick lines in raw umber, then tried to scrape them partly off to leave a hard edge down one side of the line.
As a final step, I added more red deep and delft blue wherever they were missing. These colours play a huge part in my oil pastel paintings and their influence needs to be felt everywhere for balance.
I see this one as a success and it’s up for sale. The colours in the tree trunks, concrete and wooden fences do it for me. It’s hard to go wrong painting garden walls with these oil pastels. Oh, and that thin branch sweeping across from left to right brings everything together.
<This is one of a number of local paintings that have been lent to the Rose & Crown in Hartlip to display on their walls. It remains up for sale whether via me or via the R&C. There’s no price difference.>
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