Stonehenge III

I followed the usual back to front methodology: draw an outline, paint the sky, then stones, then grass, then the birds.  The birds are in sap green as this was the main colour in all my dark areas.

It should be obvious from looking at the painting that the painting of the stones was the step that I took the most time over.  I started today by dotting in lots of different colours, generally going for browns in the darker areas but also throwing in greens and yellow where I could see them in the source photo and crazy reds and blues in random areas.  Ranger then smooth these out using my finger, I smoothed them out with strokes from the white pastel in the light areas, just using the finger in the shadows.  This made the light areas a bit too light though.  I tried to add some strokes of grey green to darken them but felt as if I was starting to lose some of the impressionistic colours.  So I scraped off most of the white and grey green with a craft knife and things started looking better again.  My original dots had been smoothed out but the lightening effect of the white had gone.  A few extra strokes of sap green in the shadows, yellow deep on bits facing the sun and impressionistic colours where they might look good and I was done; all these additions were smoothed out with a finger.

And that was me pretty well done.  A bit of tinkering around the edges between stones and sky to make them clear and some marks in the grass with a craft knife and I was done.

I’m happy with this one, even if I slightly prefer the watercolour versions of Stonehenge.  It’s up for sale.