Stowes Hill

No excuses today. I’m back in the studio doing some proper painting after Thursday’s loosener. Rather than doing another local landscape, I went for a scene from Bodmin Moor that would allow me to go to town on some rocks. I believe that may be the Cheesewring on the right, a pile of rocks that keeps pulling me back. It was a close call over whether to use soft pastels or oil pastels; I went for oil pastels because I can’t use them in the summer (too melty), so they always get the casting vote in the winter.

I worked from the back to the front, as usual. I started by dabbing in whatever colours I could see in my source photo but soon switched to using whichever colours felt right. I blended the colours on the rocks with colour shapers, so that I could get hard edges, and those in the grasses with polystyrene chips, which left grassy marks on the shapes behind the grass. For the sky and the open area in the middle, I used fingers and polystyrene chips.

As I worked my way down, it became clear to me that the stars of the show would be the rocks on the right and the bright orange band of grass below them, so I deliberately toned down both the colour and the detail in the rest of the painting. And there was a rock half way down the right side of the painting, only half of it within the frame. I’m proud to say that I decided to remove that rock from the painting because the painting would be better without it.

All in all, I was on fire today. Great colour choices, great compositional decisions, great use of blending tools. This one is a winner, my best painting for a while, and is up for sale, with the price to be found here.

And finally, this is a complete accident but screw your eyes and the composition of this one has a lot in common with my previous effort.