Telegraph Road Got So Deep And So Wide

Still quite hot today but after Tuesday’s painting got a lot of praise on LinkedIn, I wanted to keep going, so today I’ve been sweating it out over a soft pastel painting of a scene in Queendown Warren.

I put some tiny pencil marks round the edges of the paper to divide it up into 5×4 squares but didn’t add any grid lines. I just used the edges of pastels to mark out the major shapes. I don’t need any more help than that for natural landscapes with soft pastels. And then I worked from the back to the front, putting down thin layers of whatever colours were singing out to me. I smoothed them out with paper stumps, fingers, colour shapers and, possibly for the first time, kitchen paper. And, let me tell you, kitchen paper works really well.

Normally I stop adding colour when the tooth of the paper is full but today I was ready to stop when everything looked right. That’s a good sign. I can’t say for certain but I think this was because I was adding thinner layers than usual rather than to me getting to the right place in fewer layers than normal.

I had most trouble with the heather clumps. They didn’t harmonise with the rest of the grassy area. Eventually, though, I added more clumps, trying to point the viewer towards the vanishing point at the end of the path. And I added more browns and reds to the grass in the distance, suggesting more heather. I made the heather at the bottom taller, so that it disappeared off the bottom of the page. And I added lots of yellow dandelion spots in both the heather and the empty grass, connecting them by giving them something in common. And that all seemed to work. And all these corrections were only possible because I’d not filled up the tooth of the paper.

This one feels like a big success. My landscapes seem more popular than my portraits for whatever reason and this is one of my better landscapes. Anyone who doesn’t understand why I wanted warm colours (yellows, oranges, pinks, purples, reds) to do with my sky colours and greenery should look hard at this one. A green’s not a natural green without those warm colours mixed in. This one will be going back up for sale at some point but is temporarily off the market,