It's my birthday and the front page headline on stash news is that I’m going…
The Allotment
Out and about again today. I thought I’d have a go with the oil pastels. I’ve not painted plein air with them before and wanted to have a go, just to check whether they might be a viable alternative option on Landscape Artist Of The Year if I make it on as a wildcard. It’s a lot easier to carry the gear around than it is with watercolour after all. I wandered around the village looking for potential subjects and ended up in the wife’s allotment. The colours of the shed and the overgrown state of the place were what drew me in.
I didn’t have the iPad with me and found myself struggling to come up with a composition. If I don’t have the iPad, I at least need to carry around a cardboard mount as a sighting device. And if I’m going to do that, I need to experiment with mounts of different sizes.
As usual with these paintings, I put down a pencil outline and then filled out the painting from back to front. I didn’t really get to have fun until I got to the foreground, when I tried to make the place look as overgrown as possible. I started dotting in lots of different greens and yellows and then swept them upwards with one of those rubber ended tools. I added the odd weed in front of the barrels and water tank by dabbing in leaves, then adding thin stems by rolling the pastels on their edges.
I did quite a bit of scraping with the scalpel today, in particular for that cage thing in the foreground, where I even remembered to put some grey down first before putting the green on top. I may well have scraped off the grey with the green, though, rather than leaving it showing. And I also made the edges of the trees more interesting. The other special effect I used was to dab some fingerprints around the far tree to make it look like a windy day.
I added the birds at the end to balance things and to bring in a bit of life. I realised at this point that I’d not used my favourite red, so put in a red bird first. I then added one in my favourite blue and one in a green. These things always work better on threes.
It was a mistake to bring out the oil pastels today. For one thing, it was too hot (18 degrees, make a note) and the pastels were melting after a while. The tiny last bit of my pthalo green light pastel actually melted as I was applying it to the paper, so I had to manipulate it around like oil paint. This green, by the way, is the first non-white pastel that I’ve completely used up. The second reason why the oil pastels were a mistake is that you don’t realise how messy they are until you have to paint with them without access to soap and water. I’ve decided that if I do make it to Landscape Artist, I won’t be taking the oil pastels – I’ll be painting in watercolour.
Anyway, back to the painting itself. It’s spoilt by the barrels and the big water tank on the right. The water tank is boring and difficult to draw and should have been left out. I didn’t get enough dimensions into the barrels, being too focussed on getting the two dimensional image down. It also didn’t help that the barrels in my composition were too small for me to be able to put on much detail, especially with the pastels melting. Maybe I should have only included one or two of them. The birds are really good though.
This one sold quickly to a fellow villager.
Leave a Reply