The Call

I thought I’d  have a go at a random landscape or two.  The first one was so bad I’m not going to show it here.  By the time I got to the end I was experimenting with acrylic inks, granulation fluid and blowing through tubes.  I’d given up on the painting and just produced a mess.

Anyway, here’s my second of the day.  It’s in the key of triadic right.  I squeezed out some French ultramarine, transparent yellow, Winsor red and green apatite genuine, picked them up with a palette knife, spread them on the paper, sprayed them with water and just played around.  Eventually I worked out this would end up as a series of hills, so painted in some top edges using those same four colours.

I forgot two things when I was doing this painting.  First, Winsor red is really strong and a little goes a long way.  Second, the same applies to green apatite genuine.  With the green, I just ended up with a lot more green in the foreground than I’d have liked.  The red was more of a problem.  I tried to wet and dab out as much of it as possible but this was difficult as it’s a stainer, so In the end I glazed yellow over the top to turn it into orange rather than red.

I did a lot of fiddling too, including changing a white shape in the sky into a moon.

The end result has some interesting colours in it but there are too many bad points about this one for it to go in the shop window:

– not enough variety in values

– the reds still being too strong

– the horizontal green cloud on the left being at odds with all the diagonal slashes in the sky

– some strange marks showing through on the right in the lightest bit of the sky

The name for this one comes from an Algernon Blackwood short story.