The Long Reach, Cambridge

For colours, I went first for Mayan blue genuine for its earthiness and it’s granulating properties.   Ot wanting the garish greens that would come from pairing a cool yellow with a cool blue, I picked out Indian yellow as my second colour.  And after looking through my swatch book, I decided that rose dore would make the best neutrals as the red to go with those two.  So this is in the key of orange cool.  Titanium white will make an appearance later.

I put down a rough initial drawing, helped by holding the paper up to block out my scene and marking the boundaries of birder shapes and the limits of internal shapes around the boundary.  This helped me get down what was an accurate enough initial drawing for a landscape.  Unfortunately I found I’d placed my horizon too high on the paper and rather than rubbing everything out and starting again, I tried to keep the same drawing but move it down the paper by eye.  It took me two attempts, I kept making mistakes, and still ended up with a horizon that was too high.  Next time I’m rubbing it all out and starting from scratch.  After getting the drawing down, I masked the skull, a couple of swans and the church.

And then I just worked from back to front.  I had a lot of fun with the sky, wanting to include all three primaries and eventually deciding that the best way to do this was to have an orangey sky along the horizon.  I tried to include the red in all my greens and probably ended up with something too neutral along the horizon.  There was  a quite bright looking field in the distance that I managed to keep yellow and orange and that creates a bit of interest at the focal point.

The river and the grassy area on the right were  always going to be the biggest challenges.  For the river I tried to replicate some of the sky colours and to replicate some of the trees but probably tinkered too much, trying hard to replicate what I could see in front of me rather than keeping things simple like I did with Hever Castle.  For the grass I started with a really adventurous underpainting with some random primaries, dabbed dry.  After that I added a couple of green layers on top and should have stopped there but was too interested in adding grassy hummocks.  These hummocks never worked Outland all ended up being converted to extra green layers, finally resulting in something that’s darker than it should really be.

Finally I removed the masking fluid and painted in the skull, swans and church.  The skull and blades are red/orange, a colour that I thought was needed to all the blues and greens on display.  After not being happy with the neutral colours on the church and some reds on rooftops, I’m inverted them to more man–made colours by putting some watery white over the top and dabbing it away.  And after waiting for another skull to go by, I added a couple of white afterimages of the previous stroke to the water.  And that was me done.

This one’s OK I guess, certainly better than yesterday’s effort, but doesn’t feel perfect.  I always seem to prefer my studio efforts to my onsite ones.  It might be that en plein air I’m concentrating on what’s in front of me rather than what makes for a good painting, maybe tinkering too much in the name of replication.  I’ll keep pondering that.  But, anyway, this one’s not quite good enough to go in the shop window.

This was a great painting location.  Just slightly off the beaten track so just enough people walk by.  Most of them had dogs too and I can’t resist getting talking to new dogs.  There were some crazy ones out there today that liked nothing better than to swim in the Cam, a river so dirty that I’d rather spend the day in soiled pants than wash them in it.