The Rose & Crown, Hartlip

First the news.  I will be heading along to filming of Landscape Artist Of The Year in a couple of days as a wildcard entry.  That’s why I’ve been getting all this outdoor practice in lately rather than doing my usual thing and starting from a photo.  I need to keep the location a secret and I may well end up signing documents that mean I can’t show off my painting(s) or talk about how I got on.  So don’t expect a full report.

So I’m out and about around the village again today and thought I’d paint my local, the Rose & Crown in Hartlip.  A cracking pub.

It’s been painted in the key of orange cool, so there’s Indian yellow and Prussian blue there but I fancied experimenting a bit, so I’m using burnt sienna Rather than rose dore as the warm red.  It gave a cracking orange in the sky but I found it a struggle to get a good neutral from these three colours – all the greys just looked green.  At the end, after removing masking fluid from the windows, I glazed the pub and foreground with a neutral colour to tone down the whites that were showing.  And when I got home and has access to all my colours, I used cadmium red, cerulean blue and cadmium yellow (all opaques) straight from the tube to add some colourful flowers to the baskets – the painting needed something like that to contrast with what was looking a bit gloomy in places.

From a distance, the pub is the right sort of colour, and the sky looks good apart from where some burnt sienna has run into it around the chimneys.  There’s a good sunny feeling to it too, thanks to the Indian yellow in the palette and the big shadow that I’ve added.  The greenery at the back is a maybe bit too green – the burnt sienna doesn’t tame it down as much as I’d like.

Overall though I’m not entirely happy with this one.  If I come up with something like this a LAOTY, I’ll feel like I’ve blown an opportunity.  There’s something about it that makes the pub look like quite a wobbly structure and there’s that feeling that everything looks a bit too “drawn and coloured in.”  Although that may just be my style and something at need to get used to.

Still, it has a certain something about it, and it’s been sold to a couple running a local business.  It may even end up on the wall for all their customers to see, in which case I’ll be well chuffed.