Then Came The Mines, Then Came The Ore

Today I was feeling inspired by Liron Yankonsky. In a recent video, he created loads of interesting textures using granulating colours, so I thought I’d try something similar. I used the tundra supergranulators as these are supergranulating even by supergranulator standards. Cadmium red, cadmium yellow and white gouache all had roles to play too. As subject matter I picked an ideal photo of an old mine on Bodmin moor, which also allowed me to tick off one of the lines in Telegraph Road.

I worked from the back to the front. The sky was created from tundra blue and tundra pink. Tundra green was introduced as a third colour in the furthest hill. Then the middleground hill used all five tundra colours, with some dark tundra violet marks suggesting trees. That was the easy bit.

It was the mine building and the foreground that took most of the time. I never really found the right colours for the building, eventually going for a mix of tundra blue and tundra orange, with tundra violet and white gouache indicating doors and windows. I wanted to blend the building colours into the foreground, making it look as if the building was growing out of the ground but never managed to achieve this.

The foreground had a lot of layers of colour in it because I wanted it to be dark but kept each layer watery (and so light) to encourage granulation. As well as the tundra colours, there’s some cadmium red and cadmium yellow in there as Liron as suggesting that opaque colours can produce interesting effects when charged into granulating colours. Somehow while painting the foreground, I deviated from reality by putting the mine at the top of a hill rather than in a flat plain. Not only that but the mine is now slightly behind the hill, cutting out the bottom and not allowing it to merge with the ground beneath it. Eventually I decided that any further work on the foreground or the building would only make things worse so divided to call it a day.

Shall we be generous and call this one an interesting experiment? There are some great granulation effects in all three hills and I do like the impact that the two cadmium colours have had in the foreground. But the foreground and building are borderline muddy. The building has started to leak tendrils of paint into the sky. And there are compositional issues: the building doesn’t grow out of the land as intended and the foreground hill on the left has too straight an edge along its top. I’m not putting this one in the shop window but I will probably give this technique a go with a Queendown Warren scene with no buildings.