They Can Always Fly Away From This Rain And This Cold

Got to keep practising in case I make it to Landscape Artist Of The Year so it’s another soft pastel landscape. This is a scene from my village of Hartlip of a couple of telegraph poles on opposite sides of the road. It’s a view people see every day but that, touch wood, nobody would ever think of painting. It’s a companion piece of sorts to And The Birds Up On The Wires And The Telegraph Poles not just because they’re named after successive lines in Telegraph Road but also because they’re part of the same view: the left hand pole in this painting is the main pole in the earlier one.

I put down a rough pencil outline first, then put dark colours over the telegraph poles and the main shapes coming off them. Then I worked on the sky. I managed to put down three layers of colour before the tooth of the paper started to feel full. After each layer I would smooth out all the colours with the edge of a white pastel, or maybe a very light blue one. I added some subtle finger swirls afterwards.

Once I was happy with the sky, I moved on to the poles. I’d managed to keep the marks for most of the poles visible, although I’d lost a lot of the attachments. No problem. I started with a dark colour in the darkest places before moving on to white in the highlights and then whatever greens/yellows/browns I could see in my source photo or that I thought looked good. All the attachments to the pole were pretty much added by eye. When I was happy with the colours, I smoothed the colours on the poles themselves with colour shapers, looking to suggest a bit of cylindricality.

Then came the greenery. I blocked out the shapes first with the edge of a green pastel, then just went to town with the colours. Yellows and pale greens along the edges of the shapes, browns and dark greens in the middle and a few pinks, blues, reds and oranges thrown in just for fun.

The final stage was to add in the wires and the birds. For the wires, I used a charcoal pencil (and a ruler in places) and was careful to match the circuitry that I could see in the source photo. I added the birds in charcoal pencil and put a little soft pastel on top. Given the line in Telegraph Road that I was already planning on attaching to this one, I made sure to include a bird flying away from the wires. I used a couple of source photos for the birds and when I throw in my main source photo and the sky photo that I’d also used, that makes four source photos, a personal record for a painting that’s a single image.

Painting-wise, April’s not been a great month for me so far but this feels like a return to form and it’s being put up for sale (price here) and added to the queue to be displayed at the Rose & Crown. The foliage at the bottom feels like the highlight to me and, I can’t lie, I can’t see anything that I don’t like. The sky is nowhere near as colourful as I was intending but that’s probably a good thing. And the pole on the right only looks bent because of the way the paper was buckling as I took the photo: it’s straight in real life.