Towards Leysdown-On-Sea

It was so cold out there today that I was always going to pint this one with the tundra supergranulators.  With these colours, it’s not generally possible to replicate the colours I see in front of me, so they also loosened me up something I knew I needed to do after yesterday’s effort.  The other lesson from yesterday was that I needed to do some value planning but I forgot again.  Still, at least I took  are if one of my two big plein air issues.

I started by putting down a pencil outline, trying to get the horizon about one third of the way up the paper and the row of white gabled houses roughly one third of the way in from the right.  I didn’t get either quite right but they’ll do.  I reserved some whites in the buildings, white foam in the sea and a post and a sign in the sea and then spattered over some spots in the foreground.

And after that I just kept adding whatever colours either appeared in front of my eyes or just felt right.  The sky, as usual, is made up of the blue, the violet and the pink.  It’s darker than I wanted it to be and I tried lifting colour out but with no luck.  Somehow it’s easier to get skies right in the studio.  Everywhere else, though, I used all five tundra colours.  I resisted the urge to make the sea heavy on the blue, the sand heavy in brown and the grass heavy on green.  For the sea in particular I could see lots of green on the day, especially near the horizon.  It took me ages to get the grass to something I was happy with but eventually I put on some blue and, bang, there were the grassy mounds in three dimensions. Amazing.

Once most of the painting was complete, I removed the masking fluid and painted in the post and the sign, using a bit of cadmium yellow but dropping in some tundra colours to calm it down.  I added more colour to the buildings in the distance, including the windows but trying to keep everything loose and out of focus.  And I added some foreground grasses with the Merlin brush.

The temperature had been getting gradually colder and it was at around this point that a few drips of rain came down, so I quickly packed up and came home.  I was out painting for about two hours today,  compared to, what, three and a half, maybe four hours at Rochester.  Maybe it was the looseness making me work faster, or maybe it was because there were far fewer people around.  I much prefer busier plein air settings.  If anything, it makes me work slower and that’s best for the painting.

Anyway, once I was home, I added some people and birds, made one side of the posts in the sea darker and tried to rescue one of the buildings in the distance by putting some white gouache on it.  It looks better after the rescue  but still not quite right.  And I added in more grasses, this time individual strands using a small pointy brush rather than multiple strands with the bushy Merlin brush.  And that was me done.

I think this is better than yesterday’s plein air effort.  It’s a painting that tries to convey the mood rather than one that tries to record the scene.  Highlights for me are the beach and the grass.  The colours in them both (especially that blue in the grass) and the way the two merge seamlessly together.  A big win.  I also like the row of houses with peaked gables.  The dark in the middle of the distant buildings is a bit jarring and the sea doesn’t look like a very sea colour but these feel pretty minor.  This one’s up for sale.