4 January 2014 I like the colour of the hill in the background. I was…
Tree In Christ’s Fellows’ Garden
It’s been 13 days since my last painting. I’ve just not been in the mood. But today I’m back. I thought I’d go for the oil pastels as a gentle way back in: it’s harder to go wrong with the pastels. That was a bad mistake though: it’s hot outside and I was painting at midday. So many of my pastels were starting to melt, which made them difficult to use. At times I felt I was painting in oils. With my fingers. So the oil pastels might be given a break for the rest of the summer. I’ve put them in the beer fridge in the garage for now, hoping that they’ll solidify a bit in the meantime.
The subject today is a huge old tree in the Fellows’ Garden at Christ’s College, Cambridge. I was in Cambridge yesterday for a dropoff and took the chance of nipping into my college to take some photos and checking out the latest state of the building works that are going on.
As usual, I put down a pencil outline first, then the pastels, starting with the sky. I did something different today though. For the tree, rather than starting with my favourite red and blue, I started with some fairly neutral opaque colours (mummy, grey green and light English red) and burnt sienna. Only later on did I start adding blues, reds, greens, yellows and white to liven it up.
For the greenery, I dabbed in all my greens and yellows and a couple of blues, trying to keep the yellows near the top for a bit of sun. I dabbed all my dabs with my fingers, sometimes applying sweeping dabs to add a bit of energy. And I scraped out a few lines with a scalpel.
And that was about it. My hands ended up filthy from dabbing all those melted pastels. The painting itself isn’t perfect – there are sky shapes that don’t match their closest other sky shapes. On the other hand, I like the colours in the tree, especially near the top where a happy accident has resulted in lighter values and an impression of sunlight. The greenery is also OK and I like how the perspective in my initial sketch worked how I wanted it to, making the viewer stare up into the top of the tree.
This is good enough to go in the shop window.
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