Valdeinfierno

I got the idea for this one from a photo I saw on Facebook of three people hiking through Valdeinfierno.  A bit of googling reveals it to be somewhere in Los Alcornocales National Park in Spain and, looking at all the photos, looks like a great source of painting inspiration.

Colours today were lemon yellow, light red and Prussian blue in the top left (trying to go for cooler colours) and cadmium yellow, quinacridone magenta, light red, burnt umber and French ultramarine in the foreground (warmer colours).  There’s also some raw sienna in places.  I’ve used gesso and salt for special effects.

As usual, there are successes and failures in the painting.  The top left looks like a normal watercolour painting and shows that I can apply a light touch if I try hard.  The colours on the big tree came out well.  I came up with four different colours for the trunk and applied them left to right before blending them together.  And the gesso worked really well – I managed to get a good texture when I applied it today.

What didn’t work well?  Well, the shadows for a start.  Far right guy and middle guy have their shadows pointing in different directions.  And the tree shadow is in the wrong place and screams BLUE too loudly.  In fact it screams BLUE so loudly that the shadow doesn’t look like shadow and instead looks like a random high concentration of one foreground colour.  I’ve probably spent too long on the foreground, making it muddy in places.  And the foreground is just a wee bit too heavy compared to the top left background.  I wanted a bit of contrast between them but not this much.

I framed this one but only after taking scissors to it, trimming away a lot of the junk on the right and converting it to portrait format.  It was donated to a local school as a raffle prize.