View From River Cottage

Back in action today with a soft pastel landscape. I understand that there’s a view of this gate from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Café in Axminster in Devonshire. I got the idea for this one from a review of the cafe on YouTube by the great Greeno. Cheers mate!

As with all these soft pastel landscapes, there’s no complicated process involved. I just put down a pencil outline and then work from the back to the front, starting with light pressure but getting firmer in later layers. At all stages, I just added whatever colour I felt the painting needed: there was no attempt to replicate the colours that I could see in front of me.

The painting is perfectly fine and up for sale here but there are a couple of bits that mean this one falls short of galactico status, both related to the gate itself. First there are the colours. There are a lot of layers on there as I never really worked out what colour I wanted the gate to be. A light colour (and yellow in particular) wouldn’t stand out enough from the grass behind the gate, so I ended up with lots of pinks and purples. Lots of white too. Maybe I should have darkened the grass behind the gate so that yellow would have worked. And the second thing I’m unhappy about is the perspective. The height of the gate and the width of the slats and the gaps between them are too similar at the near and far ends of the gate. In the source photo (and my original pencil drawing), everything is a lot taller at the near end and the gate looks positively trapezoidal. Adding so many layers of colour probably contributed to me losing sighting my pencil work. Oh well.