View From The Lightning Tree, Queendown Warren

The year end hiatus is over and I’m back out in the studio. For once, my first punting after a break isn’t an Inktense pencil figure: I’ve gone straight in with a local landscape in soft pastel. I need to build up both a war chest of paintings to display at the Rose & Crown and a set of paintings worthy of being submitted to Landscape Artist Of The Year.

Of course the fact that my collection of soft pastels has doubled in size recently may also have had something to do with my choice of medium. And with so many new reds, purples, oranges and yellows, I was always going to double down on the warm colours in this one.

I worked from the back to the front in this one, generally trying to make the colours warmer and more intense as I got closer to the foreground, so there are purples in the distant trees and oranges in the grass just behind the foreground tree. I tried to use similarly valued colours wherever possible to aid blending and applied as many light layers as possible using the edges of the pastels. For the foreground and middleground trees, though, I varied the values in an attempt to create three dimensional shapes.

I smoothed out the sky quite heavily with rubber colour shapers and the rest of the painting quite lightly with my fingertips. The tree took longer than everything else added together. I would add on scratchy coloured marks using browns, all my warm colour and the occasional grey or white. But then I’d succumb to temptation and blend them with my fingers. And this would lose all the individual colours, so I’d go back in with the scratchy colours again. Eventually I reached the stage where the colours were getting muddy, so I stopped. And after dotting in some foreground foliage, that was me done.

I’m pretty happy with this one. While the tree isn’t perfect, everything behind it came out exactly as I wanted it to. This is why I put in a Christmas request for warm coloured pastels. This wouldn’t be anything like as good with a blue sky, green fields and a brown tree.

This one is up for sale, price here, and is currently on display in the restaurant at the Rose & Crown in Hartlip.