Refining the process

Well, hello everyone! I see you have all been very productive over the last few weeks. I haven't had the time to sit down and peruse all your work but I have watched as some of your lovely work has appeared on the feeds to Google Reader on my phone :) I hope to start catching up with you all .... soon !

I have been playing a little over the last month or so with various media:  watercolours (of course), but also Tombow brush pens, graphite (plain and watersoluble) and watercolour pencil. I tend to drift in and out of these easy to use media and although they are fun they do tend to distract me from what I really want to be doing, which is getting out there to sketch :) Hopefully the weather will start to get warmer here in the UK and I can get out there again with my watercolours and oils !

I'm also starting to play a little with oils again and have been using things like wooden sticks and paper towels to create marks and blends. This one was the result of that process. I started by squeezing a generous blob of Burnt Umber onto the palette to use as a mid-tone for a painting. I had nothing in mind at the time, but as I started to brush the paint across the canvas I decided that I would try to turn it into a painting. I suppose you could argue that it's only an underpainting but I like it just as it is, a finished monochrome painting or perhaps an exercise in learning more about values. Hope you like it.

Happy painting!

Out of the woods, Oil on canvas, 30cm/12" x 25cm/10"

Ruin with a view

Following on from the recent sketches I did, and also from the reference photographs I took, whilst on holiday in Dorset, here is another BIG oil painting of a very beautiful place. Corfe Castle was originally built during the reign of William 1, shortly after the Norman Conquest, but most of what can be seen today is from the reigns of later kings. Rather than go the way of many castles and just fall into disrepair, it was in fact victim of a previous period of unrest in british history and so is perhaps an apposite choice given the recent happenings here in the UK.

The castle was actually demolished by Cromwell's engineers, but not completely thankfully, in 1646  after it was taken from the Royalists following a long siege by the Parliamentarians. I'm a bit of a Cromwell fan, mainly out of pride for his local roots here in Huntingdon, but this bit of history came as a bit of a shock to me. Thank goodness his men did not raze it to the ground.

The view here is from what I think is called the inner bailey (a good name for this post perhaps lol). It shows the inner motte/mound and the ruins of the keep, some of the remaining inner battlements and an inner gatehouse. All of this sits atop a much bigger motte/mound, surrounded by a massive outer bailey and the main battlements, and lies in a natural dip in the Purbeck Hills. The picturesque village of Corfe Castle, also famous for its more peaceful connections with Enid Blyton, lies in and around the dip and along the roads which climb the hill to the South of the castle. The view from the top, within the keep itself, is absolutely beautiful, looking down on the village in one direction and across the Purbeck hills to Poole Harbour in another. They certainly knew a lot about the importance of 'location, location, location' a thousand years ago!

Happy painting and drawing to you all.

Corfe Castle, oil on canvas, 12" x 16"

And for those who would like to see a little more of the area, albeit in a virtual way, here is the view as you approach the castle from the South, courtesy of Ye Olde Google Maps.



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The Big Picture - tweaked

Following some expert advice from Roger and Keith (thank you both very much guys), I've done a few tweaks to this one. The main tweak is to the group of figures. The heights of the two girls and the relative proportions of them and between them was all wrong (stop rushing Michael). So I went back to the original reference photo and pretty much redid this section of the painting, including the reflections, which I'm still not happy with, although that's more to do with technique (or lack of it!) than anything else. I also adjusted the values and colours of the distant hills to soften them a little. Overall, I think it works pretty well now as a finished painting and I'm ready to start on my next one while this dries! Any suggestions for the next piece are welcome, although I do have a particular subject in mind already :)

I used W&N Artisan oil paints and long flat hog brushes throughout. My palette comprised French Ultramarine, Cobalt Blue, Indian Red, Viridian, Yellow Ochre and Raw Umber with tiny amounts of Cadmium Yellow Pale Hue, Lemon Yellow and Permanent Alizarin Crimson and bucket loads of Titanium White. I used a tiny amount of oil painting medium for some of the fine details.

I apologise for my later-than-usual responses to comments. Last night we went with friends to Newmarket in Suffolk for a spot of horse racing and betting, but mainly to see the one and only Tom Jones perform live. I watched him as a kid in the 60s with my Mum and Dad so this was truly magical for me. He still has an absolutely awesome voice and looks great - not bad considering he turned seventy last year!

Look Grandad! oil on canvas, 12" x 16"

The Big Picture

Well, after weeks, nay months, of talking about it I finally got around to painting a BIG picture. Yay, I hear you all exclaim lol. Ok, so it's not BIG BIG, but you try cycling with half a door under your arm! This is based on a gouache sketch I posted a week ago, which in turn is based on a photo I took on my recent holiday in Dorset. I used both the sketch and photo for reference.

The scene is the view from the rocky beach on the southwest of Brownsea Island, the biggest of three small islands which lie in Poole Harbour. The island is famous for being the place where Lord Baden Powell set up the first ever scout camp in 1907 and also for being one of the only refuges here in the UK for the native Red Squirrel (and no, we didn't see any, disappointingly). In the distance is Furzey Island which houses an oil drilling rig amongst the deep forestation, but I left this off as it did nothing for the composition :). Rising behind in the distance is the Purbeck  hills, a ridge of chalk hills, much of it heathland, which once continued to the Isle of Wight until the sea finally broke through to fill Poole Harbour at the end of the last ice age. From other view points on the island, you can also see across to a narrow peninsular of low lying land called Sandbanks, one of the most expensive places to live in the world! A very beautiful and inspiring place.

Look Grandad! oil on canvas, 12" x 16"

 Just to prove it's mine, here it is on the easel. The steel rule came in handy to check the freehand painted horizon was level - which I assure you it is now, although my wonky pictures may not help to convince you! I come from a long line of picture straighteners and so a wonky horizon would just not do. It would be the visual equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard to my eyes! Evidence of one of my other passions - attempting to play the guitar - is just visible to the left.

My first big oil painting

And finally, here is one I took at some ridiculous time of the day in poor light. This shows the initial sketch which helped me to establish the composition and check general tonal values. I did this the night before the main part of the painting. Although it's not strictly an underpainting, it helped a lot, although I had to almost completely redraw the group of people who had appeared to have grown in size since the gouache sketch. The actual real painting took about three and a bit hours in one session (interrupted only by dog walking duties) so I'm going to call this Alla Prima :-P.

Happy weekend to you all, Michael.

Initial raw umber sketch

Krafty planning

I recently bought a really nice A4 kraft card sketchbook made by Seawhite here in the UK. I thought it would make me paint bigger, but the main reason was to have a single sketchbook that would allow me to use various opaque media like pastel, oil, acrylic, gouache and possibly charcoal and conte, and that I could take on holiday with me in a few weeks time. I've only managed to test oil and gouache but I really like the results so far. 

For the first page shown here I used Caran D'Ache studio gouache cakes, These give similar coverage to normal tube based gouache but are in a convenient ready to use cake format so I could certainly use them on holiday.

For the second page, I used thinned oils at the top and normal Winsor & Newton designers' tube gouache at the bottom. I did a couple more samples with oils and they look really good, applied thicker than I did here, but unfortunately I cannot show those for reasons of plagiarism! If I do decide to use oils in this sketchbook, then I really ought to use a primer to stop the oil sinking but still keep the nice mid tone of the card and not loose the texture too much either.

I'm just trying to minimise what I take since boot space and weight is at  a premium. I suppose I could take fewer clothes -  I always take far more than I need!

PS Ralph Parker  has some excellent tips and general thoughts on using gouache as an alternative to oils and acrylics and even advice on varnishing gouache paintings to give the effect of oils! But please leave me a comment before you zip off to Ralph's blog!

An affair of the heart

I have something to confess to you all. I've been having an affair recently. I've been getting up at the crack of dawn and staying up well into the early hours of the morning just to spend some time with my new love. I know I've been unfaithful and have neglected my true love but the mutual attraction was just too great. I may never be the same person ever again.

So I went to see her again one more time this afternoon. We walked dreamily through the meadows by the river and sat down together for a while in the long grass. I held her hand, gazed into her beautiful coloured eyes, and said what I should have said much earlier; We really have to stop this now.

But who is this mistress - oils of course !!! And the true love I have abandoned all this while - watercolours. This is my first plein aire oil painting. Have  a lovely weekend :)

Flood meadows, Hartford, oil on gessoed cardboard, 6" x 8"

Bohemian Anniversary - tweaked

There are only two medium sized changes. The first change is to the trees and church tower that sit behind the bridge. I scraped out these areas as much as I could and then added back in a better range of greens for the trees and reworked the church tower adding some detail. The second change is to the reflection of the bridge gatehouse. This started to get scary with lots of wet colour around so I decided to leave this as soon as it resembled the reference photo a little more.

There are a number of minor sized changes. I tried to adjust the colour of the building on the far right back to white but this proved difficult so I left it as a paler pink. I tried to suggest the river cruiser a little more and then just flicked highlights here and there. I added some missing statues to the bridge, adjusted the existing ones and suggested the side buttresses that provide support for the statues. I made a slight mess in a small part of the sky so I reworked this by adding some high wispy cirrus clouds! Finally, I added a few random blobs of colour to suggest the people walking over the bridge.

The secret of course is knowing when to stop. I could carry on tweaking this until Kingdom Come but I won't. I'm much happier with it ... so that's it - done. Move on to the next one!

Charles Bridge, Prague, oil on paper, 9" x 12"

Bohemian Anniversary

It's still not that BIG painting I promised you all, but nethertheless it is just a little bit more adventurous for me, even if that is only due to the significant increase in the amount of paint that I used! This is based on a photograph I took of the wonderfully gothic Charles Bridge in Prague whilst on a scenic river cruise with my wife during a wonderful anniversary trip to the Czech Republic in 2009.

The bridge is quite a complex shape  so this time I decided to do an initial drawing of it, and with helpful suggestions from my wife I managed to get the gate tower in proportion with the rest of the structure. I applied paint initially with hog bristle brushes and then used mixed sable/synthetic brushes to blend and establish detail. I added a little oil painting medium to my mixtures for detail work or when the paint started to feel a bit too viscous. I'm still using short-handled brushes (a couple of which have been sawn to fit better in my pochade box) but I guess that will allow me to get used to working with them before I venture out for some much desired plein aire work - which should be very soon I hope! I will probably let this dry a little now and twiddle with some of the values and details a little later - but I'm happy enough to post it as it is now :)

Charles Bridge, Prague, oil on paper, 9" x 12"

Distant lands

 For today, I offer you a glimpse of what to me is another land; a distant land, almost another planet ! Last October, we went to the Azores, way out in the middle of the Atlantic. It's the most beautful place I've ever been, with Capri and Venice an equal second. The islands sit on the junction of the African, American and Eurasian tectonic plates and so are of geologically recent volcanic origin. We travelled to two towns on the main island of Sao Miguel, built in two of the three main volcanoes: one is still active and the other contains two adjoining lakes which appear to be eerily different in colour: one green, one blue. Absolutely stunning.

So the place is very special to me and I wanted to try to capture some of my memories of that beautiful place in oils. On our last full day, we took a whale and dolphin watching trip with a lovely skipper who spoke almost fluent English. This painting is based on a photograph, from the many I took on that trip, taken as we were arriving back into the main harbour of the island's capital, Ponta Delgada. The mountainous backdrop is full of calderas, some  small and cone shaped, some flatter and more vast; quite a contrast between the humble modern concrete towers of man's creation and the massive ancient mountains of nature's creation.

The food and local wine was absolutely gorgeous by the way ! Hopefully off to the coast with sketchbook and beach-hating Louie the Beagle today so no more blogging for me for a while ;). Have a happy Sunday :)

Ponta Delgada, Sao Miguel, The Azores - oil on paper, 7" x 10"

And finally, Louie wanted to say 'Hi' in his inimitable way!

I ain't going to no stupid beach today!

Cooking with ... oils

I'm getting to really like oils now. Despite the fact that watercolour is my first and true love, I like the fact that you can take your time with oils. There's no stress and you can correct mistakes as you go along. This one is done in  a different style to my last post. Rather than bold impasto strokes with hog brushes on primed board, I used softer acrylic and watercolour brushes on W&N oil paper and added Liquin to Artisan water soluble paints to get a better flow and a (hopefully) faster drying time. I took my time with this and I think it shows :)

I used a reference photograph taken one evening at sunset last winter as I was on the way home from work. The mist was rolling across the flood meadows and the dark low skyline of the neighbouring Roman town of Godmanchester just looked too good to miss. I thought at the time that it would make a good subject and so it was nice to finally get around to painting it.

I had a go at scanning this in using a pair of bulldog clips to hold the wet painting about 10mm above the bed of the scanner but it was so badly out of focus that I had to resort to using my camera. The rain is clearing and the heatwave approacheth .. off to the East Anglian coast tomorrow with my bucket, spade and a sketchbook ... with a bit of luck :)

Misty meadows, oil on paper, 7" x 10"

... and now for something completely different!

All this activity in oil painting by a couple of my lovely blogging friends (who shall rename nameless) has made me a tad hungry so I took out my 6x8 pochade box and had a go at converting one of my earlier charcoal sketches into oils. The whole piece took about 2 hours, much longer than a pochade is supposed to take I guess, but I learnt quite a bit more about mixing and brush techniques and I really enjoyed doing it. I'm now considering finding the space to take my oils with me on our holiday in a few weeks time!
 

Hartford flood meadows, oil on primed board, 6" x 8"

For anyone that's interested, the pochade box was handmade by Rowley Abbey at Abbey Easels here in the UK. They are really nice to use and made to a very high quality although nothing like as expensive as some others. I will be doing a review of the box (and brushes I use with it) in a later post.

It's Friday again - yeah! Have a lovely weekend everyone :)