Still struggling to get back in the painting groove. This is last night’s attempt, with challenging quickly moving windy clouds and changing light, but beautiful freshly-washed colours after some much-needed rain.
Windy cloudy evening after rain
More watercolour experiments … After a full month of rain, any light breaking though has been full of drama especially towards dusk. These still aren’t what I’d hoped they’d be but the process is encouraging me to be more daring with colour. I just haven’t been able to work solidly due to dayjob concerns getting in the way. Oh yes, and I foolishly decided to have a go at the NaNoWriMo ‘write a novel in a month’ thing and that distracted me from painting as well. I did manage to complete the challenge on time but now have a badly-written novel and a paucity of paintings (also, odd words like ‘paucity’ keep appearing in my mind).
Nolde actually seems to have invented many of his marvellous pictures while sitting in a darkened room. I have yet to try that, as I’ve been basing paintings on what’s going on in the landscape. Silly really, because at the moment there’s much more chance of sitting in darkened rooms for hours than there is of seeing anything outdoors!
Dregs of Sunset
In Hobdale
… painting experiments are proceeding, involving watercolour and paper.
Unfortunately, nothing has emerged so far that’s good enough to share. It’s a long time since I used any watercolour but slowly I’m remembering its ways. Using very thick paper the process isn’t so dissimilar from oils in that you can work on a piece for quite a long time, adding and removing paint – but I hope to become a bit more spontaneous (the difficult thing) as I improve.
The idea is that watercolour will be used for the initial painting, hopefully capturing the vivid colours I want. Then I can remake the piece in oils trying to capture the brightness and light of the watercolour. Well, that’s the idea … we shall see. So far, the watercolour version is capturing the muddy murk of my worst oils, but I shall persevere.