Part 3, Project 1, Exercise: Sketches from different viewpoints

Exercise : Sketches from different viewpoints. For this exercise I worked on A3 Paper, using half of the page.

Pennington Flash 22 March 2013

I packed all of my painting things and a hot water bottle and some blankets into the car ready to embark on my outdoor painting. Its unseasonably cold and miserable at the moment so I decided I had the option of skipping this section of the course for now or trying to make the best of it. I have managed to complete the indoor/outdoor exercises at home however I felt that at least painting in the car was preferable to delaying the the "Sketches from different viewpoints" exercise indefinitely.

My mobile painting kit

The first problem I had was realising that as a left hander I would need to stay in the drivers seat and set up my painting kit on the passenger seat, not ideal as this left me with the steering wheel which at times proved awkward as a surface to lean on! Conditions at Pennington Flash were pretty grim, cold, miserable and blizzard conditions on and off, and generally the outlook across the water, sky, trees and landscape seemed uniformly grey.

The first pair of paintings :- View to my left

Painting 2 View 1

For painting 2 I decided to wash out my colour palette a little more and add more blue to cool the warm greens down. Looking back at this painting now that I am home I feel that painting two does better reflect the light and colours that were evident at the time of doing the painting. I focussed more on the background before commencing on the trees and enjoyed creating the hard edge where the water meets the scrub-land by allowing more of the wash to pool at the edge of the wash line. I then used two tones of wash to give a more variegated effect rather than an all over uniform wash, as the landscape behind the trees simply wasn't uniform.

I found it quite difficult to create the effect of the water, had I had more time to spend on each painting I would have been able to paint the ripples in individually, instead I just tried to create the movement through the use of horizontal lines.
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Painting 1 View 2

I think I spent longer than I should have on this one, but I think my eyes were refreshed by the move to a different view! There seemed to be more of interest in the distance with this view, and there was also the warm red of the dogwood bushes and different light on the trees which meant I was able to translate the colours a little differently. I kept the lines of the washes quite clean to create distinction between the different areas of the landscape. I painted wet into wet for the dogwood and the tree branches, to try to create movement as it was blowing a gale!

Painting 2 View 2

For this second painting of view 2 I decided to focus on the tones and paint tonally using a mixture of viridian and cobalt blue. I mixed a darker wash for the shapes on the horizon, then softer tones for the foreground, I think this is the first time I have been frustrated with my camera since returning to the course! The photo above does not give a clear impression of the clear blue tones in the actual painting.

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