Exercise : Painting rocks

Painting rocks

I was a bit worried about this particular exercise, I wondered if I would struggle with the angles and many many greys, greens and blues! It wasn't convenient for me to approach this exercise but some photographs I had taken in Grizedale forest in the Lake District earlier this month immediately came to mind. I had carried out some landscape paintings while we were there. This sculpture of oversized rock cairns stands high in the forest and has no sign or directions to it, it appears to be part of a sculpture trail. These cairns are remarkable in their stillness and silence, and I think the fact they are "unmarked" adds to their appeal and let's the observer draw their own conclusions. 

I started by using a light wash in tones brown, green, crimson and blue (I used my travel watercolours for this exercise so there is no black or grey available). I carefully painted the individual stones, and quite like the negative white spaces seen here :-

I also noticed the warm tones of the stones, and am actually quite happy that I have deliberately chosen to restrict my palette. 

I continued to work across the stones adding layers of tone and some definition. I think this is one example where using a smaller sketch into sketchbook has enabled me to make decisions about the way forward with the painting. It was here that I need my decision between painting between the rocks with a fine brush or using pen and ink to darken the spaces. 

After finishing the experiment in my sketchbook I decided to work on a larger version to explore of characteristics of rocks further.

I think the main challenges of painting a larger version and multiple cairns was getting the feeling of perspective and creating uniformity in the size of rocks although I had to take care not to let the shapes of the rocks become too uniform.

Although it was laborious I decided to use the pen again to create the dark areas, and the benefit I found here is it allowed a significant amount if variation in depth, I was able to use less for the lighter areas and create more density for the darker areas. 

I feel this particular exercised has been useful to increase my confidence in tackling rocks as part of a landscape scene, it has certainly dispelled the fears I had, in fact I am finding many of these exercises where I need to break down and work on particular landscape elements is serving to build my confidence in considering a landscape which may have features other than simply fields and sky!