ONLINE ART COURSE – THE LANDSCAPE CHALLENGE PART 2, AND RUBY HAS BEEN HELPING
For Part 1, please go here.
I have been working on the actual landscape, and have completed the initial drawing and the painting.
The initial drawing
Just as a reminder, here is my reference photo, of the gardens of Dartington Hall, where I have spent some of my happiest times. This is a favourite spot in the gardens for me.
The initial ink pen drawing
I used pencil for the initial drawing, and then completed it with a fine ink pen.
I made sure that I did not go right up to the border, as I wanted to add some shading here, and leave a bit of a gap between the border and the landscape.
Adding the shading inside the border
For this I used a light wash of the Kuretake Graphite Blue watercolour, the same colour I used for the “spacer” stones in the border.
Since I would be going for vibrant non-realistic colours and the sky would be yellow, I was keen that this would not blend with the blue border and create green. There is no green in this project, so I would have to be very careful in this area.
Colouring the landscape
To prevent any blending between the yellow sky and the blue border, I used a bright yellow Derwent Inktense pencil for the top edge of the sky. After this, I used watercolours – my mixed palette in the old box which my hubby gave me not long ago. I had thought of using my new Kuretake Art Nouveau watercolour set, but those colours are quite pastel, and for this I wanted much more vibrancy.
Watercolour
The trouble with many British landscapes is that they are much too green! Unless you are going to go funky, it’s hard to escape from this, and I don’t think a predominently green picture is particularly attractive. Knowing that I wanted to alter the colour scheme completely, I needed to do something with the reference photo to get rid of the green. In my photo editing software I converted it to greyscale, and then adjusted the contrast, and finally saved a posterised version with (I think) 5 levels. This enabled me to concentrate on values rather than colour, and I would no longer be distracted by the colour of the original reference.
Unfortunately I forgot to photograph the picture at the completion of the watercolour stage, but went straight on, once it was dry, to adding more detail with different media. It would have been good to see the difference these additions made.
Adding coloured pencil and some more pen work
Once the watercolour was dry, I added some more pen work where there were gaps, notably the radiating cobbled area around the sculpture and some more kerb detailing, and also some bits of extra texture here and there.
Further detail and intensifying of the colour was done with Faber Castell Polychromos, beginning with intensifying the blue of the border shading a little, particularly close to the edge where it touches the border. This has made everything stand out better. I wish I had photographed the picture at the watercolour stage before I added this further work, so you could see the difference it made.
At the end of the watercolour stage, the Twelve Apostles (the row of yew trees) looked flat, but with the addition of the coloured pencils, they look a lot better now. I spent a long time working on the far distant trees which proved quite problematic, but I don’t think they are too bad now, and I didn’t want to over-work the whole thing.
Small highlights were picked out with a white acrylic marker, notably on the sculpture, the tips of the vegetation in the left foreground, and the bare branches, also in that area. These looked too white and stark after this so I toned them down with an orange coloured pencil. The wall along the back of the herbaceous border needed further emphasising too, and this was done with coloured pencils and a little more ink work. I added quite a bit of dark purple to the shadows, and picked out flecks of sky between the background trees on the right. The reference photo was taken in early spring so many of the trees are still bare.
Flattening the picture
As you can see from the above photo, by this time the picture was quite badly buckled. I had discovered a method of flattening buckled watercolour paintings and was keen to give it a try. I was a little anxious about it because I was working on drawing paper and not watercolour paper, and thought I might ruin the whole thing! However, this paper is quite substantial, and the initial stages of the treatment went well.
You put the picture face down onto a clean piece of card. You have to make sure that you hold it firmly and don’t allow it to move, or the edges to lift, or you can spoil your painting. You spritz it with water and gently work the water in with a sponge. This may take more than one attempt. The idea isn’t to soak the paper, but to soften the fibres to enable it to relax and lie flat again.
Once this is done, you take another piece of clean card and lay it on top. Load it up with heavy books and leave it for several hours, preferably overnight, to allow the paper to dry completely.
When you remove it, it is miraculously flat! It was the first time I’d tried this, and I’m really impressed with the result, and just how easy it is to do.
The next phase
The next stage is to work on the vellum overlay, and I shall do a separate post about that.
My hubby’s major clear-out
Every now and then my hubby has a blitz on his books. He says he’s going to get rid of a load of them, but I never really believe him, because even if he does, he has a tendency to replace them all with different ones in double quick time! This time I think he’s more serious, though. He’s got a lot of books related to his work which he no longer needs since his retirement, and he’s having a general blitz, clearing his Man Cave (the garage) too, so maybe he means business this time!
I went upstairs yesterday to find him sitting in the middle of WWIII-style chaos in his study, with Ruby helping him. She does love a box!
