Just a quick update on my previous post, playing around with acrylics on canvas
with some oil pastel over the top. Objects in space 1, 2 and 3…
Author: Alan
Harbinger
These are interpretations of some false colour images of C2012 S1 Ison, currently speeding it’s way towards the sun at 2 million miles a day, having entered our solar system for the first time.
Seems a bit weird to draw something that is traveling that fast on an A4 sheet with just a few pastel strokes. Comets have been seen and recorded for centuries, sometimes spookily called harbingers of doom. Said to be an icy body that, when passing close to the sun, heats up and loses gases to form the “coma” and tail, sometimes visible without a telescope if bright enough.
With this blue version, adjusting the colour values of the scan resulted in this
cool 3d type effect… Something that might work well on a large scale, I settled for this modest size canvas
for now. Ison may never come back, but it’s just amazing to me that all this stuff is out there, beyond what we could ever hope to hold in our hands.
I once introduced a friend to vegetable gardening, walking in the woods, taking photographs, the pleasures of seeing, not just looking at nature. In her open minded and naive way she used to say “Isn’t nature great!” How right she was.
Recent Sketches
Although this is a pencil sketch, the pattern of light and shade through the oaks,
with greens and oranges setting off the blue road were the attractions here.
Something very satisfying about all the shapes and textures in something like this.
Drawn at the end of the afternoon, still mild with some weak sunshine, while House
Martins wheeled above, catching flies on the wing on their way South.
A view across the Thames at Rainham Marshes. So much potential in places like this.
A quiet and still late afternoon, sun almost gone. Watercolour over pencil drawn
while best bud Roj Whitlock photographed.
Shadow play
Here are some re-workings of some recent sketchbook pencil drawings reproduced in ink – with a little scratching out– using as big a brush as possible, aiming for that “just casually arrived on the page” look.
Down by the river, lined with willows and reeds, umbellifers and nettles. Cars and vans park up wherever there is space. Not a picturesque horse and cart, sure, but I find including the modern and mechanical describes today’s heavily industrialised agricultural landscape. On the field side, the tree has not been allowed to encroach on farm machinery and has been trimmed back, giving an open right angle underneath it. Conveniently, this acts as a frame for the white van, and the high tonal contrast helps provide a
focus here.
The white van under the dark tree attracted me here
In this picture I was attracted by the shadows of the trees across the road. The barn was black,
the door was red. There was no sound. I went a little ‘nuclear summer’ with the colours, but hey…
A quiet, still summer afternoon shattered by my choice of colours!
Project potential
This is the kind of site that to me, has great potential for drawing and painting projects. There is something about neglect and the resulting decay as nature reclaims surfaces at different speeds. The process throws up interesting combinations; unlikely colours with the ‘wrong’ textures, subtle patterns in stark compositions, the mechanical and industrial together with the fragile or picturesque. Fab.
Blue sky and yellow canopy, geometric patterns of shadows all combine at this temporarily neglected site.
Lines and curves
When looking for landscape subjects to sketch, sometimes there seems to be nothing, at other times everything seems to scream potential. I tend to overlook the obviously pretty landscape in favour of patterns and rhythms that catch my eye – the organic freeform mass of a tree balanced by a neat, man-made straight line for example. In this Hertfordshire lane, sketched in the late afternoon, the tree and pole frame the road
as it winds down the hill and away to the right with hedges either side.
The sun is shining through a haze of thin cloud, strong enough to cast a shadow but not enough to give a bleached out, high contrast. The school run is about to start as a yellowhammer sings from the wire.
Hertfordshire hedges with yellowhammer, watercolour, June 23 Hazy afternoon sun
No time like the present they say, so despite the sun having gone down and darkness fast approaching, when I came across this jumble of poles near a farm in Essex I had to stop and produce a rapid watercolour, racing against both the fading light and the bugs which were giving me no mercy. The roadside vegetation was uncut and shoulder high, and the newly surfaced road had neat white lines at the edges, accentuating the bend away to the left. I used mainly Naples yellow and lamp black with a tiny amount of cobalt blue, spending only five or six minutes on it as the unwelcome attention of the biting insects was literally affecting what I was doing! Actually I think they helped in a way…suffer for your art eh?
This sketch is of a similar arrangement of telegraph poles across a lane as the sun’s orange glow reflects on the hard surfaces. What attracts me to this type of scene is the rhythm of verticals but with obvious imperfection, the control with a little chaos thrown in, held together by the wires (important but kept as low key pencil lines) and in contrast to the mass of the vegetation in all its high summer green glory, turning to blues in the distance.
Positive in yellow
A crop of oilseed rape in full flower demands attention. There is something compelling about the strident, unnatural ocean of colour breaking the harmony. As dusk approached I drove around a country bend to see this yellow sea end abruptly at the grass footpath, as if it were a yellow Hokusai wave. I turned around, parked up and produced this rapid watercolour with my gear spread out on the bonnet of the car.
As darkness approached and the colours were fading to grey, I managed to leave it as it looked when
I first saw it.
This painting of two oilseed fields by the lane was produced on Sunday morning, and I used an easel for
a change, allowing me to paint quite freely, standing back often to decide how much is just enough, so to speak. It was quiet except for a Whitethroat that had taken up territory in the hedge separating the two oilseed fields and was expressing himself with his dry, jangly song constantly. A perfect soundtrack.
Of the many meanings of yellow across world cultures, ‘ol Wikipedia tells me, in Japan it symbolises courage; in China it is the colour of happiness and wisdom, as well as the colour chosen by Buddhists
for mourning.
On our life’s journey, we will all lose someone who was very proud of our achievements and in their eyes
we could do no wrong. This bright picture is for them.
Sunlight in the lane, Terling Hall Road. Painted on a quiet and peaceful Sunday morning in May
Quiet Places
On a sunny spring day in the UK, there are many colours and sounds that take you back, sometimes to childhood, sometimes just to last year. This bench is where I’ve had many
a strategy meeting or just a gossip over a cup of coffee, or tea and a sandwich. Like an outdoor conference room. These days it’s a place of quiet reflection on what is gone, and what can be.
With so much visual excitement, the riot of orange on the Berberis, the pink and green of the flowering blackcurrant, the golden conifers thrown forward by the copper beech tree in the background, I couldn’t resist a quick rendering of the scene. It was all too easy to get distracted and want to include everything. I started to fiddle. This is invariably fatal with watercolour, laying a wash and getting its value right first time is a hard lesson to learn. Still, I was only really interested in the journey past the shrubs and across the recently mown, sun drenched lawn, down to the bench beyond the long grass.
A quiet place, and a very personal picture.
Across from the bench, in the far corner of the garden, is a neglected old toolshed.
The door has been nailed shut, and the ivy is overgrowing it, now even creeping across the broken window.
I was really attracted to the colour combination of the neighbour’s cherry blossom against the clear blue sky, the dark reds of the cherry plum tree and the fresh greens of the suckering cherry saplings in the foreground (no garden boundaries recognised by this tree). I’ve been meaning to do something with this for a couple of years now. The effect I was after was that of dappled sunlight and shade in a busy corner, but painting suggestively, without detail at all. I’m quite pleased with this one…forthright but restrained. I’ll even forgive myself for using pure cerulean …
See that sunshine
I found these interesting, ivy covered oak trees in a narrow lane in Essex.
This lane hasn’t been widened, probably as it’s a quiet backwater with little traffic,
and so the trees are old and still in place close to the edge of the road. The field opposite
has just been rolled ready for drilling, and beyond is a large copse. I came across
them with the sun directly behind, and as there was little colour I used black ink
for this drawing.
A few days later I returned to the same spot, and in the opposite direction, the lane meanders away with trees large and small dotted along either side. I was attracted by the deep lavender grey of the rain cloud lit by the sun, a rare occasion where the tree branches are a tone lighter than the sky, and worked up a quick watercolour sketch. There is even a telegraph pole, one of my favourite motifs for suggesting rhythm and perspective, and most of the trees have a significant amount of dieback in the upper branches which makes for interesting shapes.
So taken with this scene was I that I decided to come back and produce a larger scale watercolour of this view. Most country lanes in my neighbourhood are not this ‘pretty’ and this scene could be straight from 1947, the only modern element being the oilseed rape in the field on the left, and perhaps the amount of dead branches on the trees.
It took an hour and a half to block in the main elements on the first session, before the light changed too much. As I was painting the spring afternoon light above all else, I was keen to finish it before the leaves opened much more. With that in mind I had to return three times before I could finish the shadows under similar light conditions, spending another half hour. I prefer to complete a picture in one session, as it’s not always possible to return, especially with the same weather conditions!
Aha vibrance!
It’s been extraordinarily dull and cold coming into spring. Questions have been asked.
This drawing was made early in the evening on Sunday into the light, with the sun obscured by the near hedge. I used old waterproof black ink on watercolour paper which I lightly sprayed with water. Putting the big shapes in, such as the foreground hedge, the ivy covered trees in the middle distance and the wood far across the field, allowing the ink to do its own thing filling in here and there, avoiding the water and suggesting tree branches, with a few wet dashes for the clouds hurrying by to finish off. Later I added the blue green watercolour for the newly sprouted crop, and brighter, yellower green for the sunlit grass.
This drawing was produced in March, also in Hertfordshire. It was going to be a watercolour, but as the light was fading I decided to carry on in pencil. I enjoyed working on a larger scale and with the drawing on an easel, instead of balanced on my knees. The result of this freedom seems to be a looser, more responsive drawing and I’m a bit reluctant to take it further.