Tag: landscape painting

When the sun shines

Posted on by Alan

When the sun shines it seems to breathe life into the everyday, easily overlooked scene.
Being aware of this, some months ago I spotted this satisfying arrangement of trees and shrubs tumbling down the hillside, with a few poles and fences giving nice accents. Only needed some light and shade to model it I thought, preferably from the left.

Spring_Fields_watercolour
This is the result of painting for an hour or so. There is usually a moment, when I’ve blocked everything in, when I look at it and decide it’s just terrible and I should tear it up in disgust and just get back in the car and drive away, after all who am I kidding, right? Then after putting one or two flicks and shadows in, the picture (usually) starts coming together. I may have left it a little late in the day, towards noon, when lower angled shadows might have been nice, but I’m quite pleased with the outcome. I was after the bright, spring sunshine look, rendered in a fresh and simple way.

These elevated beach huts are at Frinton-on-Sea on the Essex coast. I really liked the battered but defiant appearance, and the very cool colours. Out of those that were painted, it seemed like only one or two were a colour other than blue/pistachio/cream….

beach-huts2-frinton-may-2014beach-huts-frinton-may-2014

For my large sketch I was interested in the repetition of the shapes and colours, reduced
to strips and blocks by the perspective, but the kids playing on the sand make the scene.beech-huts-frinton-bh-sunday-4-may-2014-watercolour

Rolling shadows

Posted on by Alan

Here are two watercolour sketches of cloud shadows rolling across the new spring crops.
The high hedges of Holly Grove Road wind their way to the Hertfordshire village of Bramfield, passing farm cottages on the right hand bend, in front of a large field of rapeseed in full flower.
An irresistible yellow when in full sun, in shade the crop can appear almost greenish.
The clutch of roof angles together with the contrast between the purple-grey slate and
the saturating yellow caught my attention. There are calm pastoral scenes
still to be found in today’s agricultural landscape, but these pumped-up, urgent and vibrant scenes are now commonplace and dominate today’s countryside.

slate-and-canola-sm-crop-april-2014-wartercolour

On a Saturday morning in early March, the gently rolling fields near Tewin are silent, save for a light aircraft circling nearby and an early skylark rising to sing loudly behind me. The clouds pass by quickly, continuously changing shape, their shadows race across the land, throwing the field’s contours into contrast.
The tree covered green lane in full sun bends around and up to the wood, which is in full shadow just for a few seconds as cloud passes over.

shadows-tewin-watercolour-1-march-2014-crop

Spring lane

Posted on by Alan

The lane winds downhill, right and left, and right again, then on up to the village.
The shadows from the copse throw themselves over the closely pruned hedge and across the field margin, dancing back and forth in the breeze. Walkers and horseriders are out enjoying this Saturday lunchtime stroll. This is one of those locations where there is plenty of potential for the landscape sketcher in
all seasons.
spring-lane-tewin-feb-22-2014-watercolour-crop

Mood for a day

Posted on by Alan

winter-lane-terling-feb12-2014
While we wait for the grey skies and water to give way to spring sunshine, the sketching goes on. This watery lane shows a typical rain laden grey sky over the oaks and ditches.

On an overcast dry day, this woodpigeon sits quite comfortably in a pruned cherry tree, looking half asleep but fully alert. A little grooming here or there, but no need to hurry.
Drawn using binoculars. Awkward.

woodpigeon-jan-2014
Blustery high winds saw this blackbird take shelter on top of the garden fence under a large buddleia bush. He stayed for a good ten minutes, an unusually long time for active passerine birds to stay put, but time enough for me to produce a few sketches and close enough not to need binoculars. First in pencil then in biro, the drawing bottom right shows him hunkered down, buffeted by the wind, checking what I’m doing…windy-blackbird-feb-2014

Lines and curves

Posted on by Alan

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

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.