landscape – The Consulting Artist

In Motion

Last Friday was a very special night. I was at an event at the famous revolving restaurant on the 34th floor of the BT Tower. After enjoying an excellent dinner, we had the opportunity to make art while the restaurant obligingly did its thing, offering us an ever changing view of London. I couldn’t resist the opportunity and took a wide panoramic canvas (80cm x 30cm) and started work.

I painted what I saw, as it appeared in front of me, and as the view moved, so did what appeared in the painting. I ended up with an abstraction of the view over London at night. This is the painting in situ, just after the restaurant stopped moving.

Here’s another view, looking straight at the canvas. I really enjoyed making this art work, it has real pace and movement to it, and I quickly realised I had to go with the flow, and let London appear, and appear, and appear. I am really enjoying scaling up my work.

Journey to Sunset

This piece is a continuation of Paints on a Plane. Once I arrived home I wanted to continue playing with the wet on wet technique. A friend got in touch to say he liked the earlier sketches so I said I’d develop something for him. I scaled up from postcard size to A4 and off I went.

I usually use Windsor Newton water colour pans when I paint but I decided to start out with some liquid water colours I bought a while ago. Big mistake. These liquid paints I have are cheap by comparison and they don’t blend.

I quickly switched back to what I was used to (Windsor Violet and Windsor Yellow) and continued to experiment. The main challenges I faced was being too heavy handed, and not sploshing enough water on to the paper to start with. I persevered with a few more attempts before going for it with lots of water on the paper and the addition of a third colour (Cerulean Blue). I tried to make my strokes both lighter and quicker this time, and I left more time for the paper to start to dry before applying the foreground.

Here is the finished painting and in the spirit of working out loud, you can see some of the practice runs in the slideshow beneath.

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Learning to Paint – Croyde Bay

I’ve been away near Croyde for the weekend with a big group of friends. In between beers I had a go at trying to paint the landscape. This is a view towards the bayside painted on the beach. It was a blowy day and the picture, paints and other stuff kept flying around. It was almost impossible to mix colours on the plastic plate I’d brought with me (yup that kept flying away too), and I think I need to buy some….grassier greens.

There’s a lot I don’t like about this picture though some of the folks I was away with were very encouraging about it. I found it very difficult to capture something so….big, I’m hoping things will improve as I gain confidence.