Red Sun

I’ve been experimenting with landscapes this week – not something I’ve seriously attempted before. I wanted to create a painting with drama so I started by layering cling film over some washes of intense acrylic colour with a few garden leaves. I’m working onto a rough watercolour paper and after peeling the plastic film away from the almost dry paint I had some interesting organic patterns. This visual texture seemed like a good background for a landscape. I’d purposely kept the acrylic paint to the lower section of the paper so the textured colour would suggest undergrowth or maybe a rocky foreground in the composition.
When the initial layers were completely dry, I added the winter trees. I used a rigger for this – the long, tapering brush let me make quite narrow lines where I wanted the branches to become more twiglike. Some of the finest twigs were made by dragging the wrong end of the paintbrush out of the wet paint.

To increase the texture, as you can probably see, I scraped a little inktense pencil onto spots of water to make speckles of colour in the indigo watercolour sky.

The setting sun colours everything with a warm glow so I flooded intense colour onto the sides of the trees facing its light. You’ve probbly gathered by now that this is not a real landscape! I usually work from a source of inspiration but I was just playing here and having fun with my imagination. I loaded my brush with luscious paint and let the reds and yellows mix together on the paper. Finally, I popped a white mount onto the painting to see how it would look when framed.

We’ve been having very changeable weather here in the middle of England – I snapped a quick picture of some of our garden trees when the sky was a deep Paynes grey but the setting sun caught all the lime green of the newly opening leaves. It’s a complete change of palette but might be my next subject to paint. Nature always does it best!

Thanks for dropping by. I’ll keep you posted – Linda x