February Floods

Its more of January floods topped up by a few heavy rain storms over the last few February days that’s caused these conditions. As I write this post, the wind is howling and more rain is pounding the window. I can look forward to more ‘water world’ landscapes although my farmer neighbours won’t be happy.

Its also a celebration of the return of the sun, like the last painting. The colours used are exactly the same, Yellow Ochre, Burnt Sienna and Ultramarine Blue. As usual, I blended the sky colours to produce a misty soft look. This involves placing the colours and using a wide filbert brush to stroke the paint gently in every direction, sometimes at right angles to the previous stroke direction. There’s a lot of accidental shapes and random patterns, sometimes wanted and sometimes not. These times there is a need to coax the shapes more in line with what is required. It all looks a bit haphazard and there is knack to getting it right, but the result looks less contrived than a carefully constructed sky.

The lower ‘land’ part is solid paint placed in definite structures to contrast the softness of the sky. In the flooded field there was a softness achieved by painting with ‘dry’ paint and brushing it into the weave of the canvas. Remember the same 3 colours are used in the sky and also the ground. If I had used a different range of colours in each, the contrast between the excessive softness of the sky / flooded field and the gritty solid ground and trees would have been excessive.

Check out the video to see what I mean. See you soon.