Woodland Bridge

Back in the deep dark woods. We are coming to the end of a dry, hot few weeks and there is nothing like a canopy of trees to cool the air.

The effects of light in a landscape are difficult to represent in an oil painting. Watercolour and pastel are easier, each has its own qualities. Watercolour has transparency, great for glowing light, but once placed is difficult to manipulate without looking overworked. Pastels are all about smudging and blending but are completely opaque.

In this painting, I’ve used transparency in a ‘watercolour’ way and also smudged and blended as in a ‘pastel’.  The flexibility of oil painting allows a painting to be produced in this way. I have used both watercolour and pastel and even tried mixing the media in a painting but the results were not great.

As usual I’ve used only 3 colours, Cadmium Yellow, Burnt Sienna and Prussian Blue and as usual I have not used any medium. There was a lot of solvent used to produce thin washes, similar to watercolour and some paint was used with no thinning to blend and produce the effects of mist. The opaque highlights were painted sometimes with the ‘wash’ of colour and other times as a ‘dry’ daub.

Here’s the video. See you soon.