Last month before all this heatwave nonsense I went back to Box Hill to do a few pieces, both good pieces – the featured work is a ‘resting’ piece on the hot long walk upto the top of Box Hill, unlike George Meredith I don’t have a donkey to help me get up there! Part of the reason I haven’t been back actually, the hot weather just makes the climb even worse. It’s a steep walk.
So I did this Inkense piece to break up the climb, but what I hadn’t noticed was the thistles on the ground – ouch, the things that seemed to bite me even though it’s mostly chalk there – double ouch, and even worse was what seemed to be a nest of giant hornets near there which thankfully left me alone.
When I got to the top, the light had gone from the viewpoint, but you still had the light raking over the landscape. I’ve drawn and painted this view a few times, it always fascinates but also irritates me – I never can get exactly the right shade and tone of the shadows.
Paradoxically this paint stick piece I feel is one of the closest, despite the technical issues with using such bright colours. It’s like the struggle to get the right colour meant I paid more attention to the tonal values – that’s what is the problem with deep shadows in the landscape – they are usually brighter and lighter than you think.
Also interesting the shift away from watercolour over the last few months into other media – Inktense, paint sticks, woody pencil for landscape work. I need to re-order the galleries – I have made an overall Landscape gallery page, because otherwise a lot of these other non-watercolour pieces would get lost. Also changed the Urban Watercolour page to Urban Sketching – makes more sense, even though it’s hard to differntiate the urban from the rural in some of my work in parks!
I used to focus much more on watercolour, and now it’s more landscape is the main focus and watercolour is just a subset of that. There is also a gallery page for the Box Hill works too.
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