 |
| 030 Donnington Castle, Newbury |
I have finished my Local Landmark Challenge. I'm quite pleased with it and I think its a good effort but not my best. It frustrates me how cartoony it looks, like it is an illustration in a children's history book. It is intriguing to me how some artists make their pictures hard to distinguish from a photograph and so lifelike. How do they do that? Maybe it is something that gets better with practice.
© Rosa Foulger 2020
A New Challenge. I want to paint a local landmark as my subject.
Donnington Castle near Newbury, Berkshire was largely destroyed in the English Civil War and in 1646 was demolished leaving only it's Gatehouse standing. This was restored by John Packer and has for many years remained a very popular destination for local walks.
I am using my usual technique.
An 8" x 8" canvas panel, framed with Masking Tape and first of all painting the sky and background and then using one of my own printed Photos on A4 paper that has been cut out to get my proportions and shape correct. I then will draw around the template and go from there.
The original photo was taken in January and the sky is probably at its most boring so I may well try to liven it up a bit.
Let's get on with that background right now.
I have painted a base 'wash' sky to start with and I can add more detail in later. Then I took my template and positioned it where I want and taped it gently so there is no movement while drawing the outline.
Template is ready to draw around
After drawing around the template I free drew the rest in.
and this is how it looks so far.
fig.1
Artist Notes: So today I started off by giving the whole area of Castle stonework a medium to light grey wash as a base colour. I then envisaged building up layers of different colours. (When you look closely at the Stone-worked walls there are actually many varied shades of Grey, Beige and Orange). On these first three sections of the left tower I started off too light and redid them in darker greys.
On this particular project I did need to keep standing back and observing from a distance to appreciate textures and the colours of the walls. It is not an easy thing to achieve.
When people say 'Less is More' I think that most certainly applies to painting, and has done on most if not all of my pieces. With this piece there was a definite tendency to put in far too much detail. I was almost painting individual bricks at one point. If you try to add in too much the painting is far too busy and cluttered. I know from experience that is when I will give up on a project. So try not to add in too much.
Once I was happy with the first three sections (fig.1), I carried on with the rest of the sections in the same way and making sure that any unique characteristics of the building were included.
No comments:
Post a Comment