It's quite normal for me to have a few wrestles with my paintings as the dark and light are always competing for space but the fight started quite early in this one. The original idea was to revisit a painting, 'Deluge', which I did a few years ago in acrylic and work it in oils but expand the clouds out.
Step 1; I painted the sky in and went in quite heavy with the colours as I knew where everything was going but it all looked a bit 'hairy' and needed to be smoothed out.
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'Tempestuous Skies' Step 1 |
Step 2; I decided to knock back the brown in the clouds in order to develop the atmospheric layers and try and establish that transient feeling of the clouds being blown around. I knew I'd taken quite a lot out, but that was OK as it would be replaced by glazes later on and it would give me an opportunity to paint clouds receding into the distance.
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'Tempestuous Skies' Step 2 |
Step 3; This is where I take a leap of faith....... I decided to build up the layers using the Chiaroscuro technique and keep going until I was happy with the overall balance. I painted in highlights of clouds quite thickly in places which started to unbalance the composition. In my mind I know what the end game is but it's still making me nervous as there's a lot to do to pull the clouds back into place.
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'Tempestuous Skies' Step 3 |
I am hoping that step 4 will be the re-introduction of some of the paint I originally took out but it will be a tricky evolution over the next few weeks.