Experiment to try out blocking colours into my painting. Using acrylics on primed gesso+acrylic paper.
This is the photograph I used for the experiment:
Chosen because of the arching trees reaching to the sky and the glowy sunset colours touching the tops of the trees.
I did a sketch in charcoal pencils, firstly in white to sketch out the shapes of the trees (using my fave way of drawing them roughly – this side to side squiggle!), then adding in black patches and writing to mark out where blocks of colours would go.
Process in giff form:
The ink shape I based on a digital sketch I did (left). It works in this image because it makes the viewer like they are underneath the structure.
I ended up a few more layers than intended on the original sketch. The light green I put down wasn’t orangey enough so I put down an orange mixed with a lot of gloss medium to give the paint transparency so you can see the green underneath and they mix to create the right hue.
Working on top of the dark primed paper means I was building up the lighter shades, which works well and gives the colours a lot of depth. I left the paper bear where I wanted the under-brown to show through.
The other extra layers I added were more of the sky blue colour right at the end, and more of the dark brown that I used as an underpainting. This is because I want the layers to not look obviously applied one on top of the other. Instead I want layers to mingle with each other, and to appear in some places layered in a different order to others. This gives the paint far more depth and subtly which works well.
The structure in this experiment doesn’t work as well because the width of the structure doesn’t encompass most of the painting so it doesn’t feel like a great shape that the viewer is under.
Georgina Harris 