Colour tests based on woodland sketches
After completing some sketches in watercolour on site in the woods, i wanted to do some tests in oils based on the sketches that worked best.
Working in oils suits this abstract work well since it has an intense colour and a wide colour range.
These tests also gave me a chance to test working on wood panel and stretched canvas, and compare it to working on paper:
Looking unclose at this test on wood panel you can see the brushstrokes from the gesso primer showing through under the washes of oil paint.
The oil runs down the board very easily since there is hardly any texture to hold it in place.
It would be interesting to test how ink an charcoal sit on wood panel as well. 
This canvas test produces a lot of texture when washing oils. The paint doesn’t drip and bleed down the canvas very much because of the texture of the canvas.
You can see the texture of the canvas under the oil washes even if you stand far back from the canvas. However it’s not the brushstroke kind of texture that I want.
I don’t think I’ll work in canvas again. The only way it could work was if I worked on a very large canvas, since then the brushstrokes would be bigger and the texture of the canvas would be less obvious.
I took some photos of the woods when I was sketching them, to document the day, the lighting etc.
I like the images where the trees are silhouetted against the sky. It’s very different lighting from my previous experiments, but for this idea of context and on sight reaction I need to use these images. They demonstrate great height and grandeur very well which adds drama to my pieces.
Now I’m going to pick a photo and a colour sketch and combine them together in an A1 painting.
