Sunny Sunday

... follows from Silent Saturday that was also Blistery, Rainy and Thundery Saturday aka Have a Scotland Day in Berlin.

When we sat underneath the sun cover that was temporarily (and not very well) providing rain shelter, J laughed: 'You brought your weather with you, haven't you.' - How right he was. Hehehe... and I also brought the glorious sunlight that comes with, or rather after, a rainshower. He noticed that too.

So, one of the tasks for while here is to draw and paint the rain and thunder... This is something I haven't succeeded in so far.

But: a few days ago my windows to the West promised a fantastic evening sky.

Thursday evening, westwards, 9pm
Pastel in A4 Moleskine

And guess what: they far exceeded on their promise, with this 15 minutes later.

Thursday evening, westwards, 9.15pm
Pastel in A4 Moleskine

With all these questions

... there's a bit of searching going on. - As Vivien rightly says in her comment to yesterday's post... so: do it.

Well... The post got sparked off (quite literally) but the most fabulous glow in the sky I had seen in a long time. A thunderstorm at around sunset turned the sky into that iridescent grey yellow which in turn reflected throughout the garden and coloured everything green into a kind of glowy red/orange.

No chance for a photo of it, though I tried as you can see. I think my amateur photography skills were no match for it.

So I sketched. Attempt #1 yesterday didn't get the sky. But it got something of the heavy rain shower making the trees fade in the distance.

Thunder at Sunset #1
Soft pastel in Moleskine

But, again, I'm kind stuck with the texture of the sketchbook. It refuses to take more than 2 (max 3) layers of my soft pastels. Then I remembered Brian's explanation (scroll down Vivien's post to read his comment) of how he made the beautiful British Columbia landscapes in his sketchbook for the exchange. So I followed the instructions: one layer, rubbed in well with some paper, another layer, rubbed in, etc. And to use fixative (well, my mum's hairspray in this case) in between. And: hey ho... darker than before, more transparent then before and all in all enough to keep me happy.

Soft pastel in Moleskine
Layering, rubbing and more of the same
Yellow, lime green, pale purple and neutral grey in various combinations

So, here's a bit of experimentation from today:
Note 1 - the transparency of the rubbed in layers
Note 2 - the depth of the dark pastels overlayed

Thunder at Sunset #2
Soft pastel in Moleskine


More Skyline
Soft pastel in Moleskine

So, all in all not a bad day... and that's been on the painting front alone.

Museum visit - V&A Museum, London

John Constable (RA), 'Study of Clouds', 1822. Museum no. 590-1888, V&A Museum, London

I'm currently in London and have a couple of hours free this afternoon. In the West End, I'm planning on going to the Victoria & Albert Museum to have a closer look at some of the English Romantic landscape painters - notably Constable and Turner and their ways of representing skies and clouds.

I've come across them for my cloud studies, but also in Christopher Bellinger's new blog where he has been writing about Constable himself called 'skying' - the study of skies and clouds. I do like the term a lot - so much in fact that I will need to have a closer look at his studies myself. I've come across some of the online resources and images by him - notably one painting available at the V&A. It is this one at the start of the post.

Making mountboards

The mountboard cutter I had ordered a short while ago has finally arrived. So I spent the afternoon experimenting with it. Surprisingly, it was a lot easier than I thought it would.
Basically, in order to cut bevelled edges at a 45 degree angle, one needs to cut along lines marked out on the back of the mat. The trick is not to overcut (i.e. cut too far along the line) nor undercut (cut too short) so that once each of the four sides is cut, the middle falls out neatly.
The cutter I bought, after reading some reviews on different systems, is a MatMaster by Frame Co. The company's website here has very accessible instructions on cutting not only single mounts but a whole range of complex mountboards. I just bought a basic set with a short (66cm) ruler - I really wanted it to custom frame my studies and sketches that are odd sized - such as the sky and clouds studies.

WTTS # 3, mixed media on board, 11x11 cm

I have now cut the first lot, together with a base mat. All the studies are relatively small (such as 9x9 cm) and I mounted them so that they will fit a standard 24x30 cm frame. This means, the little abstract studies are centre stage within a rather large mount and frame - this way the framing adds some impact to the small pictures.

Sky and cloud studies

After having drawn, sketched and painted a few of the mixed media sky studies in pastel, pencil, pen, watersoluble graphite and neopastels, I assembled them in a collage. I've been making these small studies of skies and clouds for the past couple of weeks (see my first post on this here). Most of them were done in the morning from my living room window. But I continued with them when I was in Germany.
Most of them are on gessoed bristol board which I had prepared for pastel paintings - the vast majority of them are small, ranging from 6x8cm to 15x15cm, with only a couple the size of my sketchbook or A4.


Collage of Window to the Sky studies #1-24

This has been a curious experience, in terms of subject matter, medium and scale. As clouds on the Scottish West Coast move pretty fast, it made me look for generic pattern, shape and light quickly and then decide on a couple of formations to get down on paper - I often did one, two or three studies in one go (which helped when the first ones didn't end up the way I'd wanted them). The watersoluble neopastels and graphite pencil have become a firm favourite for sketching - in particular on the prepared board their pigments grip nicely onto the tooth of the paper and produce interesting effects when brushed over with a waterpen:


WTTS #4, mixed media on board, 15x15cm, detail

I did a few evening skies when in Germany, most notably, the pastel sketch Am Abend. After observing and trying to get the skies down on paper, I surprised myself at how easy I found to see colour variation, the subtleties that make clouds appear three dimensional and the various shades of blue, purple and grey that denote good weather clouds or rain.

'All good things...

... come in threes' sounds a bit too much like a literal translation from German into English. But never mind that, here's the third post while in Germany.


Am Abend (Windows to the Sky #22)
Pastel on Colorfix board, 35x25 cm

This is the view from my parents' backyard. And it is also the reason why we ended up in this remote village at all. My dad was based at this telecommunication transmitter from the early 1980s onwards and would drive past the derelict farmhouse to and from work everyday. During those years, my brother and I would listen to a lot of stories on how great life on a farm with a large garden, animals etc would be like.
A few years later, the move was announced, and without knowing where we'd go, I exclaimed: 'Moving's fine with me as long as it's anywhere but Bokel' - the remote village, surrounded by heathland, dark pinewoods and the subject of a couple of scary stories was a place that I didn't fancy at all.
It didn't help: our house in the outskirts of a small town was sold and the farmhouse bought, my brother and I changed schools and left friends, and it took a good wee while to settle. Eventually, imaginary scary stories were replaced with the day-to-day scarieness that is rural teenage life.

Here are a few prep sketches:


Neopastel II, marker pen on paper, 21x14cm


Neopastel II, marker pen on paper, 21x14cm

A missing photo

This is one of the few earlier paintings of which I never took a photo, and incidentally it was also the very first painting that I did sell. So, after several months, I now finally 'have it back' as a photo record. As the very first of the Bedrock & Clouds series, it was the most realist one... myself trying to work through the composition, colours etc. Funnily enough, it's been the two realist ones of that series - this one along with another oil painting that have been the two of the lot that sold quickly ;)


Bedrock & Clouds #1, Pastel on board, 70x50cm

Window to the sky

When out in the countryside it struck me that, if I want to paint more Scottish landscapes, I need to get to grips with skies - or more precisely: clouds. With a constant breeze, it is the changing skyscapes that set mood, influence lighting and reflection. In response, I've started to make sketches from my breakfast table out to the sky above the opposite row of tenements:


Neopastel II and graphite in sketchbook




Neopastel, marker pen and graphite on Bristol Board, 8x8 cm

And then I came across this skyscape by the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershoi in my daily calendar:



It made me laugh - the text on the back emphasised the drama in the sky in contrast to the uneventful landscape - I was really intrigued to what let him paint the cumuli clouds in such a naive manner. I found a retrospective of his a few years back at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, with most of his paintings being intricate interiors. This site here shows some of them, as well as another landscape.