Glorious Snow

Oil on Board, 10 x 14 inches

Well, my silence is broken!  No doubt you've all been wondering where on earth I've been since nearly a month ago.  I've not been taking a holiday - in fact, my feet have hardly touched the ground.  My new custom-built studio is up at the bottom of the garden, it's been painted and now all I've got to do is get a path put in to get to it across what was the lawn and is now bare earth and mud. 

I've also been looking very, very seriously at opening a new gallery in the area, selling fine art by some of the country's finest painters.  In my opinion, the area is crying out for a gallery that sells modern fine art, not abstract-leaning 'contemporary' art, and there is a gap in the market that I intend to fill, so watch this space...any thoughts would be much appreciated.

 

I've also done a couple of demonstration paintings in the last month, and this one above is one of them, given at Oadby Society of Artists last Monday.

 

This was largely an exercise in tonal relationships.  As I said to the lovely group in Oadby, this is a classic case of painting what you see, not what you know, ie., we know snow is white, but looking into the sun with a river meandering through, the snow is NOT the lightest part of the landscape.  I placed pure Titanium White for the reflection of the sunlight straight away, to give me the brightest part of the painting to work up to, everything else being a tone down from this intense light.  Most of the snow was in shadow, so the colours were various tones of lilac, and the sunlit parts have a little red and blue in the mix, so as not to compete with that intense light on the water.

 

Painting under artificial tungsten light, as well as my daylight bulb was a challenge, and the colours were a little off after the two hours demo, as can be seen in the photo below, which is as far as I got on the evening.  So, a couple of hours were needed back in the studio, refining the tones and colours.