Snow Pocket

'Snow Pocket', Oil on Board, 7 x 9.5 inches

 

Another painting after the recent snowfall in Rutland. This is a quiet road from the village of Wakerley to Wakerley Wood. One of my favourite light effects to capture in paint, the morning sun was straight ahead, piercing through the huge Oak branches, dancing its light over the verge and road, with its rays beaming across the hedgerows, picking out globules of dew. The snow was still lying on the verge, kept in shadow by the trees for most of the day, and the road gleamed with ice - gorgeous!

 

The backdrop of trees and the near hedgerow were painted mostly with my decorator's brush, whilst the road was picked out with a worn old hog, dragged with successive layers of paint over the tacky underpaint - one of the advantages of Alkyds with their fast-drying facility.

Light Coating

Oil on Board, 9 x 12 inches

After the recent snowfall down here in Rutland, I went down to the River Welland at Duddington and found this view at one of my favourite painting spots.

With the sharp, morning sunlight ahead of me and to the left, it provided a nice composition, with the snow on the foreground riverbank and in the far distance in shadow, contrasted with the sunlit snow on the fields in the mid-distance.

Most of the network of feathery branches was done with my 1" decorator's brush, with a few rigger strokes to suggest the bigger branches. All the water was painted with a flat synthetic brush, the lighter, sk reflections firt, then the darker bh and tree reflections aft, then worked together and blended in places with a Rosemary & Co Eclipse long flat.

Frost

Oil on Board, 10 x 17 inches

This is the first painting for 7 weeks!!! That's probably the longest spell not painting since I started this mularkey 34 years ago. Just been so busy doing up a house, navvying, Christmas, not to mention running a gallery...but it's great to be back in the saddle.

This was a demo painting I did last year which I thought needing some finishing off, and in fact pretty much entirely repainting, so here it is!

Frost is a joy to paint, and when there's a mist too, with a hint of it being burned-off by the weak Winter sun, doubly so. This sort of atmosphere provides lots of soft blues in the distant trees, now devoid of their leafy garb, so, if you, the painter, can replicate those colours and most of all, tones - the relative darks and lights throughout the picture plane - you can make the painting appear three-dimensional, although on a two-dimensional surface.

It feels good to be back with brush in hand!