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I am always looking for bold splashes of colour to help make a painting pop. I can do this by either using bold colours as base layers, adding splashes of paint as a highlight, and also by adding powdered pigments. 

In this blog I will take you through step by step how I created the painting New Lands II. I explore the use of pigment sticks and solvents to create a base layer and then build up the painting using a brayer. See how I apply white paint with a brayer to create some lovely muted colours and how I use the brayer for blending along with palette knives and fan brushes.

My time for painting is very limited so when I do get a couple of days completely free I like to scale up and let loose on a large pieces of Arches paper.

I'm not really sure where the inspiration for this painting came from other than the dark autumnal colours; it isn't a scene that I recognise. Sometimes a painting just comes about because of the colours that I want to use and I was really wanting to create a large scale imposing clouds scene. 

Driving from Newcastle on Christmas Eve the sun had been glorious all the way home but as we hit Yorkshire the sun started to go down and with it the temperatures. The rapidly dropping temperature created steaming trails of mist along the valleys, in tree tops and on roof tops. As we descended down a hill towards home the image stuck in my mind of muted greens and blues. 

 

I have been using Arches Huille paper since I first started using oil and cold wax and I love it!  But I really wanted to scale up and see what could be achieved on a larger scale using the paper and oil and cold wax.  The valley trembles is my first large scale painting using oil and cold wax on paper.

So no longer had the RBSA exhibition finished and I was off to the Bradford Open show.  Bradford being my home town and Cartwright Hall being a stone's throw away from Saltaire,  I was very pleased to find that I had one of my oil and cold wax paintings selected for this open competition. When I ...