Blog

This is an original oil and cold wax landscape painting which you can see me create from start to finish. It was a little bit tricky as there was a gap of a week between me starting and finishing the painting so how it started out was very different to how it ended up.

Unusually this painting was deliberately created with the intention of turning it into Christmas cards hence the rather predictable green and red start to this piece.  In the spirit of getting myself organised for Christmas I started this in October but life had a different idea. So over the Christmas break I started playing around with this piece and seeing whether it would go.

Here I show you how I used a palette knife and a fan brush on a large scale to create atmospheric skies.

I have some pretty spectacular changes lined up for this year with the most exciting one being a move out of my cellar studio into a brand new, purpose built studio in Bingley. Still some way to go before I get in there but I have the plans and I have cut out small squares of sticky coloured paper to help me decide where things are going to go.

I have absolutely loved being back in the studio painting and this time I have been experimenting with scale and surface. For the last 3 years I have been mainly painting with cold wax on a smaller scale and on paper. I love working on the paper but you can only scale up so far with work that has to be behind glass, unless of course you fix the paper to the board and well I know that will just go terribly wrong for me. 

You've probably realised by now that I do like to paint dark foreboding skies (AKA Clouds of Doom!) with dramatic contrasts between light and dark colours. With the use of transparent oranges or yellows over the tops of the contrasting lights and darks this can create quite a dramatic effect.