Blog

With lockdown now in place you may have limited paint colours available. So why not try an exercise in limiting your palette?

I find it really helps to simplify things, to avoid overthinking. All you need to have is a white, a dark colour, warm colour and a cool colour and you are all set to go. 

Because of where we are at the moment a lot of things have been cancelled or put on hold for me including a painting trip to Ireland. That didn't stop me still taking the week off work and use that time to get used to being at home but more importantly to dust off the old cellar studio space and paint.

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.

So my 2020 workshops have started with a bang as I got to be the first workshop to be run in the brand new Craft House space in Bingley. I also got to run my new workshop, Atmospheric Landscapes, for the first time as well!

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.