Painting the First forest layers

Preliminary layers are there to give depth, extra texture and foundation colours.
The layers that come afterwards can allow colours to show through or not.

An explanation of what I’m doing and a transcript is below the video.

Video – 4 minutes 13 secs

This is where I begin to make a few decisions, knowing that anything I do at this stage is likely to change again.

Making decisions need not be final and you can see how I change my mind, even as I paint. I’m not saying that it’s the Right way to approach a painting, nor that this is how I work all the time. Some paintings require a lot of planning and design, but the main purpose of this demonstration is to show that you can let the act of painting, and the behaviour of the paint, lead you.

I’ll show you how I build on this layer next time…

Transcript of this video

I didn’t have any ceruleum blue out, but now we will.

What shall I have? – There.

See, that’s drying out now.
I’m going to mix up a bit of ceruleum blue with white,
just to pick up and use – over here.

I’m going to put that, some of it,
just to get,
No! Here.
I’m going to have this as the dark side, I’m just going to darken it up.
Let’s get some green over here, as it were…

Now you see, straight away, it needs a bit of dark
to change that; blues, so I’m going in there and I’m still going on quite thin.

It doesn’t mean you have to do that. I’m just showing you,
What I do when I’m not really thinking that hard.

Way of working; I just get into it and off I go, but anyway, let’s see how this goes…

A bit more yellow, here I think.

Pick up a bit of that, let’s get a nice bit of – some kind of red going on here,
in the blue.
I want something to show through there.

‘Course we’re going to make this look like trees, we hope,
in the course of things.

Get a bit of a red glow in there.

Right, ok, so now that we’re beginning to establish it –
You can decide this properly, at the beginning,
but I seem to be deciding as I go along, where the sunlight’s coming from.
You would do well to make some kind of decision about that before you start, really,
especially if you put anything down that is going to dominate.

Ok so, that isn’t to say we don’t want a bit over here – Oh yes we do!
We might.

It could catch the top of those trees couldn’t it?
Supposing it’s coming that way – ish – here…