Painting practice

Was so excited to have new paper to use - my former work colleagues had given me a token for Greyfriars Art Shop and I got some lovely heavy Fabriano paper (hot pressed). A change from the usual watercolour paper. So although I've been a bit distracted with Peter in hospital, I was determined to get some painting time yesterday.

I decided to do another version of the view of Skye from the Sandy bay on Applecross. I had got as far as this last week (with a little adjustment of the clouds).

 I liked the palette of this and the composition. So I tried to approach a new version in the same way. Started off with charcoal, rubbed it out a bit, applied some gouache.  So it started off looking like this.

I carried on in acrylics and pencil marks, trying to minimise the amount of water I was using.  Quite soon it was looking like this.  Looks a bit scrappy, don't you think? And I felt I hadn't got the colours just as I wanted them.  Probably not added enough of the lemon yellow to the blues.  And not used enough Prussian Blue, I think.

Anyway, I carried on, trying  to improve the technical 'look' of the painting without losing the energy of the marks.

But you can see that I didn't do much more to it.  I think I got a bit 'gripped' by the painting, too scared to keep the looseness (cos there are some bits I like).  And the slightly different composition has lost some of the tightness of the spaces - it's all a bit too studied.  The things that I like? - the rocks are not bad and the irises in the foreground are nice and loose. So I think I've got to go back in with a looser approach with better flesh-coloured sand to get that cold look.  It looks just a bit too warm for Scotland (although they are having nice weather up there at the moment!).  Other tips would be welcome!