Trying to keep it all going....

It's been a busy start to the year. I fear that life has been getting in the way of art. Nevertheless I have managed to get into the studio and to the Printmaking workshop a few times in January and February.

In January I was in Kishorn for a workshop with Jonathan Shearer. It was a great start to the year, very helpful for encouraging me to get down work again.  In this workshop I focused on two images I had sketched earlier.  Here are the original sketches I used.

 Strome (done the day before the workshop)






 And various Applecross sketches, done in November.

The painting exercises built on these sketches

 

My sketch at Strome was fresh in my head. I was thinking about that glow in the hills and that ambiguity between the sky and the hills.  I was painting in acrylic, but quite watery, almost like watercolour and on quite a large sheet of paper. It ended up looking a bit like this.I was forced out of my comfort zone to use much warmer colours on the hills - none of my usual blues.

 

 And  a similarly watery approach taken to the Applecross image, keeping to warm hill colours again.  This again is a large painting.

Since then I have continued with these motifs, doing a number of different paintings and studies. With the Applecross image, I have come up with these.

 I've been experimenting with the foreground, trying different treatments, based on the rocks and the grass that I observed from the shore.

And with the Strome painting, I have continued further with what I started, trying more of a layering technique.  I think this gives more interesting and richer colour. And I have tried a couple of smaller images based on the same scene.

The main development for me is that I'm now working a bit harder at my paintings. Rather than abandoning paintings that I'm dissatisfied with, I'm finding ways of working further into them to achieve richer effects and arriving at a painting that pleases me a bit more.  I feel this is progress.  What do you think?