Today I post my 3d Assignment  which is due on March 12. I  have just finished it and while the oils are drying, I share my exepreince I have had  doing my landscape drawing  which I did in oil;  I  traveled to South France early February, I liked the weather and  sunsets there at winter time. I also like the overall theme of the paysage: contrasting vast areas of sky and waters divided by light. I decide to draw this landscape  because I found the sinery as very  relevant to required work on aerial/atmospheric perpective with a lot of tonal graduation. I took a photo from my room – it was a view. On the image I have 2 objects which are close – the plant and the trees, then  there is a vast sea and we can see details – water’s riffle  close, but we don’t see any riffle as the amount of space between the eye and horizon increases. Also there is a lot to work in this sense ( aerial perspective) if we look at the sky. The amount of sky  contains 2 parts- light horizon and vast amount of grey sky.

 I used A3 size paper for oil painting and  oil paints  ( Daler Rowney) set for beginners, which contained oil paints I could dilute with water, that makes the process very manageable for beginner.

I started  with partioning the space for each large element of the painting: the sky, the light and the water. Then I mixed black, white and azur blue paints to achieve the shade of grey I needed for the sky. I am not a big fun ( probably yet) of very prominent brushstrokes, so I used different brushes – large and small to do lot of blending to create shades on the sky and clouds. It took for me 4 evenings to finish the sky, because I was not very happy and I let layers dry and work over them next day, achieving the colour  which would be as close as possible to what I had on the photo.  Then I worked on waters. I used black, white and blue paints – the same as got the sky, but in different proportions: less white, to achieve the colour of the water. I tried to create water riffles closer to the plants and the trees and used monochrome shade to create the aerial perspective, working on the far part of the sea, which was just  below the light part of the sky. I also  tried to add more psepective  doing lighter shades of lighten sky and part of water, which is close to the lightest part of the sky.  I also worked on plants at each corner at the bottom. Then I started to work on the light between the sky and the water. I tried to figure out what colors I should use and experimented on paper near by. At the left side I used white with a time bit of yellow. Moving towards right side I used a mixture of white, yellow and a tiny bit of orange, making sure that would be a very soft and gradual change from left side area which was lit by the sun to right side darker area.

New drawing 

10.10.2018

After receiving my tutors feedback for this assignment I decided to do another landscape drawing because I wanted to have better grades  upon completion of this course. My tutor  mentioned that she liked the sky  in their grey part but found the  bright streak of clear cloudless sky  as  an “odd” in terms of colours. For her the colours in that cloudless part were too intense and too orange. In reality  that streak of the sky was really very bright and intense in reality because that scenery  was at the sunset time after the storm. It was indeed a very unusual contrast between the natural colours. I did not have any  artistic thought to soften the colours on my painting, may be a different artist would like to do so, but I wouldn`t.  I also dont pretend that I did the colours in an  ideal way, thus they may seem odd to other people.  My tutor pointed to my mistake about the evenness of the horizon line: the left side was shorter than the right side. Thus I had good reasons to continue my landscape drawing trials and I did another drawing for this assignment which is below. I have done the drawing in soft pastels by Jaxell, using A2 format paper.  I had been trying other brands of dry pastels available   in the local shops, but Jaxell worked as the best ones in terms of  quality and variety  of pigments. The drawing below is a view  I have noticed from the boat during one of my boat trips recently.

I was very much attracted by the loneliness and isolated position of the house, by  its bright colour and shadows. I thought that  the scene would be a good chance to practise my light-shadow painting skills. The light was coming from left side creating strong massive dark  shadows coming from the trees  around the house. I find dry pastels as a very good medium for landscape drawings especially when you work with a large format of the paper.Pastels do allow you to work speedy and if  you opted for a good quality paper which absorbs and keeps the pigment well so  you can put a good number of layers, creating  a quite realistic image. Before starting  this project I have watched some good tutorials in YouTube which  cover the topic “how to draw with soft  pastels”. Daler-Rowney`s tutorial about landscape was very helpful.  In this particular work I spent a lot of time to create the mass of trees  and their leaves around the house using all green shades I had in my pastels set.

Below is the photo of the scenery .