CLOUD WITH A FACE
A friend of mine saw a kingfisher in Alexandra Park recently. I went for a walk across a muddy field and saw some sheep. So sheep it is.
Photo 1 has a nicely positioned sheep. It’s looking at us, and it looks like a sheep. Photo 2 has a better lit sheep and it’s standing on the horizon, looking, by sheep standards, quite dramatic. A heroic sheep about to set out on a noble quest. But it’s turned slightly away and painting the back end of a sheep is a depressing task. So the plan is to take sheep 1 and angle it up a bit like sheep 2, then light it similarly and position it against the sky.
Taking a piece of 18 X 24cm canvas board (actually I’m poshing up and using linen on board, but the term linen board doesn’t exist, if you asked an assistant in an art shop for some they’d punch you in the face, and you can’t say linen canvas board either, it’s a total contradiction, essentially a first world problem and if we all pull together we can get through this) step one is to sketch out an adjusted sheep. I like to use a mix of burnt sienna and black diluted with thinners, applied with an old, worn down brush which gives a sketchy, scrubby line, characteristics which I fondly hope will persist into the finished painting.
Second stage is putting some colours down to see what they look like, using a minimal palette of white, black, burnt sienna and yellow ochre. We are after all talking about a sheep here, in December, not a beach ball in July. The idea is the black has a lot of blue in it and mixed with white will look blue relative to the rest of the painting, and mixed into the ochre it will give subdued and controllable greens. The decision to position the sheep against a cloud might well result in a picture of a cloud with a face (beginner’s mistake).
Stage three, no getting away from it, is to slap loads of paint on. This is where everything goes wrong, probably best to draw a veil over the whole grim process but suffice to say, large, confident-looking brushstrokes will make it look like you know what you’re doing, even if you have to go back in with a smaller and more controllable brush and a palette knife to make the stroke the shape you intended.
Boxing Day Sheep
Ok in the end I mixed a bit of blue into the sky along with the black. The thing in her ear is meant to be one of those tags, I made it the same colour as the sky which would be a nice touch if you could see it. The actual tag was more of a plastic clip, even less visible, so what with the repositioning, relighting, bum-losing and cloud-adding there’s a lot of artistic licence going on. Maybe I could title it Sky Coloured Ear Tag to subtly draw attention to it but for now it’s called Boxing Day Sheep. Should really be The Day After Boxing Day Sheep. More artistic licence.
RICHARD SWANN ART 