Sitting on my Bute

The sun was out yesterday so me and my mate Bernie decided to go down to Bute Park in Cardiff for a spot of plein air painting. We walked around for a bit until we found a nice spot where the sunshine was hitting a group of trees on the edge of the playing field and set up our equipment. Bernie looked most professional with his portable easel, I on the other hand was testing my newest invention - a cushion in a plastic bag (if it's your girlfriends nice cushions make sure you do this!) It may not be the most elegant of solutions but it works!

This being the UK the weather changed within minutes of setting down. The sun hid behind the clouds and a bitter wind picked up. Within minutes this pleasant outing had turned into an endurance contest. With the intermittent sunshine the lighting on our subject was constantly changing making the work at hand even more of a challenge. Never the less we persevered until we could no longer feel our fingers. As we left we thumbed our noses at the elements and retired to the warmth of our respective homes.

Despite the weather I was quite pleased with the results of the outing, in situ landscape painting is something I find incredibly rewarding, every time I learn something new. It's amazing what you can learn about the world if you just look at it long enough.

 

I prefer to work with acrylics in these situations, it dries faster so you don't have to carry wet oil paintings around and requires less planning than watercolours. I started the piece by blocking in the grass foreground with a mixture of yellow ochre, windsor blue, titanium white and a touch of cad yellow then worked in the sky with ultrmarine blue toned down with white.

 The clouds were formed with the same mix as the sky just greyed with burnt sienna and more white. I then started putting in the tree shapes using varying mixes of burnt sienna, windsor & ultramarine blue, yellow ochre and cad yellow - toned accordingly using titanium white and black to match the atmospheric perspective. The rest was just a case of filling in the lighting using a very high tint of yellow ochre for the highlights and an almost black green/blue for the shadows.

When I got home I worked into the piece for an hour or so from memory. I picked out a few details and generally just upped the contrast and defined the forms of the trees a bit better.

Bute Park, Cardiff - Acrylic on 230gsm Watercolour Paper 10.5"x7.5" R.G. Montgomery 14/03/13