Direction, battles and plein cold air!

The battle continues and I want to show you the battle. When I look out there at what's available to see on instagram and youtube, you see only the success. I want to show anyone else that wants to try their hand at art that its not all roses and 'amazed' emoticons on facebook. There's a ton of fails too. At the moment I'm a bit lost. I had direction, horse paintings...but now the compass has confused me. Don't get me wrong I absolutely love painting horses but there's other stuff out there to paint, other skills I need to get my head around. I think I pinned my colours to the flag a bit early. Since my last blog, I tried my hand at what they call Plein Air. There's a wonderful man, Stephen Taylor a painter from the US that I've exchanged messages with who is so generous with me as a learner, that paints from real life and encourages me to do so. Also, after listening to hours and hours of painters podcasts and youtube videos, the common, resounding advice is to avoid painting from photographs. The colours and tones of real life are different from what you get from taking photos. They call it Plein Air in the painting world. There was also a particular interview with an amazing painter from Bath, Pete the Street, Peter Brown who paints the most amazing street scenes from the UK, Bath, Bristol and all over that really pushed me. He's a wonderful painter and he's out on the street almost every day.

However, plein air painting is mostly urban or rural painting. It's not horses or animals. It's almost impossible to paint horses from life because they wander around. You can sketch them - but to paint them? Difficult. Also, do people want paintings of horses on their walls? Would I be better painting landscapes? I don't know. I think so. I'm confused at this point. But what I'm not confused about it that I know virtually nothing and so painting anything and everything is going to be a decent lesson for me and just getting hours in painting is the best lesson of all.

So I committed, invested in a French Easel, a beautiful wooden piece of functional engineering with straps and fold-out legs so you can paint out in the wild. I selected some paints, brushes and filled a flask with hot coffee and ventured one fresh morning as far as my own village.

My french easel

I then spend the next two hours trying my best but freezing my butt off. I also have enough experience now to understand when a painting begins to lose altitude and to nose dive toward total crapness. I also forgot my yellow paint - which makes painting green a bit of an issue. Anyway, I gritted my teeth and continued on until I reached the point where I convinced myself that I could finish it off at home, where its warm and there's yellow paint.

As you can see there's a ton wrong with it. To be fair, when I started painting the sky was actually that blue - it was a beautiful sunny morning and the light was hitting that building with a beautiful glow. By the time I'd finished the clouds had swept over and filtered the sun into the diffused, dull light that the entire rest of the month have provided.

This is it though. Painting is not for the feint hearted. It's a thousand little problems that you've got to work through. Weather is one and my inability to bear with discomfort another. It's fine. I went home, made some lunch and warmed up. I've slipped that painting to the back of the stack and I plotted a different approach.

I wondered if I might now try plein air painting but with pastels. I love the work of Bob Richardson https://www.collectart.co.uk/collections/richardson%2C-bob. So I did what James Banks would do. I spent money on resources I couldn't afford. I realised I only have a limited number of stick pastels and I 'need' a good range of colours in order to capture all the subtle colours and tones of nature. So I paid a heap of money to buy some beautiful soft pastels and ventured out again.

I went and scouted some locations to capture locally and packed my new french easel with all my new pastels and headed down to the canal near Stroud to try and capture some of the beauty I'd previously seen there.

I set up my easel and tried to draw the scene before me. I'd outline it roughly and then attack it with my beautiful new soft pastels. Then after a good start, the nose began to dip, the temperature dropped and I began to freeze my butt off yet again to the point where my fingers stopped working. I also began dropping altitude. It was turning into a complete pig's ear and what's more there were members of the public passing me and catching a glimpse of my evolving disaster. I was tempted to start screaming Black! black! Paint it black! https://youtu.be/IIW9sL-Yf6Q and throw my brand new french easel into the canal but I didn't. One kind feller asked if he could have a look and when he said 'Oh okay, yeah', I knew he knew I was doomed. So again I returned after only a couple of hours to the warmth of my car, then headed home to try and rescue the painting.

Rescued painting of Stroud Waterways

The net result is that the french easel is staying at home until it warms up a bit. Okay I'm a wimp. Fine. I'll focus on other stuff.

In the meantime I got on with getting more portraits under my belt. I understand that I need to draw literally thousands of them before I can get any good at them. I finally got a win. I did a portrait of my son, Ethan and captured a likeness. Now let me tell you, its harder to capture a unicorn that to capture a likeness. All of my other portraits look like a person but sadly not the person I was attempting to draw.

Capturing a likeness is tough.

This is the second time in about 40 portraits where the likeness has been captured. So that's a win. I'll take all the wins I can get at this point.

I also began to work a little smaller with my pastel paintings. I saw some lovely little square frames and thought, Wow, I can paint some small pastels to fit into those and maybe reduce the price on my paintings. So I started work on a collection of British wild animals. It was lovely to listen to my favourite podcasts and crack on with those, totally freehand, to try and push my drawing skills.

Louis Armstrong portrait

Badger painting

I was pretty pleased with those. They fall in my comfort zone of pastel paintings. I will be getting the oils out again soon but I needed for a while to work in the medium that brings me the most success and comfort.

So the battle continues. I'm scoping out what I like to paint and in what medium but it's all good - it's all gravy and none of it is a waste of time. I do feel I'm improving and look - I'm spending hours doing what I love.

Until the next time.