Exercise 1 Linear Perspective
We are to produce a hard landscape, paying attention to where the horizon is, allowing lines to converge towards that point. Line is more important than tone in this exercise.
As I have a few issues drawing buildings (which I discovered in Drawing 1), I decided to stick to an area I know well, i.e. the street looking up from my house. I first drew the pathway roughly to give me an idea where I wanted the focal point to be and then tried to draw the houses on the right hand side of the street as close to their actual angles as I could. These buildings are all different sizes and designs, so I found it difficult. They were well lit by the sun coming in from the left hand side. I then went inside and used the Tombow brush pens to strengthen lines and add some tone/shade to the buildings. Then I used a wash of ultramarine (watercolour) for the sky and a mixture of ochre, burnt sienna and raw umber for the buildings and shadow areas. I didn’t want to fiddle with it too much.
Exercise 2 Aerial Perspective
I have been wanting to do another painting of the flowering rape seed near where we live for a while, using acrylics. I had an old stretched canvas that I wanted to paint over, so decided to use that. I have extensive photographic reference images that I’ve taken myself of this area, as this stuff surrounds us here in south Norfolk. The rape seed has now been harvested but I felt this would make a simple enough study in aerial perspective.
I painted the lower half of the canvas in a dark green, as I wanted this to show through when I started working on the foreground. I spent a lot of time on the sky as I wanted this to be quite dramatic, even though on the day that my reference photo was taken it was slightly overcast. I kept the palette limited to cobalt, ultramarine blue, white for the sky, although I did an underwash of a dark blue/violet made from burnt sienna and blue, to get the weight of the clouds in. The trees were quite easily done with filbert and flat brushes using a mixture of greens that I made from burnt sienna, ochre and red. The highlights on the trees were made using cadmium yellow hue and a fan brush. I left a band of bright yellow (lemon yellow) beneath the trees and did not put any detail on this, to give the illusion of the distant rape seed flower heads – the detail only starts to become apparent when you get nearer to the flowers. The middle and foreground I dotted various tones of yellows to create the flower heads.
Aerial perspective – Acrylics on stretched canvas 60x45x1cm
In terms of the devices mentioned in the course notes, I think the warm tones of the flowers drives them forward and the cooler tone of the sky recedes, even though it is a large part of the painting plane. The trees are varied in tones and this creates pockets of interest.
