Exercise 2 Hard or Soft Landscape

I took this opportunity to do a painting of rock formations by the sea, as it is something I've wanted to try for a long time. For me, materials like plastic cards and palette knives, along with oil paints would have to be instrumental in putting it all together. Although I didn't get this idea until doing a couple of studies in acrylic and realised these materials would be far more suitable for what I had in mind. So I went ahead, after writing out a rough plan and doing a few tests with the intended medium and materials.

To obtain a sense of layers I tried to use strongly contrasting shapes and tonal areas - the sky, water and sand are flat and horizontal and quite smooth, applied with a brush. Whereas plastic cards and knives were used for the hard upright solid forms of many rocks, particularly the largest and most prominent at left centre. I exaggerated the height of the large central rock to add impact and the diagonal angle to increase the sense of perspective. I angled the upper half inwards to make it sharper and more angular. The lower more rounded rocks look soft in comparison. The overlapping shapes of the rocks move across the mid ground from one side to the other. Water and sand in the foreground and the sand in the mid ground form a receding figure of eight which curves and snakes its way backwards. I like the effects of where the cards and knives have been scraped through the still wet paint to reveal some of the dried layers and ground colour producing scratched out lines alternating with built up ridges of paint. Rags came in useful too, as they often do, for obliterating and altering certain passages.

The colours I chose, particularly for the rocks, have been exaggerated.  They are contrasting (blues and deep yellow-oranges) and quite unrealistic, which I thought would look more striking than what was actually there. The sand and water colours are closer to the real thing, unlike in the colour study in which the sand had a rather strong deep tone. I prefer the darks to look more unrealistic than the lights. It also helped with the process of this painting to do a certain amount of work on it, then return and finish it at least a week later, well after the first applications had dried.

finished