July - Week 3

Written 20/07/2025

Sketching ideas

So, as I briefly mentioned last week (but not in that much detail), my plans for this month are to do a painting that represents my home village (meaning where I currently live). So right outside my house there is a view of a massive hill (it isn't a mountain though, it isn't quite big enough for that). Here's a photo I took (hopefully it isn't TOO identifying, I did have to censor the van since it had an address on it).

A tall, green hill looms over several houses on a cloudy day. There is a small van in the foreground, with its back censored with a grey square — It really does LOOM over the surrounding houses - it being a cloudy day makes it seem slightly ominous. Also not the slight 'crease' near the top - I believe that's where the road is?

Since I will be representing something that is literally on my front door step, I decided to do some sketches from life rather than from my photo. I will say drawing in my A3 sketchbook on my lap was a rather precarious experience and not the most comfortable - I should have dragged a side table out with me in hindsight!

Four pencil sketches of the above photo, each with slightly different angles and focuses — It was interesting trying out slightly different angles - which is something that much easier to achieve with a life drawing than with a photo reference

My key takeaways from this exercise were:

The surrounding phone cables (not visible in the photo) framed the image well
Only three houes for the foreground, otherwise it looks too cluttered
The clouds 'converging' to the peak - or the crease - helps with drawing the eye to the hill (the main focal point)

From these sketches, I then drew a "composite" sketch of the things I liked the most from my practise.

A pencil sketch, combining the four previous sketches into one almagamated picture — This isn't an angle that 'really' exists but works well for a picture methinks

As we should know by now, Alma Thomas was an abstract/impressionist painter. So she tended to focus on simple, 2D shapes. While the above sketch is fairly streamlined already, I thought it needed MORE simplifying - to ensure the shapes were all 2 dimensional. So I practised that and then redrew the above picture but EVEN SIMPLER!

Simplifying shapes, cloud to blob, cube to square, triangular prism to trapezium — These are shapes that can easily be represented with straight mosaic like squares

A pencil sketch, a simplified version of the composite drawing from above — I think the simpler shapes makes the image more striking

Once I had finalised the 'shape' of my final piece, I needed to focus on the part that actually makes Alma Thomas's art hers; the colours! I did four practise pieces, experimenting with different colours using watercolours. Which is something Alma herself actually did as you can see here with her draft of 'Blast Off' (with the final version as a comparison):

A watercolour painting roughly representing a rocket (which is a reddish triangle) about to blast off into space

An abstract mosaic like painting representing a rocket (which is a red triangle) about to blast off into space

It is interesting to note how much 'looser' the watercolour draft is compared to her controlled final piece (but also the colours are less vibrant which makes sense with watercolour vs acrylic). But anyway, here are my four initial painted practise pieces:

A gren sky, reddish hill with yellow line, green and blue houses — I like the boldness here, but not enough colours

A blue sky, with yellow clouds, a reddish hill with a yellow line, purple houses with orange roofs — I think the sky being blue at the top looks better but the houses blend too much

A green and blue sky with more prominent yellow clouds, a red, pink and orange hill with a yellow line and purple and blue houses — Probably the best in terms of colour variety but looks a little cluttered and hard to discern where things are

An orange, pink and red sky with yellow clouds, a blue and green hill with a yellow line and red anf orange houses with yellow chimneys — The chimneys matching the clouds is a good idea, the hill really should be what is red though

So after doing these four sketches, like with the pencil sketches I decided to almagamate the parts I think worked best into a singular idea, before painting it out I actually did a little pencil sketch of the vision so that I didn't just slap the colours down (which I may have done before in the past!)

A very basic version of the sky, hill, houses sketches with colours written down for each of the sections. Blue for top of sky, green for lower sky, yellow for clouds, chimneys, and 'crease' of hill, red for peak and bottom of hill, orange for middle of hill and pink for between the red and orange, finally the back two houses are purple and the front house is blue — A little messy, but I think it helped with visualising things

So here is the final plan for my July artwork

A watercolour painting of the sky, hill, houses sketches with a blue for the top of sky, green for lower sky, yellow for clouds, chimneys and 'crease' of hill, red for peak and bottom of hill, orange for middle of hill and pink for between the red and orange, finally the back two houses are purple and the front house is blue — I think this is quite striking and vibrant, and this is in watercolour!

Some thoughts I noted down

The colours will be more saturated in the final painting (acrylic painting will inherently make that easier)
Not sure if the wires should be small squares or solid lines (or if they are really needed, I only realise I forgot to add them in now!)
In the final painting I will make sure each square has slight differences in colour like how Alma Thomas's mosaic like paintings do
I hope the eye is drawing to the centre of the piece (the hill)
The clouds will be more like the moon is shaped in Splash Down, rather than the blobs I have depicted here

How the process is going

I feel like things have been pretty on track so far? I have a solid 11 days until the end of the month to get the final painting done and I think that because the style is more abstract I am feeling less pressure to make sure everything looks 'correct' (not that I think this piece will be 'easier' by any means! Just from practising I can see that I really will need patience to get the really controlled, strong look that Alma Thomas achieved in her works).

Anything I have learnt

I have learnt the usefulness of redrawing something several times over to get a good 'feel' for it, even if it is a little bit tedious. I can't really think of much else for this week/month tbh.