Goodrich Castle – Work in Progress

Today I decided I would start my second voyage into the world of oil painting. After much deliberation I decided that I would try to paint this photo taken outside Goodrich Castle last autumn. I was very hung over at the time, having spent the previous night at a party in the village hall however even in my stupor I could appreciate the wonderful colours all around me.

I started the painting by blocking in the darker tones. I then stood back and noticed that the arch was a little crooked but that would be easy to fix.

Next I blocked in the basic tree shapes. At this point I took a chair over to the other side of the room and just sat for a while, partly because I suddenly didn’t have a clue what to do next but also because I wanted a yoghurt.

Once my snack was all gone and I had resigned myself to the fact that I had to do something and it would either work order it wouldn’t I started adding the foliage. At first I was very unhappy with the result but it seemed that the more I worked into the foliage the more the shapes and colours were starting to appear. I was however having issues with working wet on wet and I was concerned that the colours were starting to look muddy. As I had all but run out of white I took that as the universes way of telling me to stop now and come back to it latter. I added a few defining highlights to the remaining trees and then popped my pallet in the freezer.

I will be continuing tomorrow once the paint is a little dryer.