Rough sketch and a substrate of (quite appalling) acrylic gesso (cheap but should have been cheaper). A1 card with acrylics, some of it an undercoat of luminous pouring paint which will be mostly covered by darker acrylics and hopefully wink through to make leaves highlighted by a spotlight.

Touch of the van Goghs in the sky here. I’m applying leaf shapes and a second layer of colour to the foliage areas with a view to creating texture. I don’t intend to make detail, just impression, so I need the shape, the lumps and bumps, and a kind of contour map to help with the application of a more broad brush approach later.

This is the point I begin to struggle with the idea of house!

Trying to avoid the bucolic, I find myself mired in the bucolic and go back and forth between the ends of that spectrum.

This is exasperation – the house got lost so I ‘revealed’ it the way you reveal lost items in virtual worlds. It did not last and eventually I removed it altogether and introduced a ‘visitor’ via photographic overlay.

The overlay is a photograph I took of my shadow. The background is removed and the slice applied in PhotoDirector which also handles opacity.