This is the second of three local photographs, the first my back garden, this the weirdness of an aurora sky, and the third my front garden featuring what I referred to as my guard plant with its leaves like swords.
The aurora was an exciting but ultimately flimsy affair, as if the main show had been kept behind a veil. Nevertheless, we had a pink sky and some people with more of a clear northern view also had quantities of green sheets. The one I saw looked like rice pudding.
This is A1 black card as before, prepped with white acrylic primer.
I’ve kept the architectural style of the buildings and begun to map out the cloud cushions overhead. The photo brings out the rather yellowish green merging with the raspberry sauce of the pudding. I’m using an apply/wipe/scrape technique here to pick up the texture from the primer.
Moving on a little and now I’ve been able to find a kind of dirty plum colour for the sky, lightening it towards the horizon and almost normalising the scene at this elevation. Again application/wipe/scrape and often re-application to arrive at the shapes I need. My intention at this stage is to use watercolour pencil to geometrically outline the clouds and to define the buildings. I can see arms, heads, and hands in this!
15th November.
It’s quite difficult to write into this post at the moment as WordPress is skittering left to right whenever my cursor is in the space. So far, the internet hasn’t provided an answer.
The images below are all taken from the bottom of the painting upwards while it was at an angle with the thought that this simulates the view of the sky from the PoV of a person on the ground.
The painting remains prone while its watercolour pencil pink aurora stabilises. Then we’ll see if it’s staying.
I am so tempted to put a cat in that window! Meanwhile, I think I may need to brutalise the pink.
16th November.
Lime green watercolour pencil, dry, makes a subtle difference I think. There’s a cast to it reflecting both the colours of the aurora as we experienced it here, but also to the NEOs (near-earth objects) of an earlier painting.
I discovered, after a bit of experimentation using fixative and varnish, that watercolour pencil doesn’t hold its raw form if any kind of solvent touches it so I had to concede defeat and let all of the pencilled areas run and blend so I could seal the surface. This resulted in a much more sinister appearance which reflects very much some of those cosmological references I made earlier. Imagine looking up one night and seeing this shuffling herd of bricks and boulders in the sky.
After a bit of searching, I believe I may have identified the clouds in this image. Small, rounded, and quite high, they seem to be Altocumulus clouds, aka high heaps! The photo below is unedited and zoomed in, it shows stars and what might be a comet. Artistic licence allows for removal of intrusive elements such as telegraph wires. Section 2, para 3 I believe.
Today, WP has stopped its manic saccadic flickering but won’t add a tag. #Project 10
20th November. Yesterday I was looking at this, varnished and pristine hanging in my studio and thought, nope, I don’t like those clouds. So today I took them back to basics, to cloud qua cloud as it were.
Not done yet because now it’s two paintings, the somewhat architectural bottom third and the much looser top two-thirds. I’m wondering whether a strong wash of Payne’s Grey might soften all those edges, take the clouds back into the sky, and allow me to scrub free some smaller shapes or parts of shapes from the whole. The bonus of painting on varnish is that the paint’s grip on the surface is relatively tenuous, and recalling that the clouds are not varnished, this means that they probably should be prior to the grey wash.
23rd November. There isn’t, Storm Bert has arrived and the light is about as good as a candle in a fish tank.
I tried again but this time reflection affected the dark of the sky at the top and changed the nature of the image so …
I imported it into Rebelle7, a digital painting programme, and restored the dark tones of the sky using a wash of dark blue/black watercolour on a separate layer. Setting aside animations and other post-production digital effects, this is the only digital component of the image.
I’ve loved this and hated it in equal measure but now I feel as though the sky connects to the ground through a central line and speaks to the glow behind the houses. My painting style is present, this time as a roiling scrub rather than a fluid slither, and the weight is there but without its substance.
Further entries to the log will follow when I have all three paintings in this series completed with video and text as may suit each one.
SCH 2024
Conboyhill Arts - art from stART to finish 
One thought on “Rooftop cosmology”