Avoiding symmetry in painting

One of the design concept one should adhere to when composing a picture (or even a photo) is to avoid design elements that are exactly the same, as this makes for a static and boring composition.

When I drew Tower Bridge, I realised that the composition was quite symmetrical, so I knew I had to counteract this in the painting stage.

You may notice that I darkened the water unevenly and also lifted paint from one of the  towers to stop them from being identical.

Ickworth House

What isn't clear from this painting is how large the building is in real life.

Ickworth House is a National Trust property. If you love art, you will be impressed by the collection of portraits by famous painters, such as Titian, Velazquez, Hogarth, Vigée-Lebrun and Gainsborough.

August has been exceptionally hot, so we really enjoyed the exhibition in the cool basement of the building, where we found out more about the life of the servants working at the house in the thirties.

Ermitage Arlesheim

The Ermitage in Arlesheim, Switzerland, makes for an easy ramble. Although the area looks perfectly natural, it apparently is a landscaped park in the English style created in 1785. You can find out more about it on this site (in German).

I liked the way the buildings nestled in the landscape, with the red roofs contrasting against the greens. For the mountain on the left, I painted lots of washes wet in wet and mostly wet on dry for the rest of the painting.

Staithes

Staithes watercolour

Staithes is a small harbour village in North Yorkshire and is a popular painting destination for British artists. Well-known painters like David Curtis have painted this place and you can find his paintings in the local gallery.

I made my own attempt at painting this iconic place from the reference photos I took when there in August.

What isn't so apparent from pictures of Staithes is the number of seagulls roosting and flying around the place, their cries echoing loudly from the cliffs.

Painting the backdrop to a model railway layout

My husband is in the process of building a new z gauge model railway layout of an imaginary small town in Switzerland.

The background is painted in acrylic paint on mountboard. I first looked online for advice on how to paint backdrops, as I had done this only once before some years back, and soon realised that we did most of the process the opposite way to the advice given, namely:

- one should create the background first (we made the layout first)
- backgrounds that go around the corner are not advised (ours has three sides)
- perspective views should be avoided (I joined one road on the layout to the background)

Despite all this, I am quite pleased with the result, and it took me just three days to create (one for planning and two for the actual painting).