Memories of a rainy visit

Watercolour of Lugano

A second painting after my visit to Lugano in October. Despite the gloomy weather, the colours shone through and brightened up the scene.

Piazza della Riforma, Lugano

Watercolour, Aquarell

This is Piazza della Riforma, the market square of the pretty Ticinese town of Lugano. The photo reference for this painting was taken a day after deluges of rain hit the canton of Ticino. As we emerged from the train tunnel (Europe's longest) on the south side of the alps, we could see waterfalls everywhere running down the  mountains.

I do like painting rainy weather, as it provides reflections and colourful umbrellas that can enliven a subject.

Saltburn Beach

One the coast of Saltburn, I was amazed to see these large round boulders that looked like perfect sculptures, shaped and smoothed over millions of years.

Paintings of the City and the Countryside

This is the Viaduct Tavern, which I photographed on my phone sitting on the top deck of a bus. This made the horizon line a bit higher than usual. I liked the cast shadows and strong contrasts of dark and light in the scene and had to go quite dark to bring out the white walls of the building.

This folly belongs to Wimpole Hall, a National Trust estate in Cambridgeshire near Royston. A folly is quite a romantic subject, which I tried to convey by using soft edges and heightened colour. 

Plant pot in sunlight

I think this plant is an agave, a type of cactus. For the leaves, I used phthalocyanine green mixed with  different blues (cobalt, ultramarine, cerulean) and yellows (lemon, aureolin, quinacridone, raw siena) to create a variety of hues and tones. 

The background was painted mostly wet-in-wet to give an impression of an outdoors setting.

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.