The Red Hills

For my latest painting I took on a topic which I knew was difficult:  I tried to do a proper landscape painting of a panoramic photo on a wide canvas.  I was quite excited since I recently bought new paint.  On the suggestion of a professional artist, I bought Winson and Newton’s Galleria series of artist quality acrylic paints.  The artist (Diane McLean from De Rust) suggested that the better quality paints should give my painting the better colour quality that I am looking for.  So, I was looking forward to using my new paints on this very ambitious project.

While on holiday in the Little Karoo in the town of De Rust (near Oudtshoorn in the Western Cape), I took a series of panoramic photos of the well-known red hills in the area.  My plan was to a create some panoramic paintings from these photos.  The photo that I used for my painting is presented here.

Red Hills reference photo

 

 

 

 

The big challenge was to get the balance right between light and dark and details versus vagueness.  Since I was working with new paints, I followed the advise of my online art teacher Richard Robinson by using a limited palette and first creating a colour chart.  I used Raw Sienna and Ultramarine as the primary colours and used white (both Titanium white and mixing white) and light yellow to reduce the darkness in the colour.  Off course, the yellow also brings green into the picture and this green is a better green than my tubegreen (Phthalo green).  The colour charts are presented below.

Raw sienna – ultramarine – white colour chart

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Raw sienna – ultramarine -yellow colour chart

 

 

 

 

 

 

The colour charts turned out to be crucial for this project since I could simply refer to the chart to determine what colour I needed to mix and how I needed to mix it.  I spent 16 hours finishing this painting and result is presented below.  I am satisfied with the painting.  The clouds could get some more attention and I would like to do something with the field in the foreground, but I decided to leave it as is.  To me it was a real accomplishment to be able to express the level of realism that I have managed to do.

The Red Hills