Derby Museum and Gallery did a call out for artworks responding to the theme EVERYONE – Your place in the world. I have never responded to an artist call out before and I felt that this would be a lovely starter exhibition to enter.

As I want to develop my place to be outside painting, I chose an area of Derbyshire that I particularly liked, Dovedale in Ilam and created a design from a photo I recently took there. Obviously lots of deep thought going on for the idea behind this piece! Sometimes it’s nice just to paint your view of a place, which is what I set out to do here.

I sketched two designs first to give myself some practice and generate how I wanted the scene to look. The top once was too cold but quite cold to the actual colours, and the bottom one was a tad too psychadelic but I liked the idea of addng characters to the composition to give the view someone to connect to.  I then sketched the design onto canvas! I’ve included below my rouch sketchbook pages to see the process i went through. Nothing very complicated but it helped to get my thoughts in order and I could figure out what colours mixed well with others and how I could eliminate other colour options that would ruin the balance of the piece.

I used Gouache as my medium as i’m used to watercolours but I want to learn more about how to layer opaque paints, making Gouache the perfect middle ground. They were very easy to wipe off though at the beginning when I was adding new layers but eventually I got my under painting to how I wanted the colour structure to go.

From there I just kept on refining the detail! I wish I had a good reference for a person in this kind of light but ended up having to work from memory and imagination ( dangerous combo when trying to get things looking realistic! ) and the final piece didn’t look too odd thankfully. I used some interactive acrylics for some colours I couldn’t make with my Gouache and for some of the whites.