Painting Snow-covered Mountains

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One of the really good aspects of working at the Hay Literary Festival is that we’ve had a lot of youngsters taking part in our short workshops, and several of them have produced excellent work. The language is also quite different, and to every technique I demonstrate the illuminating reply always comes back the same: “Cool!”

I love opening the fantastic world of art and nature to students, and it’s sad we’re unlikely to see these youngsters again, for it would be lovely to see the enthusiastic ones progress their painting further. I don’t do workshops for many reasons, preferring to run occasional courses where I can take folk out into the countryside and show them how exciting it can be working directly from nature.

Today’s tip takes us back into the mountains. So many times I have hiked across mountains through deep snow, up crags and gullies, and taken tremendous efforts to reach a scene to paint. This one, however, is in Snowdonia in North Wales where I simply got out of the car and sketched this view. In places like Snowdonia you don’t always need to trek across mountain ranges to get that stunning subject!

In the watercolour you will see how I’ve created the shadows with fairly strong ultramarine, while leaving the white of the paper to depict the snow highlights. A snow scene can look extremely cold and forbidding, though, unless you introduce some warmer colours. One of the obvious places to do this is in the sky, where I’ve laid Naples yellow and some alizarin crimson to warm it up. Had I pushed this further across to the right I could have also included some of these colours as reflections in the stream, but I was happy with the way things were. Beside the stream I’ve added bunches and strings of reeds with the warm yellow ochre, a useful colour to drop into the foreground of a snow scene to relieve the overwhelming cool – there’s that word again. I’d better shut up!

The painting features in my DVD on Painting Mountains & Moorlands, which is a series of slides covering a whole variety of scenery from valleys to the high peaks and glaciers, and available from http://www.davidbellamy.co.uk

Pastels, Watercolours & Vikings at Hay Festival

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Over the last few days Jenny and I have been demonstrating and running brief workshops at the Hay Festival in the shadows of the Black Mountains. This has been sponsored by Sky Arts in an endeavour to kickstart people’s creativity, and it has meant that we are reaching a different audience. What has been really exciting is the number of youngsters taking part and enjoying themselves.

The picture shows Jenny demonstrating her pastel-painting techniques, and in the short time available she produced a lovely landscape. Pastel, though needs careful handling when you are not used to it: somehow one young lady managed to get more pastel on her face than on the paper! However, they did some really good work, especially as so many were absolute beginners, all benefitting from Jenny’s excellent teaching.

I don’t normally do workshops, and to attempt to shoe-horn them into 45 minutes or so is tempting fate. At times things became almost riotous, but everyone put in a marvellous effort to produce a finished painting. Alas, the brushes for the workshop had disappeared overnight, so we had to scratch a few together, not quite having to resort to a stick of rhubarb!

We are lucky in being sandwiched between two marvellous acts – Opera Playhouse with Pippa Longworth and Karl Daymond, and Hip-Hop Shakespeare. Pippa has a stunning voice and looks quite formidable clad in Viking gear, complete with horned helmet as she launches into a Wagner piece, while Hip-Hop Shakespeare is a marvellously original way of interesting young folk in the works of the great bard.

Jenny and I will be there again on 30th May, 3rd and 4th June, and will be delighted to see any of you who can come along.

Stopping environmental destruction

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They came from Ceredigion, they came from Carmarthenshire, Denbighshire, Radnorshire, Snowdonia, from Shropshire, Devon, Cornwall, Cheshire, and many more places; but most of all from Montgomeryshire. They descended on Cardiff to protest against the destruction and industrialisation of the beautiful Mid-Wales countryside by over 600 wind turbines, with their associated tall pylons, substations and other structures. To protest against the gridlock of main Powys roads every weekday for six years or more, with the associated works of building new roads, bridges, and moving road furniture to carry massive turbine structures and thousands of tons of concrete for their bases, concrete production being one of the most polluting processes known to man. At the same time destroying peat blankets that store CO2, thus releasing the very thing these turbines are supposed to be reducing.

Jenny and I travelled down with a coach-load of protesters. My first problem was when they handed out the song-sheet – no-one else on the bus appeared to be able to read Welsh, so Muggins had to blast away…..anyone who has witnessed my singing will recoil with the awful memory, and in the confines of the coach it must have sounded dreadful – I’m no Katherine Jenkins!  We’re deeply concerned that it is clear that most of Mid-Wales will become one vast windfarm if these plans go ahead. We certainly would not want to walk and sketch amongst these useless structures. They would devastate the local economy that relies so much on tourism.

This was the largest demonstration they had seen at the Welsh Assembly. All the political parties sent out a representative: Labour sent out a girl who had only been an AM for a couple of weeks, while her leader hid away in the Senedd; the Lib-Dem leader, an AM for Mid-Wales shamefully made no appearance; Plaid Cymru, the party whom one would expect to stand up for Wales, made it sound as though he’d fought on our side, which was patently not the case; only the local Conservative MP for Montgomery, the man who galvanised the growing protest movement, stood up for our glorious countryside. Most magnificent was Myfanwy from Meifod who tore into the Welsh Assembly with a ferocity and touch of humour that received a tremendous applause.

But then, not to be outdone, stepped forward that wonderful organisation that strikes terror into the heart of any British government, should they step out of line – the WI. The representative from the Womens’ Institute told the Welsh Ass in no uncertain terms that this wasn’t good enough – a rethink on their energy strategy was necessary. Then, finally, as is always fitting in Wales, we all sang, and sang……

Whether we are artists, walkers, riders, tourists seeking solitude and peace, or whatever, we need the countryside for our health, our sanity and to de-stress. Nothing works better than nature, but if we are not careful we have so much to lose now. If you feel you would like to sign the Welsh Assembly petition against these proposals please see http://www.assemblywales.org/gethome/e-petitions

Painting with Pastels

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Many people turn to pastel, that lovely rich, direct medium, after experiencing the horrors of watercolour, which seems to have a mind of its own, and sometimes it seems, a vindictive one. Pastellist Jenny Keal has just brought out a new book Painting With Pastels, a superb guide for both beginners and the more experienced artists. It is mainly concerned with landscapes, although she has included a number of flower paintings as well.

Barafundle Bay in Pembrokeshire has a gem of a beach and in this painting Jenny has done it proud. She turns a good subject into an outstanding composition with a number of devices. Firstly, the long background cliff-top can intrude, but see how she has softened it off in places, introducing mist here and there with a judicious smudge. She has not been tempted by the cold, featureless sky, but has warmed it up to echo the foreground sand colour. All the background has been achieved in tones of grey, but she emphasises the power and solidity of the rocks with bold, determined strokes of a dark pastel that bring them closer to the viewer and thus creating a marvellous sense of space and distance.

Pastel is a lovely medium for suggesting reflections in wet surfaces, and Jenny’s rendering here has a mouth-watering quality, with lovely soft edges all round. One of her outstanding techniques with pastels is that of flaking – scraping the pastel stick and letting the droppings fall onto a selected area on the painting, then pressed in with a painting knife. Here you see the method used on the white splash, which truly brings the painting to life!

I was with her when she did the original sketch on the beach, which is why I know how much she has tweaked the scene with the eye of the master painter. Her book is crammed with tips and techniques like this, and even if you do insist on sticking with the dreaded watercolour medium (as I do!), you will still learn a lot from this inspiring book, which includes a number of stage-by-stage paintings. Jenny will even sign it for you if you order it from our website http://www.davidbellamy.co.uk

Enlivening your landscapes

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There are a number of ways to enliven your landscapes, and in this watercolour of a farm in the English Lake District I have employed a few devices to add interest. A clothes line can be used to add colour and by not having the clothes hanging straight down you can give them a sense of being blown about – white, pink and red are excellent colours to use on the clothes. Just in front of the house I have emphasised blossom on the trees, and many of the trees around the house are bright green, adding to the feeling of spring and further drawing attention to the centre of interest, which is the house.

However, once you include figures the centre of interest will then transfer to them, unless they are extremely small. The cyclists were not present, but I added them to bring life into the work. Always try and get your figures to be doing something, rather than standing around with their hands in their pockets, and for this try introducing some prop like a wheel-barrow, bucket, or as in this case, bikes. Finally, remember that sunshine will always liven up a painting.

This watercolour is featured in my book David Bellamy’s Mountains & Moorlands in Watercolour where I show the original sketch and photograph of the scene. For details of the book see:  http://www.davidbellamy.co.uk/