Tag Archives: #davidbellamywatercolours

David Bellamy – Warming up your Landscapes

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   When you begin a painting do you stop to consider your colour management or simply copy the colours in the original scene or photograph? Whether you are a serious artist intent on improving your work, or perhaps painting simply for enjoyment, it is so much more rewarding to create a composition where you can inject some of your own ideas to add interest.

     In this watercolour of the Brecon Beacons I decided to create a much warmer feeling than was present in the scene on that particular day, and enhance the summery mood. Apart from the cobalt blue in the sky most of the scene embodies warmer colours, and after establishing the clouds with the blue I laid on permanent alizarin crimson over the lower sky. The blues on the mountains are French ultramarine with a touch of cadmium red added, resulting in a lovely warm purpley-blue. The greens on the fields have also been warmed up with touches of gamboge, and there are also some gamboge and cadmium orange fields to liven things up. In the foreground I dropped in some Indian red wet-in-wet to produce soft edges and when this was dry spattered Indian red and white gouache before finally scratching out reeds with a scalpel.

    At the end of this week I am starting once more to do live workshops, this one at the excellent Sandpipers studio on the Wirral, while on 3rd April I start my first post-Covid course at the superb Caer Beris Manor hotel in Builth Wells. There are still places available on this course, so if you feel like getting out into beautiful landscapes again you will be very welcome. We will be sketching outside (hopefully painting as well if the weather is fine), and also working indoors in the ballroom which has plenty of room for us to keep apart from each other. Details are on my website  Emphasis will be on injecting atmosphere into your landscapes and putting something of yourself into the subject.

    Sadly we haven’t had much snow this winter, but with spring about to burst upon us let’s hope that this will herald better times for getting out and about with our paintboxes.

David Bellamy – Painting an tranquil evening sky

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 I’ve just delivered some paintings to the Attic Gallery in Swansea’s Maritime Quarter for a mixed show running until 26th March, and there are some excellent works on display. You will find the gallery at 37 Pocketts Wharf, SA1 3XL and the telephone number is 01792 653387. My mainly Pembrokeshire scenes includes one of my favourite locations of East Angle Bay.

This watercolour shows a tranquil winter evening with Angle church forming the centre of interest. I’ve kept the main design in harmony with the emphasis on horizontals on the creek, the lie of the land and with the clouds. In the sky the Aussie red gold also has a horizontal bias and is deliberately strong around the lightest part of the sky to heighten the glow. Positioning the church with the creek leading towards it, and the reflected light on the water brings it all together and it is important to ensure that all these varied elements support one another in this way. Sometimes nature needs a little tweaking to produce a good composition. 

 If you are planning on exploring more of the UK rather than travelling abroad this year you may well find the Great British Wildlife & Environment Map of great help. It features over 1,500 wildlife hotspots, eco events, conservation projects and days out in the natural environment, places where it holds interest for those artists who love to get out amidst nature and perhaps sit quietly to observe wildlife. It has an amazing amount of detail on both sides and is produced by marvellousmaps.com

David Bellamy – Creating a tranquil mood in a landscape painting

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As many of you will be aware, I love painting wild seas crashing on a rugged coast, but there is much to be said for the calmer moments. To emphasise this you need to concentrate on the horizontal elements as you will see in the painting below.

As you can see, the sky comprises a series of horizontal cloud effects of evening light, and this is further emphasised by the long, horizontal horizon, with the vertical features such as the mature trees pushed well into the distance. To further enhance the calm mood of the scene the washes laid over the estuary are flat, undetailed ones, and even the line of waders in the foreground conforms to a horizontal pattern. And what if you’re looking for a suitable animal to include in a calm scene – well for me none can compare with the dear old Friesian cow for suggesting a scene of utter calm and tranquility.

This painting can be found in my Seas & Shorelines in Watercolour book which is available from my website  The original painting is on display in the Attic Gallery in Swansea, Tel. 01792 653387  The gallery is open from Wednesday to Saturday 10am to 4pm and can be found at 37 Pockett’s Wharf, Swansea, SA1 3XL where a number of my paintings are on display at the gallery with a lot of other exciting artwork.

    Enjoy your painting!

David Bellamy – Painting a Mountain Stream

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Where I live we are blessed with countless streams and waterfalls tumbling down the hills and mountains, and I like nothing better than to wander beside a mountain stream with sketchbook, well away from the hurly-burly of life. One mountain stream is worth far more than a thousand mental health quacks for our well-being. In my short demonstration painting last week on the Shopkeeparty site I painted a mountain stream on a misty day, as seen below, and on Thursday 13th will be doing a much longer, more considered workshop on the site.

    In the painting I aimed to lose much of the mountain and its detail in background mist, using the wet-in-wet technique, pulling out some of the colour on the left-hand buttresses with a damp brush to suggest light catching the boiler-plate slabs of rock. This was accentuated when the paper had dried by painting in the left-hand buttress which contrasts the softer-edged wet-in-wet approach used on the right-hand one. The central group of conifers was also painted wet-in-wet so that a real sense of distance was created when the dark-tones trees on the left were added. Notice on the cascade how the rocks are placed with hard edges at the tops and soft ones where the rocks rise out of the tumbling water. 

    Next Thursday at 3.30pm I will be running a 2 to 3- hour workshop on painting a waterfall with sunlight and autumn colours, and you are welcome to join me. I shall be showing you how to tackle many fascinating features:

  • how to introduce striking light effects
  • creating effective rock structures
  • making the most of exciting autumn colours
  • the magic of wet-in-wet passages
  • how to capture the energy of falling water
  • the importance of lost and found edges   …..and so much more!

    You will find further information at  Workshop: Autumn Waterfall with David Bellamy (shopkeeparty.com)
    I shall look forward to seeing you then.

David Bellamy – Painting sheep and lambs in springtime

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 The onset of spring nearly always gives us all a sense of hopeful anticipation of more pleasing times to come, perhaps more so this year than ever before as we attempt to recover from this dreadful virus. I hope you are able to get outside and take advantage of the better days, and perhaps manage a sketch or two. For me, daffodils always make a powerful foreground feature, and it’s worth capturing some images of these while you are out.

     This image is part of a painting depicting lambs in early spring. Sheep are relatively easy to draw, but can pose problems for the unwary at the painting stage, especially where you have a light-coloured field caught in sunshine: you need a slightly darker area behind the sheep so that it stands out, and as you can see in this painting I have included several darker patches of grass in order to highlight the sheep. Generally I use Naples yellow for the main body, often leave a white top on head and body to accentuate the sense of light. This is normally left as white paper, but touching in a little white gouache can help rescue one that has not quite worked.

    When including lambs it is important to put across a sense of the relationship between mother and lamb, or between a number of lambs enjoying each other’s company. This makes it look so much more natural. Compare the lamb by its mother in the foreground with the one on the distant right which is lying on it’s own. The closer couple invoke a much more pleasing composition.

    One of the stronger background features is the gate. Although this has nothing to do with springtime I mention it because it is a good example of negative painting. Here, I have worked the darker colour around the gate and posts to define the light woodwork. I never include all five or so bars as it’s good to keep some hidden in the long grass! The painting was done on Saunders Waterford NOT 140lb paper.

    Enjoy springtime, and you can find more help on seasonal work in my book Landscapes Through the Seasons in Watercolour, which you can obtain as a signed copy from my website www.davidbellamy.co.uk