Sometimes you just need to loosen up and slap it on

Over the last few months I have mainly been doing landscape and wildlife paintings. The latest, The bridge between two cities, is a prime example. A lot of control was needed to get proportion, depth, light and least of all “that bloody bridge” right. It gave me such a headache and yet, in the last few days, while looking for inspiration all I kept finding were the same type of images that I always paint.

This morning one of the other artists that I follow on twitter (@Jeanettejobson) said “Small amounts of paint are never used in palette knife painting. This is not a technique for the paint hoarders.” and this simple tweet pushed me into a moment of madness. I remember seeing a photo of my sister taken by Samuel Durkin and I decided to just give it a go.

First up came the charcoal drawing. A few simple lines are usually all I need as I like to save the more complicated shading for the finished article. In order to reduce the amount of mixing of the charcoal with the paint I covered it in matt medium, a trick taught to me by Will Stevens on my first art course. I quite like the look of this even before I hit the paints.

Following the advice from Jeanette I loaded loads of paint, grabbed the palette knife and off I went. First up went the shady bits, the burnt sienna and raw umber then I just kept adding and adding until I finally felt done.

I probably used more paint on this that I have on all my other pieces of work put together but it was great fun. I sometimes found it frustrating that colours started to merge together but in the end it didn’t really matter. This was never meant to be a great work of art. I started this for fun and I need to remember to hang onto that. It doesn’t matter that everyone will tell me that the nose looks wrong, or her chin is a little out, or the overall posture should have been more tilted. This will never hang in the National Portrait Gallery. But it was so much fun to paint and that is more important.