Below are my most recently finished paintings.
| Lotus Flower |
Work in Progress
This page is provided to show how a design can change and develop from initial drawing through to completion.
Hopefully it will illustrate how I like to work. The page will be updated regularly to show one work in progress with an
archive available for those interested in my techniques.
| 'Hello There' Watercolour |
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*Methods outlined here for Barbara, who's also passionate about detail. Deciding it was time to paint the textures of a section of drystone wall, I used some of my reference photographs of walls and the Borders countryside, together with the face of a friendly black-face tup, to put together this composition. Everything was drawn in detail in pencil first, with selected wild flowers of hogweed, nettles and grasses added into the foreground.
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The black-face tup was painted first, starting with the eyes. The friendly look was an important feature for the final painting so I had to get it right. Then I masked all the foreground leaves, flowers, stems, and then the lichen textures on the stones, together with the moss textures, ready for painting all the supporting surfaces inbetween. I used a ruling pen for the masking to save ruining a brush. It's important that the masking fluid be a very runny consistency for this to work well. |
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Next I painted the ferns with all their cast shadows, the rocks wet into wet and their crevices, the mediums and darks of the mosses, and the medium and darker tones in the foreground foliage areas. All the pale cream masked areas you can see were to be the lightest tones of the foreground features after the masking fluids removal.
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The masking fluid was removed - a lot of preserved white revealed! |
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All the masked structures and textures were painted in, or in the case of the lichens, tinted in with thin glazes. The foreground grasses were more time consuming as I developed additional stems and leaves in the shadow areas between those that had just been painted in. It was important for this area of the painting to suggest being in the shade, so blue-greens predominate. The distant fields and tops of the ferns were to be catching the sun. At the base of the wall behind the foliage there needed to be more shadow development. After that, in this area, gouache was used for some overlapping lighter grasses here and there. The painting was coming alive now. In pursuit of more masked textural effects, I decided to use it on the bank of conifers on the left and some distant trees on the right, just before they go into the far distance where the crisp edges of masked textures would be inappropriate. |
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As you can see these masked trees were then painted in ; shadow darks first, then masking removed, then local colour on top. |
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Finally, time to paint the background, choosing warm tints for the patchwork of fields, stippling softer textures for the distant trees, and soft banks of clouds for the sky. |
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| Constructive comments welcome - please email | ||
| pdf files of previous projects can be downloaded here | ||
| Panther Lily | 0.3 Mb |
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| South to Carter Bar | 0.5 Mb | |
| 1.6 Mb | ||
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Poppy Fields | 1.1 Mb |
| Rhododendron "Percy Wiseman" | 0.7 Mb | |
| Monarch Butterfly and Wild Flowers | 1.1 Mb | |
| Victorian Pansies | 0.67 Mb | |
| Brown Hare | 0.9 Mb | |
| Blackies Patch | 1 Mb | |
| Ziggy, maine coon | 1.7 Mb | |
1 Sandystones Cottage . Nr Ancrum . Jedburgh . Scotland . TD8 6UP .
+44 (0)1835 830795 .
All artwork ©Lynne Henderson.