First painting and first Pickings drawing
Essex Country Estate: January
Here is the first completed painting in my new Twelve Months on an Essex Country Estate painting project. It shows the far end of the lake with the frosty silver birch trees, under-planted with red and ochre yellow dogwood.
The painting is 40cm square, on Winsor & Newton canvas board. It is a mixed media piece, with acrylic and oil pastel, and some Neocolour II soluble wax crayon, too.
I’ve also completed my first Pickings drawing. I planned these as pastel pencil drawings of things which I picked up as I walked around the Markshall estate. In my last post I showed you my collecting tin, with an assortment of bits and pieces that I found – larch cones, oak twigs with leaf buds, a broken small branch covered in lichen, an oak leaf and a feather.
I arranged some of these on a piece of white foam board, so that I could see the details clearly.
The drawing is done with Pitt pastel pencils on Daler Rowney pastel paper.
You may remember that I have chosen bright colours for all twelve of the Pickings drawings that I shall do during the year, so that the twelve drawings can be printed as a colourful tea-towel when the project is finished. I was very pleased with how the bright blue shows up the soft greys and browns of these natural objects.
This drawing is in the Small Paintings and drawings gallery, and the painting will soon be available to view in the 2025 drop down menu under Gallery – I am just waiting for my webmaster to fix that up!
January visit to Markshall
Yesterday I got started on my Twelve Months on an Essex Country Estate painting project. I made my first visit to Markshall!
The first thing I did was to take out a Friends membership. For £49.00 I can make as many visits as I like for the year, which I thought was very good value. I also now have a Friends car park ticket, so that I have access to the woodland when the arboretum and gardens are closed – for example on Sundays and Mondays.
It was a warmer morning than we have had recently, but still only 5 degrees, so not very conducive to sitting still for very long. I had a good walk round the lake, through the walled garden – not much to show there at the moment, of course – and through some of the arboretum.
Two buzzards were circling for some time over the trees at the end of the lake. There were mallards and moorhens on the river running below the white bridge. The huge carp, which we fed when I was there before Christmas, were all gathered by the weir. Large parts of the lake were still frozen, but the moving water by the weir had prevented freezing in that area.
There isn’t a lot of bright colour around in January, but the dogwoods were vivid in reds and ochre yellows, and the witch-hazels were all covered in their crinkled yellow flowers.
I did a small drawing of the farthest corner of the lake, which is going to be the subject of my painting this month. It was very chilly sitting still!
I thought it was going to be difficult to find any Pickings – but once I’d got into the arboretum I was spoiled for choice. I picked up twigs with larch cones attached, an oak twig with shiny leaf buds, a small section of branch covered with lacy pale blue-green-grey lichen, a small woodpigeons feather and an oak leaf. Here they are, in the tin which I take to put things in to prevent them getting crushed.
Later today I will be drawing some of them with Pitt pastel pencils onto January’s deep blue pastel paper which I showed you in my last post.
Getting ready
I have been assembling some new art materials, ready to make a start on my new painting project. I’m intending to make my first visit to Markshall this week, provided the weather warms up a bit – it was -5 degrees C this morning!
You may remember from my last post that I’m going to be drawing some Pickings – items such as twigs, leaves, fir cones, feathers – which I can pick up from around the grounds. I am going to use Pitt pastel pencils, as I did for the beachcombings that I drew in my Mersea Island project. I have a large range of different colours in these pencils already. I used Daler Rowney pastel paper then, and I’m going to use it again for the drawings in this project.
I bought three pads of pastel paper – Neutral, Warm and Cool. They each had six different shades in the pad.
I wanted to choose shades for the drawings that would not only suit the months, but would also work when I use the drawings for a new tea-towel design, and for a new set of coasters. I initially chose twelve different colours.
I quickly realised that these just looked ‘bitty’ and didn’t sit well together at all! I had a think about the tea-towel design, and realised that the first six colours needed to be repeated in reverse for the bottom six. I also bore in mind that many customers had commented that they liked my newest tea-towel – Essex Fields, in my shop here – better than my Mersea Findings one, because the colours were brighter. They didn’t like the neutral earthy colours as much! So I came up with these as my choice.
January and December – blue
February and November – dark green
March and October – bright green
April and September – orange
May and August – red
June and July – dark cerise
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I also thought about the Flowerings paintings that I will be doing each month. Some of these will be gouache – I think! – but some will be soft pastel. I have quite a big range of Unison Soft Pastels now, but not a huge number of vibrant flower colours. While Jacksons Art had a pastel sale on I thought it was worthwhile buying the Unison Colour Botanical box. Look at the wonderful colours!
I am really looking forward to making a start now on Twelve Months on an Essex Country Estate. My first visit could be as soon as Tuesday – and I will share some photos once I’ve been.