I was working on a cloud painting, it was going to be all about the cloud. A bit of horizon, maybe some water to reflect the cloud. Then this happened.
A swan made its way into the painting. This was very odd as I haven’t painted an animal using oils for years. Pet portraits in watercolour, yes, but an animal, in oils? Eh?
The result is a slightly fantastic portrait of a swan, a peculiar image, make no mistake, but got me thinking I should paint some other animals too, like another swan, or a lioness, or maybe a tiger. I didn’t have any lions or tigers or swans laying about, nor had I recently been on safari, so I popped over to Pixabay, a great source of reference where talented photographers and other creatives upload their images, videos, and music, for use free of royalties, and found some stunning pictures of several different creatures, which I then painted. I have attributed the source of the reference images beneath each of the pictures of the paintings.
And now for the lake. Not far from where I live are the very beautiful Cregennan Lakes, presided over by the magical Welsh mountain of Cader Idris. It’s a delightful spot, and the northern aspect of Cader Idris is the mountain at its most craggy and vertiginous. This painting, oil on canvas, 70 x 60cm, was a studio piece derived from reference photos I took about a month ago. I used large flats for virtually the whole thing, excepting the rocky shore of the foreground.
