Sunlit Black poplars, early Spring, Bristol.

Often I will prefer to avoid a situation where the sun is coming from behind me (possibly from right or left in addition, but principally from behind) for 2 main reasons. Firstly, the sun will be fully on your paper and palette, except for when your own shadow moves over it. Both these things create difficulties in judging tones and colour, and regarding drying times. Secondly, because shadows fall away behind the subject things can look quite flat, whilst also being revealed in every possible detail – which then needs simplifying!

The problem with Winter or early Spring is that the with the sun staying low in the sky the alternative of painting towards the light comes with its own problems. Mainly that the subject is too silhouetted and dark, and the sun too blinding on the eyes to look at it.

I’ve recently decided to focus on sun-behind-me views. At least the fast drying effect isn’t as bad now as it will be when it gets warmer. Also, the relatively low sun at this time of year casts a warm tinge over the landscape, which brings out the ochre colours of the leaf buds nicely. In just a week or two many of these colours will be gone and replaced with a boring lime green everywhere. I do love it when new growth starts, but I also feel the need to tone down some of those overpowering greens.

The first painting here was done at a local city nature reserve. These trees are Black poplars, which are now the rarest native tree in the England, so I’m glad we’ve got some locally, and that they are being looked after. They are definitely worthy of a painting. I had to try to paint carefully around the trunks with the blue of the sky, so that a first wash of pale Raw Umber on the trees would retain its warmth on pure white paper. Quite fiddly! Also, I wanted some soft edges to the warm tree buds in the sky wash, so added some Raw Umber into that before it had dried, where the main clumps would be. The relatively small areas of dark/shaded branches and trunks were added after everything had dried, along with dry brush work to suggest smaller branches/twigs.

Burnett hill in afternoon sun.

This second painting was back at Burnett Hill, looking up the hill along a hedgerow for a change, rather than the opposite view towards the Chew valley that I’ve done several times before.
Like my painting last week on the Avon (also included at bottom), this has the sun behind me (and to the right somewhat), so what I’m looking at is face lit – shadows falling away behind. In this case I just invented a shadow over the immediate foreground, as if cast either by the overhanging tree branches (it was a huge tree) or just another bush/tree out of shot.

Another pictorial ‘disadvantage’ of a front lit scene is there is usually less of an aerial perspective effect owing to colour; ie. the distance remains fairly warm. I could have ignored this to a degree and cooled off the hedgerow on the horizon line to help set it back (or else paled it in tone), but decided I’d try to cope with representing it as it in fact looked.
In my painting from last week by the river, I did cool off the distance, blue-ing it down in a way that it wasn’t in fact, but this does run the risk of losing the sunlit effect.
On reflection I can see that a way around the ‘problem’ for this painting would have been to have painted the horizon hedgerow (and much of the right hand field) as if cast under a cloud shadow. I could therefore ‘justify’ cooling it down, thus aiding the effect of distance, whilst also creating a useful piece of tonal counterchange. Having the warm colours of the sunlit trees juxtaposed against a cooler colour would also have enhanced the sense of light, and atmosphere of the painting.
Front lit views will often call for some good negative painting too. I used my fingernail to scrape out some branches/twigs etc which were catching the light against a darker background, but didn’t manage to capture the overall effect very well in the complex masses of ‘stuff’ where grass-meets-hedgerow. I probably should have squinted more at the scene – got caught out focussing too much on everything.

Frontlit river willows on the Chew

Finally, above is a painting from a similar time last year, with sun directly from behind. This is a good example of a painting that required a lot of negative painting. In fact it felt like I was painting around things more than actually painting the things themselves. Its very tricky and requires lots of patience and concentration. And more practise.

March 25th by The Avon near Keynsham.