100th Post.

..and it's another abstract.

Given this poor summer, I've taken to painting outdoors whenever the weather allows, and inside when it doesn't. It's leading to very different paintings. I love painting outside (I love being outside), so I'm doing it every chance I get (well, as much as is permissible, which is quite a bit). These paintings are the usual impressionistic landscapes that you find with plein air painting. They're quite tricky to do, which is why I enjoy doing them. There are some amazing plein air painters on Youtube, and my lie-ins this holiday have been spent watching them.  The indoor paintings are leaning towards more abstraction, which I'm quite excited about.
This painting is on top of one of my old paintings of York. I am low on cavases, and I didn't like it anyway. Ever the frugal Yorkshireman..

 I started off by painting a thin layer of gesso over the old painting, to hide it (you can still make it out under the gesso). I then added some texture gel. the web like shape is based on some paths through some wheat that I photographed the day before on a walk with Sara.

 I stuck down some off-cuts of card, that had gold paint on them, and started working some pale blue in the background.

 Next I worked into the ple blue with a rag, and started working some rich cadmium into some areas with a palette knife.

I repainted the background with a mixture of burnt sienna and pthalo blue, before scratching into the paint with my knife, and working in some more cadmium red and a little cadmium yellow deep. It reminds me of a collographic plate, but then the process of producing it was similar.

Abstract