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A Winter's Walk
Christmas time in Church Stretton in the Shropshire Hills!
By : Deborah Susan Jones : Editor
The view of Caer Caradoc at the northern end of Watling Street.
With
its Ancient British Iron Age or late Bronze Age hill fort (at the top
left summit in this view) it is easy, on a winter's walk in the
romantic snow, to allow one's mind to wander in the local legend of
being the site of the last stand of British King Caractacus against the
mighty Legions of Rome during the Roman conquest of Britain, so that
allegedly, after the battle, he hid in the cave near its summit, though
another local legend says it is, in fact, "Merlin's cave" so one can
choose one's own legend to dream of while trudging through the thick
crunchy snow.
As
a child, living in the bleak cold urban grey winters of north London
the child artist painted snow scenes of imagined rural countryside
scenes every Christmas and here he found himself, decades later,
painting the real thing!
The
artist decided, on Christmas morn, to do the romantic thing, so often
talked about in magazines and the like and portrayed in classic movies
but rarely actually embarked upon, and go for a walk in the snow in the
countryside and take notes for a classic snow scene painting.
Far
too cold to stop and sketch, the artist, using an early mobile phone,
took snaps of the key colours intended to be painted by shooting a
colour palette of snow colour variations, from freshly fallen to deeply
trudged and of sky and vegetation.
Back
at the studio he e-mailed himself the colour patches, difficult and
very lengthy with early slow mobile technology, and then proceeded to
download the images and drag them into am image editing program and
then pieced them together in a patchwork arrangement.
He
then printed out this swatch card and mixed batches of oil paint to
match the colours on the printed card to use as a palette guide for
creating the painting enabling him to create the very classic picture
he'd always created, since a child, but this time using actual rather
than imagined information., a personally very satisfying finale to so
long a project.
The frame for the painting was also colour matched using the same method.
By : Deborah Susan Jones : Editor
About "Artist"
Frames
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