Scottish Landscape Art – Scottish Landscape Paintings

‘Below the east ridge of Ben Lui, Winter’ (Work in progress)

Work in progress, ‘Below the east ridge of Ben Lui’, Acrylic & Pastel, 80 x 80 cm

This is the latest stage of a new 80 x 80 cm acrylic & pastel piece I’m working on.  It isn’t a great photo either …just one that I snapped to record the progress of the painting.  Anyway, hopefully it’ll give you an idea, not just of the painting, but of how these pieces are done.

I guess I must have spent about four days working on this piece so far.  I tend to paint the basic composition in quite boldly after first lightly drawing in the composition with a water soluble pastel.  At this point it’s just the basics….structure and some colour.  What it doesn’t have at this point is any sense of atmosphere, the cold and the peace and quiet.  This will hopefully come later, created with subtle use of pastel and translucent glazes.  That is of course, if all goes to plan.  It might end up a mess ….time will tell.

The painting is a view looking up to the end of the east ridge of Ben Lui.  On the day we were here a few years ago, our aim was to climb this by way of the obvious snow filled gully.  Once we got a little higher up though we realised that the snow was in poor condition and instead we moved slightly to the right and scrabbled up a mixture of frozen turf and rock, before finally emerging at the top of this prow.  Beyond the ridge levels briefly before continuing up very steeply to the summit.  It was a great day and one I’ll never forget.  If I manage to complete this piece satisfactorily, I’ll post a decent image of it so that you can see how it moved on.