Experimenting to create a whimsical landscape

Anyone else fed up of this dreary weather, it's warm here for February but still very grey and wet . I try to get out when I can, here the river was in full flow

My cat isn't too impressed and is spending very unproductive days in her favorite spot

 

We have just had Valentines Day, so many people excited and happy to share a day with a loved one, others sad as they remember love they have lost. Supermarkets selling red roses and heart shaped chocolates, I was fascinated to hear St. Valentine was also a saint of bee keepers , so obviously he was a good man

I spent most of yesterday in a dentists chair, another annoying side effect of my cancer treatments is my teeth are cracking, seven to date, so I too haven't been very productive , except by catching up on bargain hunt, and tinkering with paintings past....So today I thought I'd show you a very different blog.

I've been experimenting a bit recently and a lot in my paintings, are turning out quite differently.

I've been looking through my old paintings that I keep in a drawer and I found this rather boring painting of a river. I decided to use ,it as I sometimes do, as a foundation for completely new painting.

Some of my most recent painting seem to have a rather lyrical feeling. I don't know what that says about me, but I'm quite enjoying experimenting with the paint.

So find a nice space in that painting that was relatively untouched. And I drew a little sleeping fox.

Then I got one of my magic sponges and I washed away all the lines I didn't want on the piece any longer.

Then I painted my fox. I use yellow ochre, raw Sienna ,some cadmium orange.

My thoughts were to let the paint merge into the fur. You could put any little creature in here, a hare or a badger. But I quite like the orange because I'm gonna add lots of purples and pinks.

Now the detail is done. I'm really mixing some nice strong colours. I mixed my purple using alizarin Crimson and cobalt blue. I've also got some permanent rose, in fact, I am sort of painting intuitively . And while it still wet sprinkle bits of table salt on the area so that I get nice textures

I move on up the page. I'm adding blues and pinks

 

and greens and at certain points I'm leaving it with some cling film on it to give it another texture.

 

Once I've sort of filled the page and added areas of fantasy as well as realistic areas of trees.

I  also let some of the fur colour bleed into the surrounding colours. so that he looks like he's a part of nature.

You can see the textures in this piece. And then I add some more branches and things so that the forest is surrounding the fox the fox. I'm much happier with it than the original painting that I've painted over. But I have left some elements of the original piece , some of the tree trunks have stayed, and some of the blue sky.

So once I remove all my cling film. I'm left with a painting born out of the foundations of the older one

 

Why not have a go at experimenting with some of your old paintings and see where they  take you?