Mow Cop£240
14 ½ x 10 ½ inches
Watercolour on Bockingford
Mow Cop in Cheshire. As soon as I saw it I knew I wanted to paint it, as it looks so dramatically Gothic perched up on the hilly crag. Very reminiscent of Jane Eyre and Rochester, windswept moors and forlorn love! So I decided to let the sky speak for itself, and started the painting by wetting the paper and swirling the paint on with a large brush and seeing how the paint moved on the paper, the fluid shapes giving the basis of the moody sky and mystical clouds. When it had dried, I added to the cloud shapes, and put more colour in to hint at forbidding dark clouds and distant storms forming. After creating the sky (that sounds very biblical!), and making sure it was properly dry, I painted the heather covered rocks and crags, again letting the paint create the basic shapes on its own, and adding detail in the form of splattered paint, to hint at foliage and lichens. The final part was the dramatic architecture, lit by a bright unseen sun - very simply created by basic light and dark shapes to form the stonework, and because they are painted in such a sharp contrast they easily make the painting dramatic and interesting. I used alizarin crimson for the pinks in the sky, mixed with Antwerp blue for the forbidding clouds and then burnt sienna and raw sienna for the ground, mixed with the same blue, giving a feeling of unity to the painting. Burnt sienna and Antwerp blue made the deep darks of the stonework.
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Gallery - Landscapes 
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