Oh For The Wings of a Chicken

This is a gouache painting – see Tip Still Waits on Howden for color palette details. I want to point out a few things about this painting of Jack,  the donkey.

This is just my preference, not a suggestion. I paint the main subject(s) in fairly realistic detail, but I do other features in a more stylized way. Here, Jack and the Chicken are quite realistic, whereas the fence wire  is not to scale for this kind of fencing. The same applies to other gouache paintings you’ll see here such as Tip… where the dog is lifelike, but the barbed wire is thick.

The next point concerns the color perspective. This is the use of color tones to give visual clues about depth and to help distinguish near objects from distant ones. As a general principle, objects closer to us have warmer colors – reds, browns, yellows and so on. Further into the distance, colors are cooler – nearer the blue end of the spectrum. You can see this in the picture.

The warm colors seen in the animals are absent in the distance and the hills are a bluey-green color.

Contrast to show distances of trees

Another thing to notice about the colors is the difference in contrast between near and distant objects. The grass in the foreground and the wall stones have a high level of contrast whereas there’s very little contrast in the distance. You can see how the distance is brought out using contrast in the image of the trees shown here.

We’ve all noticed, as painters, that we see nature in a different way –  through different eyes. The things we’ve just mentioned – the colors, the contrast – are things that you start to notice for the first time. If you look across a valley, you see the thickness of the sky. You see how it gets bluer further away, along with the change in color of the trees and grass.

You also notice the seasons, the animals, the skies. You may see the moon as a sphere, hanging in the sky, instead of as a flat disk that’s been pasted there.