Here's the finished picture that I showed in the earlier stages in my previous blog post. The Alton Barnes white horse looks out over the Vale of Pewsey, which is a lovely, wide open place where you can sit up on the Down and gaze over to Salisbury Plain and imagine the far distant past, in between admiring the evolutions of the huge jet fighters that occasionally wheel over the Plain, and the distant rumble of artillery.
I had a paint crisis on Saturday, when I put on a wash for the sky, and it went horrible. I use Daler Rowney hot-pressed paper, because it is really smooth and allows me to paint very fine detail. But the flip side is that it won't suck up huge amounts of paint. So I did a quick dash to Bristol (Wiltshire seems a bit deficient in art supply shops) and picked up some gouache from Harold Hockey's. The sky is painted with Winsor and Newton's Permanent White, which is their most opaque; and Brilliant Blue mixed in with it.
