Painting of Deep Wood Estate Winery, Dunsborough, Western Australia

Deep Wood Estate the original photo

The photo above is from the collection of images I have on my laptop. It is part of a larger panoramic view. I chose it because I liked the shape made by the dark trees in the centre, the curve of the hill behind and the distant view on the left.

Image drawn with bamboo pen

 In my drawing I distorted the original image to reduce the size of the road as I thought that the big area of road was boring. I brought the grapevines on the right in close to the viewer so I could utilise the chaos and pattern of the vines. I raised my viewpoint so I was looking down on the vines on the left and brought the central trees in really close. In doing so I changed the shape of the image to match the shape of my Arches 76 by 56 cm paper.

Initial colouring with oil pastel

 I coloured the image with oil pastels trying to create pattern and using a basic colour scheme of red/orange to violet/blue. I am more concerned about tonality than colour with the yellow/orange colours the lightest (apart from some white) toning through the reds to the dark blue violets.

Studio on the verandah

 I do a lot of my work on the verandah as it is cool there and I can interact with people passing along the street. The houses here are nearly all open to the street and people wander in and out in a very informal manner.

Tricky stage

 After getting the painting just right I destroy it by covering it with ink which I partially wash off.

Nearly there

 Then I scrape back into the ink covered pastel and rework the whole thing. While I lose some of the colour and brightness of the image I gain in depth and interest in the image. Also it is a challenge to recover the painting and almost a learning process as I get to know the work better.