Whilst spending time at home doing a daily drawing of the human form out of my head, my other art class once a week was spent working on an oil painting of the South African Air force Avro Shackleton.
The work is based on a
photograph of the machine that I took several years ago at an air show here in
Cape Town. I used the image to develop a drawing – tonal study – of the
aircraft.
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| Avro Shackleton A3 pencil drawing |
After figuring out the tonal range of the image, I repeated the exercise in watercolour. This created a lovely tranquil looking image of the aircraft.
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| Avro Shackleton A3 watercolour |
Up to this point the
image was not particularly adventurous, in fact it was little more than the
recreation of a photograph in different media. Something that computer packages
purport to be able to do these days! I wanted to go for something a little
different in the oil painting.
My first idea was to place the aircraft over the sea with a drifting rubber dingy of small lifeboat in the water, thus depicting the aircraft in the air sea rescue role. I looked at some paintings of seascapes with small boats in them and found one by JMW Turner. I used some of its background to create a mock up of what a painting might look like.
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| Avro Shackleton rough with lifeboat - A4 watercolour |
The mock presence of the boat created some issues with composition and perspective which was a distraction from the main point of the image, the aircraft. So I tried again without the boat and more defined storm clouds.
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| Avro Shackleton - A4 watercolour rough |
Then I looked at one of Turners most iconic painting, the ‘Fighting Temeraire’, and in particular the sky behind it. I began to wonder how Turner would approach and paint this aircraft. Another rough watercolour followed. This proved more acceptable so I used it as the starting point of the painting and created the first glaze of the painting on the canvas board.
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| Avro Shackleton final watercolour and first oil glaze |
As the painting developed the sky went through a number of iterations such as the one below. Here the suggestion of a horizon can be seen in part of the image.
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| Avro Shackleton Oil glaze - intermediate stage |
I decided to enhance
the horizon suggestion without making it too explicit, the idea is to leave the
background to the viewers imagination whilst the foreground (aircraft) is
realistic and explicit.
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| Avro Shackleton Final oil painting - 20 inch x 30 inch |
