Spring made a welcome return for a few days this week and I managed to get up early on Saturday morning and headed back out to the Stirling Range.

It was pretty hot for 6:30am, and there was very light cirrostratus cloud cover all morning. The light kept changing as I was painting, sometimes revealing subtle detail in shadows and sometimes obliterating it, but I was pretty happy with this one for a quick sketch.

(Sketch for Bluff Knoll Framed by Eucalypts. 35x25cm oil on board. © Andy  Dolphin)

I hope to develop this into a larger painting and to spend a bit of time resolving the tangled mass of bushland in the middle and foregrounds. The clouds look a bit contrived here but that’s what they actually looked like at the time. It was quite surreal.

On the way home, I stopped on the side of the road and did a quickie of Mount Trio. I used a very limited palette of French ultramarine, cadmium scarlet and Australian red gold, plus white. The Aussie red gold makes the most amazing colour mixes and I’m still to work out how to predict them.

(Sketch for Mount Trio. 20x22cm oil on board. © Andy  Dolphin)
I hope to get back here at different times of the day and see what happens with those shadows on the peak.