Reference photo – A little village on the Scottish coast

I have zero experience with painting with a palette knife other than wielding it with gusto when applying the mixed media textures for all those camel paintings. I always felt a bit like I was icing a large cake with butter icing, which is all good and well, but I figured for painting a landscape, or flowers with a palette knife I would require a little more finesse. There is nothing like YouTube and the blogs for all sorts of directions, advice and input on how to paint with a palette knife. I have a little while to go before I can claim Jackson Pollock status, but I certainly have a little more insight into handling a palette knife.

For this painting I used a medium sized diamond shaped Palette knife with a cranked handle.

My colour palette for this painting was as follows:

• Titanium white
• Cadmium yellow light
• Alizarin crimson permanent (W&N)
• Ultramarine blue
• Burnt umber
• Naples yellow

I am aiming for a very painterly impressionistic technique in this painting. Ultimately I want to familiarise myself with a palette knife and the techniques of paint application so I can do painterly studies of my orchids. The idea is to loosen up my style and try to observe the shapes rather than the details which is a challenge for me, especially when my comfort zone comes from highly detailed botanical illustrations.

I have a tendency when using a brush to try and always ‘neaten up’ my edges so I am hoping and aiming to become more comfortable with unplanned more gestural marks, and let go of fiddling with the details, and focussing more on painting with more energy and personality. With learning a new technique there is always that uncomfortable learning curve where one feels anxious around coping with the new challenge.

I went through the usual drill of painting on a tonal ground in a mixture of raw umber and titanium white, sketching in the landscape outline, and then blocking in darks and lights using burnt umber and titanium white. During the second stage I introduced the blues and greys creating a visual balance between the warm and cool. Next I exaggerated the brightness of the colours to lift the scene a little, but adhered to the idea of what was there. I also used a combination of palette knife and brush to smudge some of the sharper palette edges and add some linear detail with a finer brush.

And there you have it, my first landscape painting using a palette knife.