Here is my latest version of Eltham Palace bedroom. For this one I experimented with adding bright red to the black and white colour composition. Although it didn’t quite produce the desired eerie effect, it did give the image a more dramatic appearance.
For this piece I used a mixture of pencil, fineliner, drawing inks and acrylics, to enable the interior to include both fine detail and bold tonal elements.
My next steps for developing this image will be to recreate it using different colours and to varying degrees of abstraction, to decide which levels of abstraction and representation create the strongest sense of unreality before presenting it on a large scale.
Here is my most recent drawing. For this I used a mixture of black drawing ink, fineliner and pencil, to create both bold and delicate areas of tone.
I worked from an image of the main bedroom at Eltham Palace, a circular room with bright yellow walls.
As I worked into the image, I decided to try to create the appearance of an old black-and-white photo, or a shot from an old black-and-white film.
One of my tutors had suggested that my painting ‘Crooked Chairs’ reminded him of a Hitchcock film, a comparison which I liked, so intentionally tried to create this sense of eeriness in the gloomy depiction of the room at Eltham Palace. I found this particually fun to do since the gloomy atmosphere was such a contrast from the actual, sunny colour scheme of the room.
From this I also got the idea of perhaps trying to transform an interior with a dreary appearance into one with a cheerful look, in future paintings.
For the present, however, I am working on creating further drawings, perhaps to develop into a painting, of my Eltham Palace bedroom drawing, and gradually increasing the image in size for a more powerful atmosphere.
Here is an image of my latest painting. It is a development of my ink drawing ‘Eltham Palace Chair’.
In this painting, I have been experimenting with applying my paint more smoothly, to create a smooth and blended effect, a move which was inspired by some of the artists I have been looking at, such as Weischer and Dalwood.
Initially I tried applying thin layers of acrylic to create this effect, and smoothing any ridges with kitchen towel, or sanding them slightly after the paint had dried.
However, as I began to build my layers up I found this method increaingly difficult, and realised that the acrylics were drying too quickly for the way that I was painting this time (adding large blocks of colour and then working bck into them to refine and alter the tone). For this reason, I decided to switch to using water-based oils at this point, which I found much easier for my purpose.
Because oils are much slower-drying than acrylics, I still have work to do on the chair in particular, so have decided to leave this one for now and continue with other work meanwhile.
Here is an ink drawing which I did of part of the entrance hall at Eltham Palace, near London.
I emphasised the effect of the reflections on the polished wooden walls and flooring for an abstract appearance, and to make it look as if the scene was beginning to collapse in on itself in a sea of ink.
I am currently developing a painting from this drawing, on a large canvas which I helped to make by hand.
I found making the canvas frame and particularly stretching the canvas over the frame extremely difficult.
I did, however, enjoy priming the canvas, which I did with several layers of gesso, sanding each one lightly for an extra-smooth painting surface.
Here is one of my more recent ink drawings. it depicts a fireplace in a 13th-Century converted barn that i stayed at on holiday in September, in the Loire Valley, France.
I used more detail for this than many of my recent drwaings of the same kind, so that I would have more visual material to choose from when simplifying the scene for my Interiors and Unreality project.
