Moon rising

Moon Rising

mixed media on paper 57x37cm

©2011 Lisa Le Quelenec

I seem to be on a roll with finishing paintings at the moment. This is another one pulled from the portfolio that was started a while back. I know it sounds odd that I'd forgotten about these paintings but the house move we had took nearly two years it was off and on so many times and we packed and repacked so many times that our heads were spinning by the end of it. Now I've got a few paintings that were packed at the beginning that given just another few hours of work will be complete.


This one started off with a monoprint of the birch trunks, at the time I was very interested in the effect of white on white and how there are so many different coloured/toned whites when you really start to look. As a print it didn't really work out, it was a second take from the plate, so I worked into it with paint. The ink used in the print was oil based and when I washed over with watercolour it repelled the paint leaving the trunks untouched. I kept flooding the paper with watercolour and added FW acrylic ink to the washes to build up colour in some areas and blotting it out in others.

The golden coloured bands in the sky and foreground are gold ink, something I wouldn't normally use, but seemed right with the colour scheme. The mica in the gold diffused and swirled into the wet wash in interesting ways and repelled the colour of further washes. Once dried I added the moon and now the light source was decided on I could work out where all the shadows would be on the birch trunks. The sketches I'd done in the New Forest had been done during the day during bright sunlight so I had to use a little imagination in working out how moonlight would fall.

My favourite passage is the three trunks that are right in front of the moon that become almost a silhouette because of the back lighting. Now I've revisited the subject I can see lots of ideas to develop it as a series. I'll be getting my sketchbook out over the weekend to work out some more compositions.