Expressive Textured Winter Landscapes in Mixed Media

I thoroughly enjoyed yesterday's workshop with Soraya French.  With some careful packing, I managed to fit all the suggested materials into a rucksack and a shopping bag so my journey on the bus was not too fraught (apart from delays with rush hour traffic and road works).

Soraya's teaching style was relaxed and easy to follow and she was able to advise and encourage each student individually.  Her first demonstration painting was split into two parts so that we could prepare our paper or canvas surface with various textures (gels, gesso, pastes, collage etc.) and a base wash, before we forgot that part of the process.  This also allowed our work to dry before following up with painting, over-painting, glazing and refining with heavy body acrylic, ink, pastel and wax crayon.

I changed my mind about the sketches I was going to use as my reference.  The first was from a small study of the Neolithic stones at Avebury.

Avebury Stones - pen and watercolour 3" x 5"

I find it quite difficult to relinquish my "watercolour" mindset when using other mediums, so these workshop efforts are quite rough, but I did feel I managed to overcome that to some extent.

Ink, collage, texture paste, gesso, pumice gel, acrylic
and some final touches of pastel and wax crayon

This was my next reference sketch:

On the Polar Road from Narvik - pen and watercolour  5" x 5"

This interpretation was definitely a bit messy!
Ink, texture paste, gesso, acrylic, wax crayon

For my final attempt I decided I might have more success if I followed Soraya's second demonstration piece more closely.

Ink, texture paste, acrylic, with some wax crayon and pastel

I used Hahnemuhle Britannia watercolour paper (approx. 9" x 12") for these acrylic paintings and it certainly stood up well to the battering it got.  The only downside was that the low-tack masking tape I used to attach it to my painting board pulled away some of the paper surface when I tried to remove it.