Painting process | Blinding Sunrise, Chelsea Embankment
I got up at 5am for this painting, walking along the Thames at dawn looking for the right composition. I had a clear idea to capture the sun rising over the river, and I was lucky London’s fickle weather complied.
For me, this painting is all about colour and light and celebrating the city at its summery best. This view felt unmistakably London, with Albert Bridge, Battersea Park, and the Power Station all in one scene.
The vertical slash of light is the star of the show, and I love how the yellows, blues and purples interact so beautifully. I enjoyed exaggerating the effect of the bridge disappearing into the silhouette and I’d love to bring that into more of my future paintings too.
Preliminary sketches and studies
This is where the idea started, and you can already see in this pencil sketch that I had the composition mapped out very early. I used this sketch to clarify how dark and light everything should be relative to each other, which is especially important to get right so the sunlight sings.
I did two little sketch paintings to play around with colour mixes. They really help me have conviction with my choices while I’m painting the final piece.
The painting process
After drawing out the big shapes, I went straight in with thick, light yellow and orange paint for the sunlight. This lets me measure the other colours off of the lightest value.
Here I’ve started blocking in the darks. The shadows are deep purple, blue and brown - never black. It’s all precise, but fine detail doesn’t matter (and is actually distracting) at the stage.
And here is the entire painting blocked in, with the big shapes of colour placed on the canvas. I used thick paint with no thinner or oil added, which gave me a great malleable surface to work with for subsequent layers and I enjoyed the effect it had on my brushstrokes.
The next step was to bring in detail, focusing on the parts that are important to the painting. None of the detail in the shadow matters to the scene, so I added just enough subtle variation in the right places to indicate the form of the path and the wall. Instead, I focused on painting how the light hits the lamppost and leaves, and refining the shape of the bridge and distant buildings.
Finally, I focused on making the light effect believable as it skips across the river and obscures our view of the bridge and park on the other side. The pylons on the left end of the bridge are reflected in the water, while on the right side they cast a strong shadow instead.
Finished!
“Blinding Sunrise, Chelsea Embankment”
73 x 54 cm, oil on linen.
This was a real joy to paint and I think that comes through in the freshness of the colours.
Details
Even though I’ve painted the bridge to disappear into the silhouette of the trees, if you look closely you can make out its shape.
I found it interesting how the leaves become cooler and bluer towards the sun, creating a gradient effect back into the darker, yellower leaves.
The bridge’s cables are always a fun challenge to paint and take a lot of back and forth to get right. If each is carefully painted in a solid line, they’re technically correct but look clunky and unreal. That’s because we don’t see them with such precision in real life. So the best way I’ve found is to paint them and then repaint the sky in between to soften and break them up.
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