Grey Whethers and Black Bullocks by Amanda Bates

lovely painting :-)

This painting is very apt looking out of the window at the weather today its very grey and very wet! You have captured the wildness of the lansdcape really well here with the storm clouds gathering and the rocks are excellent, lovely colours in them

Great painting Amanda! Love the colours in the nearest stone, a little colour in an other wise overcast landscape. Lovely!

Thank you, Rebecca, Ros and Fiona. - It was actually a MUCH nicer day than today. It was August (2009), and the same set of photographs that gave me the source image shows my husband in shorts and wide-brimmed sunhat. But the colours in the photograph were in need of a bit of ... emphasis, I thought. Never trust photographic colours 100%...

A beautiful atmospheric painting of a place I know very well on Dartmoor. Dartmoor is such a wondrous place for not just the hiker or letterboxer (see letterboxstamper.co.uk), but also for the artist with all it's mass of neolithic, medieval and victorian history.

It is a fabulous place, indeed, Paul. I always feel a little guilty and inadequate if I work from photographs - moreso if it's a place I *don't* know well - because I like to think that I include a sense of place in each landscape. I have been to Grey Wethers precisely once, but I do recall the occasion very well (those cows really did act as if they owned the place! There were more of them in reality - and in the photograph). I am very pleased that you, who know the place well, like my painting of it

I don't think that working from photographs is a "crime" in itself, especially if they are your own because then you have a connection with what you see; an emotional response, not dissimilar to sketching. Reproducing them to a T, however, I find dull so don't worry, because you are using them as a tool and as I have said before, I admire your knife oils.

Thank you, Gudrun. My personal rules stipulate that any source photographs must be mine - I won't even use my husband's! I usually like there to be more than one photograph, but this was from a time when I wasn't shooting specifically with future paintings in mind, and when I was still making the mental transition from film to digital... This particular shot just leapt out and shouted, "Paint me!"

Just on the topic of using own photographs. I prefer that too. I have used one from a friend of mine and it didn't work - you never get the composition you need.