Canterbury Hills (Lyons on Lockdown #11 Painting

Don't you just love the way New Zealand hills fold? I suppose hills in other places do too, but there must be something about the Kiwi topography that causes us instantly to say, "Oh, that film was shot in New Zealand" when a shot of the countryside appears on screen. This is a bit bolder than some of the other paintings (so far) in the lockdown series. I think working on a smaller scale, using quarter sheets of watercolour paper, biases me towards less exuberant, more cramped techniques. I tried to resist that tendency in this painting. As on previous occasions, this recording was bedevilled by technical problems. Well, one technical problem in particular; the camera battery died a few seconds into the recording. It actually died slightly later than it appears to in the video. I guess the camera updates the file every minute or so, and when the battery dies, you get left with whatever file was most recently created, and the last half-minute (on average) is lost. So what you missed was the laying-down of the first wash, after which I was committed to continuing to paint, or I’d lose the wet-in-wet effect that I used to keep the edges of the paint areas reasonably well blended. So while the battery charged again, I kept painting the hills. Then when I started recording again, the camera behaved impeccably. The unpredictability is so unsettling. Sigh…