I’ve made a few changes to the painting following a few days with my kids beside the ocean in Malibu. In the first picture you can see that the water has highlights of reflected light from the cloud base above, giving it some variety and depth. I’ve begun work on deleting the odd cliff structure I put on the right hand side – I’m not sure quite what I was thinking doing that; it was wildly cramping the edge of the painting and drawing focus from the traveling man. Now that there’s a layer of Ceramic white over it I can re-do the sky then add the acacia trees back into the composition.
I didn’t get to the water bottle knot-work, but did design a nice piece of work for the handle of the knife (second picture), and started rendering it in Van Dyke Brown over the blank oval (third picture). I think this will do very well. Once I’ve finished the work on the first layer of the pommel I’ll move back to the water bottle and get the base rendering of that knot done. I’m enjoying this Celtic work very much; I love the romantic quality it brings to the piece and get a great deal of satisfaction from the technical side of the work, which is quite fiddly and requires concentrated effort to get it right, especially when drawing it freehand in paint.
