Butte States - stages 1 to 3

Stage 1

I am happy to report that I am now based permanently at home after two years of living between here and my elderly parent's house in Leicester. I have moved them to within five minutes walk of where I live and can consequently get on better with my work, mainly in the mornings. This means that I can get back to posting pretty much daily updates on paintings in progress etc.
"Butte States" is conceived as a companion piece to "City of the Sky People" in that it's another fantasy landscape painted in relatively real colours. This one is an imagination of a South West American desert landscape such as New Mexico whereby each mesa and butte is an individual city state kind of like there were in Italy in the 1500s, each one fortified with towers etc - sort of a futuristic Medieval fantasy landscape/cityscape!
Stage 1 was "drawn" up with a small bristle brush using a mix of Burnt Sienna and Winsor Violet thinned with Liquin and turpentine.
Stage 2 has a layer of the same paint mix applied to the landscape with a flat brush and rag as the beginning of the tonal underpainting.
Stage 3 has the sky painted in by giving the whole area a wash of Burnt Sienna and Winsor Violet thinned with a lot of turpentine and then areas for the white clouds erased by a rag dipped in turpentine. A second layer of the paint mix has also been added to the the landscape.

Stage 2

Stage 3