The closest I have been to Iceland is when I have visited Denmark, but if ever I do travel to Iceland I would certainly have this location on my itinerary. The colour of the sand, dark, almost black, makes the most wonderful, inspiring colours on the thousands of years old glaciers, that have been breaking up since 1934. The sky colours just add to what in reality must be the most awesome of sights.

I painted in the sky first, wet on wet. I had prepared a wide variety of washes including: a lemon yellow, orange, crimson, cadmium red, a tube purple, and a variety of purples I mixed, from a light purple to really dark purple which looks almost black.

I wet the paper twice, let the water soak in, and then started applying my colours, yellow first, and worked through the spectrum of my colours from light to dark, so I applied my dark purple last.

For the water, I used a lot of my purple colours and used a titanium white for the surf in the background.

For the ices floes I used blue, black, white, silver and a mixture of those colours. These took sometime as I worked in glazes over a couple of days. It is important to build up these colours in layers to create a 3D shape, otherwise they will look flat as a pancake.

I used more of my sky colour (reds and very dark purples) for the body of water in the foreground. When that was dry, I overpainted with pure white, using a dry brush stroke.