This was painted from the opening scenes of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, paused onscreen and painted with a flat half-inch brush with raw umber watercolour. I made an initial sketch in pencil to get the main proportions. It was a good job I did, because after drawing the basic outlines of the top corner of the room I drew the figures way too big, out of proportion to the rest of the scene. Maybe this is a Betty Edwards left brain problem: I think the figures have more importance so draw them larger than the background. I had to make a conscious effort to draw small heads! But once I did, something clicked and they looked correct relative to the frame of the door.

Using one brush and one colour was surprisingly liberating, leaving me free to concentrate on shapes of light and dark.

Painted from a photo in watercolour, the colours in this haystack scene look a bit cool for a late afternoon in autumn, but that’s the trouble with working from a photo where all sorts of in-camera corrections have already been done.

Or maybe the light was that cool and neutral. Perhaps the reality we’re trying to paint needs a tweak to be believable, or perhaps we need to wait for the scene to change before we decide to paint.

Experimenting with areas of light, using some heavy (300gsm) Bockingford watercolour paper. It needed to be that heavy because I worked it to death, with some areas turning to mud. After all that abuse, the paint still lifted from the paper (shadow side of the trunk).

The main object was to experiment with the relative brightness of different areas: to make something look light, make the areas around it darker. Leaves on the foreground tree were blotched with a bristle brush.

Watercolour, from a photo.

This was the first time I used a normal watercolour brush instead of a water brush. By letting the paint dry before applying another glaze, shades and colours can be built up. It takes a while as you have to let each application dry completely before applying the next. A hairdryer could speed things up, but that ruins the mood.

Hergé’s clean line technique is deceptively simple. He managed to get so much expression in the hands, face and posture with just a few well chosen lines.

The colours in this copy are uneven, showing my poor watercolour wash technique, not helped by using a water brush which continually adds water to the mix. I think the original team at the Hergé studios used gouache, which makes it easier to apply flat blocks of colour.