Ö÷²¥´óÐã

He loved the mountains and streams and snow and great slabs of rock, and he coped with them absolutely brilliantly - painting them all with a palette knife in huge flat areas of different colours.

Llanddona, by Sir kyffin Williams. Property of Ö÷²¥´óÐã Wales.

The slight changes of colour he handles with the palette knife painting are just brilliant - you have the flat edge of one area and then you get another area right next to it, a slightly different colour, yet completely clean where they meet. You don't get any blurring of the paint from one into the other and it was just incredible to look at his techniques and see how he did it, and wonder how on earth he kept all the colours so clean.

Trying to recreate his style, that's what I found very difficult. I found I was using the tip of the palette knife to paint a lot of things in tiny detail, whereas he seemed to use the great flat areas of the knife blade to smooth things across. I found that quite frustrating - that I couldn't paint them as well as I wanted to, or as well as he did. The more I painted, or tried to paint in his style, the more I realised just how brilliant he was, just so incredibly good.

I think painting Hefin [Jones, the sitter] is probably one of the best memories from the series, mainly because it brought me back very closely to Sir Kyffin. He and I became firm friends in his last years of his life. We were quite close, even though I only knew him for a couple of those years.

I managed to get a really good likeness of Hefin, but it didn't finish up anywhere near as good as Sir Kyffin's palette knife portraits!

Rolf was in conversation with the Ö÷²¥´óÐã press office.

Watch the first episode on Wednesday at 7.30pm on Ö÷²¥´óÐã One Wales, or catch up afterwards on Ö÷²¥´óÐã iPlayer.