Well, here I am working away. I will show you a step by step development of a 10x 16 oil done on location here near Charleston South Carolina. Charleston is a beautiful and historic city. I show here with Ella Walton Richardson gallery.The other day it was pretty cold so I wore this ugly jacket which I purchased on a previous trip. It was wicked cheap. It also looks like it was made out of a Hefty bag.
Here is the beginning.The panel looks blue because it was shot in the shadow, it is white of course. I began laying it in with raw umber. I often do a monochrome underpainting but raw umber is unusual for me. I have been fooling around with it lately. Burnt sienna would be more normal in my methodology.I have continued to work out the drawing in grisaille, that is one color. There is no white paint on the panel. As soon as I touch the white I am unable to modify it as much and the
painting becomeslocked down, so I stay out of it at this stage. That means I can push it around and take it in and out easily with a rag and thinner.
I am using only yellow ocher, ivory black, burnt sienna, vermilion (fake ) and Prussian blue, ultramarine, titanium white, plus the raw umber I have already mentioned. I am making my greens with ochre and my two blues. They are not very green and I am pushing the burnt sienna and the
vermilion into them as well. If I had cadmium yellow and viridian I would paint them much moresaturated and far more like what was actually out here. I don't want to do this so I have stripped back to the is a a mostly earth color palette.
Now I have painted in the sky with white and yellow ocher and then Prussian blue over that, to leave the clouds behind. I like to paint sky's with a warm note first as that way I know it will be there. Amateur painters use only blue and their sky's have no light. There will always be enough blue in a sky if you use any. The feeling of light comes from value and the warm colors you include.
Here is the thing a little more refined. I have added a little bit of pthatlo green to my palette for use in the reeds. I don't want them the brown color they are in reality so I am greening them up. I only used a smidgen with ocher and only in the reeds.Now I am finished with the outdoor part of creating this painting which took about four hours. I will work on it some more inside. Maybe I will ruin it. Maybe not.
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5 comments:
I love it Stape! Thanks for explaining how you do the sky - I like the idea of a warm color first. Do you ever use red in the mixture for the sky - to create a sort of soft grey?
Mary
excellent STAP, It helps to see the process you go through that leads to your final painting. Alot is learned just by observing these photos and your explanations. Can you show another completed painting explaning the process just like this post? Do you spend as much time as you can KEYING your painting before you get into detailing? Would you say that having your painting keyed is the most important process?
JIM
Mary; I do use red sometimes and often I use burnt sienna which, while it looks red on the palette is really a sort of yellow-orange,sort of a super ocher.The different notes in the sky are allowed to remain separate, the blue being broken over the other colors rather than pushed down in to it I sometimes use a reverse procedure on gray skies. I paint a gray (VERY LIGHT) made from ultramarine and whatnot. I then break warm notes into that. the trick is to not mix or muddle the notes different in color and temperature but close in value. .....Stape
James; I will certainly do more online demos if you find them useful.
I guess my under painting keys the thing in the early stages. I tend to paint in a somewhat lowered key.Many landscape painters today paint in a high key. I feel that when it works I get a lot of punch and powerful color. When it doesn't work my paintings end up TOO DARK.I think I key almost instinctively now and I hang my detail on the larger masses after they are established. I laid that painting in and used a #12 brush for the first 2/3 of its development........Stape
Thanks for posting this...I gotta come back and soak it all in...I still do Illustration and need to get a painting out the door
blessings bro
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