Keying a landscape painting

Here is a little stream where Willard Metcalf painted. It is in Cornish Flats, New Hampshire. Cornish covers a lot of area and he painted all over it, but he painted many times in this valley.

I have done a number of posts about Willard Metcalf. He is an artist of whom I am fond and I have spent some time studying his work. You can look back through this blog and find a weeks worth of dissections where I carve up some Metcalf paintings. He worked a lot in New Hampshire where I live and the last few days I have been traveling to and painting on this location with my friend T.M. Nicholas.That is also the reason I am posting so late today as I got home very late last night, I wrote part of this post and then at about 2 o'clock in the morning I collapsed without proofreading and publishing it. I left it till today. But here is my belated post. Thank you for your patience.

This is my friend T.M. Nicholas at work there yesterday.

And here I am.The painting looks very dark because it is in the shadow and the landscape is in the light. It is actually much lighter than it looks.

And here is the painting I made. It is a 24 x 30.

My practice is to go on painting trips and start paintings. I then hole up in the studio, usually during the gray and rainy days to finish them. So this picture will see a lot more finishing in the studio before it goes out the door.There are so many paintings going through here and in so many different stages of completion that I often show you them in various states of finish. I will try to remember to show it to you again when I finish it. I photographed this every hour or so as I painted, if I do the same thing in the studio as I finish it I can make a tutorial from that..

Several people asked in the last comments, about how I key a painting. So I will speak to that today.

Keying a painting is setting the range of light to dark, and where the different elements will be placed on that value scale. Generally this is done by establishing the values of the sky and ground, and hopefully, something like a tree or a hill where the landscape meets the sky. The difference between these is how the key is first established. With the introduction of a few dark accents and a higher note in the landscape, you have layed out the gamut of values that will be used in the painting. Note I am talking about key as it relates to values and not as the set of colors used to make the painting. I could key a painting in black and white.

Imagine a set of ten shelves with each shelf representing a value in our scale of one to ten. If the elements of the landscape are the toys scattered about on my playroom floor, key is how I pick them up and order them on those shelves. I might for instance, put all of my toys on only the middle four shelves. Or I might put one on the top shelf and all the rest on lower shelves, but none on the bottom shelf. I can put those toys in any arrangement on those shelves I want, using all of the shelves or only a few. But I decide. The toys don't tell me where I have to put each of them.Toys are not good decision makers.

I paint in a relatively low key. That means there is more colored pigment in my lights . If I were a high key painter there would be a lot of white in my notes in the light. Most outdoor painters work in a pretty high key so this gives my work a little bit of an unusual look. By lowering my key it enables me to keep more color in my lights, because I am not using so much white there. Much more on this later, but I mention it because I am a bit out of the usual in the aspect. It is important to find how YOU like to key your paintings. I point this out because I want to teach you in the broadest manner I can, that is, how to do things, rather than HOW I do things. Much of the time what I do is pretty universal, but in key I am a little out of the ordinary, so there's a heads up.

There are several large themes running through this blog and one of them is the idea of observing, thinking and deciding. Here is today's version of that.

YOU MUST DECIDE HOW YOU WANT YOUR PAINTING TO BE KEYED, RATHER THAN SIMPLY TRANSCRIBING THE VALUES PRESENTED YOU BY NATURE ON THAT DAY.

So keep in mind that the sky is the giver of light and the landscape merely the receiver of light. You are the designer of the painting, not nature. Arrange your lights and darks to make an effective composition, rather than having the same biggest contrast at the horizon installed automatically in every picture you make. The eye is drawn to contrast, if your biggest contrast in a painting is always in the same place, all of your pictures will arrest the viewers eye in the same place.

KEY IS, LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE IN A PAINTING, SUBJECT TO THE MACHINERY OF DESIGN. YOU CANNOT OBSERVE GOOD DESIGN INTO A PAINTING.