Virtual Paintout Challenge: Prince Edward Island

hi there!

this time i finished the virtual paintout before it ended! and it really was a challenge! except for the sailboat painting, i've never done ocean, & few landscapes . . . plus i decided it was time to loosen up!

first, this is the view on prince edward island that i chose:

i liked the simplicity, the opportunity for abstraction, and the play of rosy pinks against purpley blues. here things are, ready to go:

i used a 5x7 canvas board (untoned), put the photo up on the frame, and laid out my palette, using ultramarine, cerulean, sap green, trans yellow oxide, cad yellow light, cad red light, & alizarin:

i tried a new way to organize the paints - i put the white in the upper left corner as usual, but i put the reds & yellows going off to the right on the top & the blues & greens going down the left. i really liked it - seemed a natural way to arrange them for me, & it kept the colors well separated, too! i'll keep trying it this way for a while.

i started to mix the sky color first, using cerulean & white, with a tidbit of alizarin. but before i got the colors really mixed, i thought about using painting knives instead of brushes. i've done only one painting before this with knives only, & loved it! so, just to make this even more of a challenge (mere hours before it was due!) - i decided to do it! here's the sky mix (which i kept marbled instead of mixing it to a consistent color - same with the water mix later on) & the knife (brown handle) i used to put it on:

then i mixed the water color (ultramarine & white) & put that in with the same knife. here is the initial block-in - i've left the canvas blank where the dune was going:

then i mixed up the sand bar color, using alizarin, white, & a smidge of trans yellow. i used this little guy to lay it in - this knife felt like a filbert to me & i thought the shape would work well for putting in that long strip of color - & it did!

then i mixed the dunes mix, using some of the sand bar mix with more white & a touch of cad red light to brighten & warm it up. i used this little triangular knife to lay in all the rest of the painting, including all the details of plants & shadowing, etc that came later:

here're all the blues & pinks in. i didn't put any paint where i was going to put in the largest mass of green for the dune plants: i hadn't done any measurements, & at this point i realized the sand bar was way too wide. so i just used the knife to lift it off & lay in more ocean. then i mixed up four different greens (using my lightest pink for the base of the light greens), some lighter or darker, some purer or greyer. & i realized the sap green wasn't going to cut it for the darkest greens. ooops! got out the olive green & that worked! i also decided the sand colors needed a hint more depth, & added hints of burnt sienna to the bar & the darker dunes. the water behind the sand bar i darkened using anthraquinone blue (if it's ok with you, i may just start calling this 'ant blue' - i'm lazy, & it's fast becoming my favorite blue!)

i then had to put in the clouds. i realized that the horizontal clouds of the photo just wouldn't work - too many horizontals (that sand bar's a whopper, even though it looks better in person than in the photos!). so i decided to go for a fluffy cloud approach. first i mixed up a black to get in the darks. i used the ant blue with alizarin, & a teeny hint of trans yellow oxide - very nice, deeply purple black, just right for the clouds! (this is an awful photo, but it gives you an idea, i hope!). i mixed a small amount of it with white, & worked it in where i wanted clouds.

then i dipped the knife into pure white, strolled it very lightly through the ant blue (leaving a trail behind it!)
and worked in the lighter parts of the clouds. by the way, you can see in the above photo the trail left in the olive green when i slid the knife lightly through it to get just a thin line of paint to make some dark highlights. i love how versatile the knives are, going from smearing on huge masses to fine detail (well, it'd've been finer if my hands didn't shake!).

here's what my palette looked like when i was done. i didn't end up using the cad yellow light at all. i really am finding that the more i paint, the more i experiment with my colors & find out which ones work better for me.
and here it is all finished! (it's hard to get a good photo on this one, since the masses of paint keep picking up &/or shadowing the light!)

i had a lot of fun with this one! it's got that looser, more abstract, interpreted style i feel i want to express in my work, & the painting knives made it easier & even more fun! i really like the clouds - they have volume but are also fluffy - they float as they should! (i have been terrified of trying clouds in the past!) the dunes worked well, along with the plants. the water i'm so-so on - and the sand bar . . . well, i knew it would be hard to get that strong horizontal to work. i think it needed some more variation in color to really pull it off - and a steadier hand to get in the light & dark tones right in the front of it (i tried, but it was too shaky to look very good so i modified it a bit). all in all tho - i like it!

thanks for stopping by - take care till next time!

dusty!

Reflections

hi there!

sorry i've been away from here so long - been a bit under the weather, but also very busy! i got a writing job that turned out bigger than expected & that's been keeping my limited energy-time tied up. but it's almost done - & i did get another painting finished! been working on it slowly - so slowly, i totally missed the deadline!

this was for the august Daily Painter International Art challenge, which was "reflections." i decided to finish it even after the due date passed because . . . well, one, i'm stubborn - &, two, i'm a bit compulsive! also - i guess this is three! - i felt i'd learn a lot from it - &, boy, have i! i'll go through my process painting it, then sum it up - more reflections than the original photo has!

first - here's the photo:

i took that over the july 4th weekend at woodley island. i figured i could simplify it pretty easily so i could concentrate on all the things i've never done in it - things like boats, water, reflections . . . ! i put it on the digital picture frame, placed the grid over it


then sketched it in in charcoal on an 8x10 canvas, pretoned in gold:
this was the point at which i had my first qualms. the perspective seemed off, even after following the grid. the boat didn't seem as angled away from the viewer as in the photo, yet the perspective of the stuff on the boat seemed correct! i tried to fix it a couple of times, but decided to go ahead with it.

first note to self: fix it in the sketch, not after it has umpteen layers of paint!

i decided which colors to use: ultramarine blue, cerulean blue, raw sienna, trans yellow oxide, cad yellow light, alizarin, cad red light, & titanium white. i felt these would do the sky & water (the blues), the sail cover (the reds), & the trees (the yellows w/ the rest of 'em).

i started with the sky. i wanted to show some yellow at the horizon to reflect the warm sunniness of the day, so i put straight cerulean blue in the top of the sky area & cad yellow light mixed with white in the lower half, then mixed them up, going up & down with a fairly large brush to blend them roughly. the light yellow mixture & a light blue mixture i made up on the palette served as my atmosphere colors in light & shadow, and went into any color mixes that needed to be lightened.

i then put in the water, using ultramarine & white, & the sail cover, using the alizarin for the shadow areas & the cad red light for the bright sunlit parts. i mixed up various greens and put in the first sketchy bits of trees. at this point i still put in the buildings in the background & the other boat to the right behind the main one. i decided that boat wasn't working, but still left the buildings.


only that was too much stuff back there for me to do well along with everything else. so i wiped the buildings out, mixed up some more greens, and put in more trees! if you ever go to eureka & see trees growing where the carson mansion used to be, now you know why!

second note to self: settle on the composition before you start painting!

right.

next was the side of the boat & the reflection. i knew the boat couldn't be pure white, so i did a first layer of the light blue mix over it all, then put darker tones at the two ends and the yellow mix blended in in the middle to show the curving shape of the side. i mixed up a color for the main reflection and put that in, along with faint indications of the other things that were reflected.

at this point, i asked my son to look at it. he studied it & realized i had the color of the reflection completely wrong - it was green based rather than blue. oh dear. he sure was right. i scraped the color out & reworked it with a slightly darkened form of the light blue mix, & it looked a lot better!

third note to self: don't mix colors based on what you think they 'should' be - hold up the brush or palette knife next to the original & check!

i then finished off the insides of the boat, discovering leftover bits of the original sketch i'd decided not to do, which i had to paint out. (is that note one or two - or both?!)

i didn't like the sky, so i took my big soft fan brush & started squiggling it around, getting a sorta van gogh-ish effect in the sky, which i liked. at this point i also added some ultramarine to the sky & some cerulean to the water to create more life in them both. i adjusted the darkest parts of the shadows under the boat, the shape of the reflection, and added more cad red light highlights on the sail cover.

the last thing was the mast. i am incapable of drawing a straight line, so i placed a ruler at the top of the canvas, slanted away from the paint but in the direction i needed the mast to go. then i loaded up my finest brush & placed the tip on the starting point of the mast on the boat. using the ruler as a guide, i was able to put it in fairly straight & was really relieved! i didn't use it for the two cross bars but they were pretty short. and that was it!

after all that, this is what my table & palette looked like - not literally every brush i own but every one i use regularly!
oh - plus some new ones! i discovered some taklon long handled guys that i really like - inexpensive too, as they were student grade - perfect for me!

i can't say i really like the painting, though i do catch myself recognizing the reflections as reflections when i walk past it on the drying rack. so in that i succeeded. i do really like the sky, and it does have a certain naive charm about it. (i did notice that i have ripples in the sky, but not the water!) and i sure learned a lot about painting doing it - which is the fun part of the challenges!

i guess the thing is, it just has no 'me' in it . . . somehow it's missing that spark that directs my hand & helps me choose what to present & how. not sure why . . .

if you ever have ideas about how i go about things, or what i could do to improve what i'm doing, please let me know via the comments or through email - i'd really appreciate it!

thanks for stopping by - take care until next time!

dusty!