Tuesday, September 3, 2013

How fast do clouds change?

I had another great day painting today. I'm still working on my latest barn painting. For the last two days, when I stopped painting on it outside, I thought it was done; today I even signed it. But when I brought it inside and look at it, I knew it's not quite done yet. Maybe tomorrow. While I was working on it, the clouds in the east were slowly building and changing, so I could do another cloud painting today. I had been taking photos of them changing, and they made a constantly shifting panorama.

Clouds #7
I had used up my cheap, 12x16" canvas pad, so I took down a 9x12" Fredrix canvas pad. I decided almost immediately that small is good when you're painting a moving subject. And I took a slightly different approach, after painting a real POS yesterday, so bad that I'm not going to post it. There was so much blue sky today that I decided to sketch the outlines quickly of the separate clouds, and fill in the sky between them first. That meant that I basically chose my composition first thing and stuck with it, despite how the clouds changed, just using the later clouds for color and texture reference.

I kept taking photos, just for fun, just to see how fast the clouds were changing. I took the first one right before I started sketching the outlines, the second as soon as I finished the sketch and started painting, and the last one when I stopped painting.

When I began sketching

3 minutes later, done sketching

28 minutes after beginning, done painting

What fun!

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