I cheated on the big version

Underwood Fire, 7:14am

I finally got to making a larger, more finished version of the Underwood Packing Plant fire last October. I enlarged it to 18"x24", which gave me a chance to do a lot more work on the smoke clouds,  and the foliage detail in the left foreground (which still barely shows in the photograph). But after struggling with the proportions of the barn in my last painting I really wanted to get them right from the beginning in this somewhat historical subject. I didn't want to have to draw a grid and then paint it out, so I got out my old Artograph opaque projector and used that to draw in the outline from the photograph. I feel like it saved me my usual hours of re-drawing and repainting when I'm 3/4ths done with the painting and suddenly figure out that the angles or shapes or sizes of the elements are off enough to make the painting look awkward.

The bigger a painting is, the harder it is for me to get all the proportions and placements correct in the initial drawing. I feel like all the extra time and paint it takes me to fix those errors is a waste—I'm not getting any better at drawing on large canvases. If I were, it might be worth continuing to try drawing the outlines the hard way. I give up. I want to spend all that time working on the painting part, getting the colors the way I want them.

In fact, with plans for more large gorge paintings in the works, I decided to buy a relatively inexpensive digital projector with a bright LED lamp that I can use during the day, unlike my old Artograph. A preliminary test showed me that I can use it fairly easily in my studio, and I'll share more details on it when I start using it later this winter.

In the meantime, I'm starting a big abstract.

You can solve any problem if you stare at it for a week

Glenwood Barn

If there's any secret to success, it must be stubbornness.

I had a feeling when I started this one that the photo I started with had some problems I couldn't quite pinpoint, but the colors were nice, the light was good, the composition was pretty good, and I really wanted to paint this barn. I liked the fence and brush-filled wash in the foreground and thought it added an interesting counterpoint to the building.

When I had everything blocked in and the background colors and grass mostly complete, as I began to get the details of the barn nailed down, the foreground looked less and less compatible with the rest of the painting. I experimented tinting the foreground shadows with different colors from the rest of the paining—red, red-orange, blue—but nothing improved the problem. I painted it darker; I painted it lighter—neither helped. I did the same thing on the fence—highlighting it took too much attention from the barn, and darkening it made the whole foreground look like a dreary afterthought to the rest of it. I lightened it back up and left it all.

I stared at the painting for several days without getting any ideas. I thought about starting another one, but knew I'd never go back to this one if I left it. Finally, yesterday afternoon I got the idea to enlarge the lightest area of grass—what I'd copied from the photo—from a very narrow band across the center of the painting. I stretched the highlight down to cover most of the grass and pushed the darker grass into the foreground, and everything looked better.

This morning I wanted more change because the bottom foreground was still too strong, and pulling down the energy of the whole painting, so I stared at it again for a few hours and finally noticed a hint of pattern in the right side of the grass and knew I wanted to make that stronger. When I painted in the diagonal streaks of richer gold, the whole composition changed. The pattern created just enough of an 'X marks the spot' effect at the near corner of the barn, and it pulled the whole painting together. The foreground suddenly balanced the trees, and the barn itself took on as much importance as if I'd put a spotlight on it. I believe what it did was add a design element in the grass that somehow highlights the barn. Who knew?

None of that was in the photo. There wasn't as much grass, there were more shadow stripes, and the foreground was darker. It took me a whole week to figure all that out, but it feels so good to win one!