Progress of skills is not linear

I never thought a two-day sketch of daffodils could be so hard to paint. It was interesting the first day, frustrating the second, really frustrating the third, and after the fourth I was ready to give up. But on the fifth it finally started looking a bit better, and today, it's okay. What took the longest was nailing down the basic colors. I've never done much work with whites except clouds. Lavender was the first tint I tried for the un-highlighted areas on the white petals, and that wasn't awful but it wasn't pretty. Then I tried gray-greens, and blues—I've always loved blues and yellow together, but not this time—before finally settling on an almost teal, which went well with both the yellows and the greens.

The other big problem was that the photo reference was strongly backlit, and I couldn't make that work in two days of trying so I gave up and faked more normal lighting. Once I got that far, it finally got to be fun. Now that I'm ready to call it done I'm thinking how I could have done it better—but that's a major point of sketching—get the first one out of the way, and stop thinking about it. Just get the experience under your belt.

But I did really get a good education in yellows and ruffled edges, and I only rarely work in yellow or orange. I invoked the artist's privilege to outline the coronas in purple; that was anti-realistic and fun. Sometimes I just want to find out what I can get away with—it's good practice drawing with the brush, and 100% approved for sketching. That's still how my mind works, unfortunately—Is this okay? Is it allowed? I sure hope I can get to a point where I can stop worrying about that. The only things that matter are how the painting looks, and what lessons did I get from this one?

A post-sketch painting of Catherine Creek

Memaloose Island

After doing the sketches of the gorge I wanted to see if they made it any easier for me to make a painting of it, so I basically copied the image of the second one, a combination of the two photos—the basalt outcrop at Catherine Creek, and the gap just east of there. And no big surprise, it did make it a bunch easier, enough that I finished it in just over a week, working around a bit of stomach flu. It did take me a few hours' work coaxing the complex hills and bluffs into a close approximation of the way they actually look.

I'm still not very familiar with the geography there, but I think the near bluff on the right is Rowena Crest, and the more distant land on the left is around Lyle. (I added some buildings to the painting after I took this photo.)

The most fun part was the foreground, playing with the big color range from the black basalt through the dried and the green grasses, to the wildflowers, blue Camas and a pink thing that looks like a clover flower that I can never remember—Rosy Plectritus. I used 3 yellows, two greens, brown, orange, white, and black just for the grasses! Fun playtime!

I wanted to make a center of interest around the right cluster of flowers to bring attention to that area, so I put some soft highlights in the trees just above them and then darkened the ground just below them, and that gave them just a little boost.

Detail

It was nice to finish it so quickly—last year a painting like this would have taken at least 2 weeks of work and a lot more worry; I credit all the sketching & quickie exercises I've done this year for the speed improvement. I used to get into so many situations where it just seemed like there was no way out, and that doesn't seem to be happening any more. I'm getting into a habit of just trying something, anything, when I get stuck now, and once I stop worrying about the outcome, it's amazing how many times those wild-guess experiments just work.

Looking East

Looking East

I was actually afraid last night and this morning that I wouldn't be able to do another gorge sketch today. But I started the same way and used the same strokes, and they really look a lot alike. I learned something new, though—that with the Blick Professional Gesso I can scrub paint off with a wet brush  when I make a mistake and get almost all of it off without visible harm to the gesso. That's very handy. I first drew the rock outcropping at the wrong angle, and was able to fix it.

I did more work on the foreground in this one, wanting to see more of the grasses and do more to balance the foreground and background. I also mixed a lighter color for the distant bluffs.

Sketching the Gorge with a very used brush

Rowena Plateau

I decided it's time to start working from some of my photos of the landscapes around Catherine Creek State Park, east of White Salmon, WA, on the Columbia River. I sifted through them yesterday and grabbed a couple to start with. I was ready to start a canvas panel this morning when my muse whispered, "Do sketches." I spent the last two days doing color experiments so I was already in "quick" mode.

I mixed up a nice china blue from Pthalo blue and Dioxazine purple, and picked up a superbly beat-up and damaged small flat brush and started scribbling in the dark shapes. The bristles on one side are bent back 360º and they were great for scratching on trees, branches and other rough shapes, while the other side was still straight enough to sort of draw lines and put the paint on flatly. I did use a different tint on the river, a mix of Pthalo and Cobalt blue. I was going to color it in fully, but decided to stop with a value study.

I'm surprised how traditionally "sketchy" it looks, and yet how fresh and "real", as if I'd done it right there. It seems like a great example of brush-stroke texture as detail, and I'm liking how many different looks I got depending on the value and thick-or-thinness of the paint and how much time I spent on that bit. No real painter would ever throw a brush away, unless maybe the handle breaks off, and clearly this is why. What a gold mine!

A big loose-ish landscape

I was thinking I would try doing a photo-based landscape in the same brushstroke style I used on Wild Iris, but as I was painting in the sky and tree foliage, I decided to reduce the amount of texture by having fewer brushstrokes and more larger, smoother areas of color. Most of the water is pretty smoothly mottled, but I tried to delineate most everything else.

The location is the Catherine Creek State Park in WA, northeast of Hood River. It's a great wildflower area I go to with friends most years in May. As far as I know, only the elves use the stones to cross—there's a wood plank bridge for humans. It's where I took the photo from.

It was a pretty straight-forward effort, using a lot of glazing to get the myriad of greens and blues that are in here, and a guess at how many highlights to put in. They could change. This one took me a week, the longest painting I've done all year. I would personally call it "impressionistic" because it really is all about the light.

A return to loose color

Wild Iris

One of my friends who saw my May Garden painting last year commented that she'd like to see it without the trees in the composition, and I've been thinking about trying that since then. I really didn't think I could make an interesting composition without the tree trunks framing the flowers, but after quitting work on the abstract, I pulled out a 16x20 panel and just started blocking it in. I switched from brights and flats to filberts for the rounded flowers and leaves. At some point in the second day I discovered how much adding stem-like strokes did to add both form and energy to the seriously overgrown foliage in the foreground.

From then on I just kept layering on subtle variations of hues over the whole painting. When I added the darkest greens I began to feel like I was channeling Vincent van Gogh and started really paying attention to my brushstrokes and how I was weaving the darker tones into the middle and lighter values.

When I thought it was finished this morning I started taking photos of it and immediately noticed little problems with it—mostly in places where I had unintentionally created the appearance of a straight vertical or horizontal line—just fixed two more of those. I've done about seven cycles of that and now I think I've fixed them all!

But other than than that, this has been a joy to work on. The scene is how I imagine a hillock and ditch overflowing with wild iris and other moisture-loving plants, with March-wind-blown fir trees in the background.

This year I switched from sitting down to standing while painting, and I recommend one particular item—an anti-fatigue mat to stand on. I had to trim it a tiny bit to slide it up into my easel base, but it was worth it. My palette stand is about 4-6" too short, but that's the only real problem. It took me a few days to get used to standing up for hours at a time, but I'm glad I did.

Tilting Perspectives

Tilting Perspectives

Believe it or not, this started out as color blobs too, intended to make an abstract, but it quickly became all about straight lines, boxes, and angles, with a composition that suggests structures on top of a tilting, collapsing foundation. It could be symbolic of a lot of things, but in a positive mode it makes me think of outdated, outmoded ideas that just don't hold up any more, and how everything built up on them is headed for the recycling (or trash) bin.

Artistically, I felt like the big problem was to make a coherent image with patterns that might be recognizable as familiar objects, like a cityscape, and I don't think I quite got there. it was interesting working in such a limited color range.

It was extremely slow to work on and a real test of both my resolve (aka stubbornness) and trusting my hands to make something interesting. Clearly I need a lot of work on the latter. I kept wanting to make more different patterns, but when it got so chaotic I could barely look at it, I started seeing ways to simplify it. I think once I decided what it "meant", I over-emphasized that to the detriment of the visual impact.

Looking back over my work since New Year's, I get the feeling that I'm going through a phase where I have to try every style I've ever liked at all. I love colorful geometrics. If there's an opposite to "loose", this is it. I think I'd better try more abstracts. I like some things about it—the range and arrangement of values, the repeating white (formerly) verticals, even the hard edges.

I've almost talked myself into painting over parts of it, but I'll let it sit a while longer.