Blue blanket of spring

I had tried every year since my first year in this garden to take a good picture of the forget-me-nots in bloom, but one I took last year is the first one that I thought would make a good painting. I love my forget-me-nots. Every year they come up all over behind the house of their own accord and blanket the area with sky blue that lasts for weeks. For me it's like The Official Arrival Of Spring. Now, it's 31º outside and it'll be at least three more months before it's warm enough to plant anything, so it seemed like a great time to turn this photo into a painting.

I had a couple of mishaps along the way. When I first blocked in the buildings they reminded me of some of Georgia O'Keefe's building abstracts and I spent several days struggling to fight down a really strong desire to turn it into a minimalist abstraction.

I wasn't sure how to paint the flowers because although they look like a blue cloud when they're all blooming, each flower is only a quarter inch across, so on the photo they look like tiny pinpoints of blue. I took a stencil brush and tried "pouncing" the blue on, and that looked like crap, so I went back to a small flat brush and re-did them, and redid the foliage as well until almost all the tiny specks were gone. So anyone who knows what a forget-me-not is will never accept these blue strokes as forget-me-nots, but this is as close as I can get to how blue my garden is when they bloom.

The other way you can pinpoint the time of year, down to a single week, in fact, is the yellow-green tips of some of the fir branches. They're only that bright when they first start growing, and within a week the effect of glowing tips is gone.

Mossy maples

Mossy Maples

I finished the maple grove painting today, and have several photos of its stages of evolving.

On the dried background, the first thing I did was draw in the lines of the individual trees with a medium green.

Next I took a dark green and gave the trees their trunks, and blocked in the foreground ferns. Once their shapes were defined I added the mossy spots on them, and tested some other shades of green on the ferns.

I decided the whole painting was too low key, so I glazed over the upper background to lighten it.

The last photo I took with my iPad surprised me by making the colors more saturated than they appeared in the painting. I liked the effect so much I took pure violet and veridian and washed them over the background. I added lighter highlights on the trees and the ferns, but it still seemed way too dark, and after a while staring at it I noticed the too-dark area in the top center. So I lightened that up, and then went over the moss a few times with lighter moss green, until it looked as it had the day I saw it. It was after all the moss that had attracted me to the scene.

First plein air of the back yard

In midsummer this year a couple of watercolor painter friends came over and joined in the backyard for a lovely afternoon's worth of plein air painting. It was my first plein air attempt in at least 5 years, so I opted for a simple rough watercolor-like sketch—only in acrylics—and only got it half done that day.

A few weeks ago I dragged it out again, along with a photo I took that day of how things looked. Some daylilies and hydrangeas were in bloom so I know it was July-ish. It was a really nice comfortable afternoon, a perfect day for being outside (with mosquito repellent on), and surprise, surprise—also nice and quiet. It ended up being the only day I went outside and just did art, but I hope I can do a lot more next year, including all the sketching I had hoped to do. That was one of my New Year's resolutions. Oops.

This is a background I just painted today for a new painting of a maple grove in late winter. Almost every time I try to document the stages of a painting, that painting is a disaster, so I'm hoping to break the jinx.

As I look at this one now, though, I'm already thinking I should have blended all the colors more as I put them down, that this is way too textured and rough for what's going to be an equally-textured foreground. Oops. Well, we'll see. Time for a few more paintings this year, if I keep working.

Hope you had a good Solstice!

Painting for FUN!

I've been painting for fun these last few days. I really wasn't happy with the river painting the day before, and I felt most of the problem with it was the colors. I wanted to try a different color scheme on it, so I painted over it. It had the effect of simplifying a lot of the textures and making fewer, larger blocks of color, which I definitely like better.

Early this fall I was out in the front yard just after sunset and looked up to see this long, sunlit clump of cloud framed by two stands of firs. The shape and the glow reminded me a little of the Milky Way arching across the sky, so I ran in and got my camera and shot it. I first tried a wash sketch, but wasn't happy with that so I painted over it with thicker paint. I had fun doing it. The shorter trees at the bottom look a bit cartoonish, actually the whole thing does, but it was fun doing it.

I don't know why I've been having so much fun with these, but maybe it had something to do with having already given up on them being any good! I started playing with another image I've had for a while, of one of my favorite daylilies. I don't think this one is done yet.

I'm trying to keep it loose, but get a good, balanced composition. I didn't notice till I had the color on it how unsymmetrical the smaller, outer petals are, and I don't know how that will affect the final appearance.

Light in the forest

Fir Grove

I roughed this sketch out a few weeks ago, then let it sit while I worked on several other ones. Part of the reason I waited was because I was so happy with the first work on it that I wanted to be as sure as I could that I wouldn't mess it up. After I finished the coralbark painting where I felt so relaxed while I was painting, I thought I was ready to go back to work on it.

The foliage went in pretty easily, and I was pleased to see the effect of the bright afternoon sun getting in was still there when I stopped. I purposely kept the work as loose as possible. I fell into a quandary over how many branches to add. I didn't want too many but I didn't want to have too few either. I'm not sure I chose well on this, and I wonder if maybe I should have just left out the ones that didn't have light falling on them. I kept wondering how many Emily Carr would have put in. Sometimes she only put in one or two branches, where they made important contributions to the composition or to the sense of movement. Other times she would show a lot more of the short, broken branches typical of tall firs in groves which lose most of their lower branches over the years.

These aren't my Douglas fir trees; they belong to a neighbor, but they look just like mine. I love my fir trees, and the afternoon sunlight bouncing through a grove, lighting up the trunks and foliage, is one of my favorite sights to meditate on when I'm outside. Throw in the sounds of chickadees and the occasional red-tailed hawk, and you have a recipe for a wonderful afternoon.

Fast and loose with the brush

Coralbark In Morning Light

I got this painting blocked in from the photograph, and then looked at all the lovely points on the Japanese maple Sango kaku leaves and thought, oh no, I'm not painting those. Then I argued with myself for a few days over how to make this painting looser than the last one without really changing the way the way I paint. On the third day, the answer came back to me from the Robert Burridge work I did: paint it fast. Go quickly. Don't think, just paint.

I did, and it worked! I didn't worry about keeping it loose, or making it look like the subjects, or how the texture of the paper would affect the brushstrokes, I just loaded the brush up with the colors and put them on. The absorbency of the paper made it pretty easy to get nice texture, and I was amazingly relaxed while I roughed in the first pass. After the first pass was done, I took a smaller brush and put in a few details here and there—probably should have resisted painting the fern fronds, but I couldn't—tweaked the colors a bit, and that was it.

But the whole way through, I had to keep arguing with myself about how much to paint the shape of the maple leaves. They're so small in this 11x14 painting that I'd have to use the smallest round brush I have to get them right, and I convinced myself that I don't want to do that. The gardener in me wants to do that, it wants to show the beautiful shapes and textures and complex colors of every trunk, stem and leaf. It wants to show the magnificent architecture of the simplest ancient flowers, and every luscious satin petal of a camellia, rose, or dahlia. But the artist in me is the one painting here, and I want to convey the feeling of being in a garden, not do botanical illustrations. If the viewer is a gardener who recognizes a little heuchera, a bank of sword ferns, or the trunk of a mature Douglas fir, great. But I'd rather have a viewer see how this spot in my garden looks in the pale sunshine of an Oregon fall morning.

Just keep painting

It's another fake watercolor, which I really have started wondering why I am doing. I think I'm experiencing some kind of time warp, because the only painting lessons I ever had were watercolor lessons, when I was eleven or twelve years old. I went through a second watercolor phase in the mid-'80's, and I was making good money then so I bought several Arches blocks, all of which I still have because that phase only lasted a year.

I do like that it's easy to make acrylics look like watercolors, but you can cheat to some extent because you can layer them if you give them a day or two to cure, and if you have to make big changes, you can switch to opaque mode.

I had pulled this composition out of a larger photo, because I liked the balance of it, but when I got it almost finished I realized it's really not a very interesting composition. The most dramatic thing I could think of to do with it was to darken the sky and put a few sunlight bits on the trees in the background.

I need to make the next one a bit more adventurous. I hope. Just keep painting.