Is this what inspiration feels like?

Sunny Afternoon at Horsethief Butte ©2023

I was looking through all my Gorge photos and found a pretty dull shot of a streak-clouded sun above the landscape that really grabbed me. Staring at it, something in my mind spent a few seconds pointing out what I could do with its obvious challenges, and briefly I magically visualized what I wanted it to look like. Putting aside the other candidates I had pulled out, I used iPhoto to get more detail in the foreground rocks, and went to work. I roughed in the sky and sun first, realized that it looked exactly like I wanted it to, then worked my way down, pretty evenly, till it was finished. I'm sure that having pre-visualized the whole thing resulted in a better outcome than I'm used to having.

Since that approach to choosing my next subject had worked so well, I decided to try it again. I went through the large collection of candidates but nothing would talk to me. I looked back at my old photo files to trips in California, and came across a pair of subjects I'd thought about doing for years. These were taken on US 395, a winter trip to Mammoth Mountain, on the dry side of the Sierras with the mountains on one side and the high desert of the Owens Valley on the other. I had the same experience with them, of quickly going through the way I wanted to paint each one, the major steps to make it interesting.

I'm glad that my mind is finally catching on to the idea that I don't want to just copy a photo, I want to use it as a reference for a more introspective painting, with some particular feel, or emotion to it. It's rare that I take a photo that would be perfect without any changes, so being skilled enough to handle adapting it to catch people's attention would be a big step up for me. And another issue--a trap I'd like to not fall into any more is literally copying a photo because I love the subject and then finding out it makes a confusing, unfocused painting. I've done that more times than I want to think about it.

So if I can add this mental process to help me screen my photos for winners, that will be great! No more boring paintings!

Back to Horsethief Butte

I still have at least 100 pictures of the Columbia Gorge that I want to paint, and this time I went back to Horsethief Butte for a south view showing late afternoon light on the western part of the butte, plus the vegetation farther from the walking trail near the massive outcropping. I went with friends just before sunset and I shot many images as the sun slowly dropped behind Mt Hood and the Columbia River. Most of the grass was long gone dry, just the tiny water-hoarding groundcovers still showing any green. Gray, Tan, Ochre, and Orange were the dominant colors. Horsethief sits in the rain shadow of the northern Cascade range so it dries out mid summer to glowing golden slopes between the blue sky and the river reflecting it. It was a beautiful evening and made a lot of memories for me.

The challenges of painting clouds with softness and subtle color variations

Catherine Creek Cloudy Day

 I was at Catherine Creek State Park with a friend one March morning a few years ago when clouds were moving across the sky, blocking and then revealing the sun. We even got drizzled on for a bit, but had a lovely 2-hour hike through the basalt bluffs and weathered towers, with spring wildflowers blooming throughout the meadows and the oak trees still bare. I did one painting soon after that of Wankers Columns, but had several other photos I wanted to paint, including this one. When I took the photo, looking into the sun, I was really happy with the shapes and density of the clouds, framed below by this small rain-shaped gully bordered by rough basalt ridges and thin stands of white oaks.

But the photos themselves were complete duds, no color whatsoever in the clouds and the landscape completely silhouetted against the brilliant sky and almost-revealed sun. I loved the composition but hated the loss of color. For the years since, I knew I didn't have the skills to recreate the scene, with the brilliant spring grass and the subtle hues of the backlit clouds. In the last year, however, I've been practicing on clouds, working to develop a technique that would give me the look I wanted. I don't know how many times you have to paint a subject before you know it well enough to create it from your imagination, but that is my goal with my subjects, like the landscape and clouds here.

Acrylics have a lot of challenges in the best of circumstances, and more for slow painters like me. I have neither the experience nor the confidence to paint a new subject boldly and quickly, before the texture of the paint becomes either too dry, or too wet from trying to keep a mixed color from drying out over a period of several days--or weeks--while I work out the details of the composition. I almost never want to use the straight tube colors--I end up blending them, adjusting the value, and mixing colors freely with both their complements and their neighbors on the color wheel--whatever I have to do to get just the colors needed to work together.

I also like to layer colors to mix them. On this painting I used more than a dozen different mixes of gray, white, black, two blues, two purples, yellow, orange, and green to get the hues I wanted. And I frequently misjudge values, even with the reference photo on my iPad for the best color, and end up having to lighten or darken whole areas after I've painted them, to get the scene right. Sometimes it feels like I've painted the whole painting three different times, slowing bringing everything into the right balance.

My latest discovery has been that once I have the basic pattern of the painting done but the colors just aren't right, and they need just small adjustments, I can tweak them by picking a very small amount of paint on the right-sized brush, then wiping the brush gently on a piece of paper towel, so there's very little paint on the brush. With that, I can put the paint onto the canvas very carefully without it globbing or running, or me leaving so much that I have to wipe it off (which is also a useful technique.)Then, of course, I have to let that bit of paint dry so I don't smear it with additional strokes. That way, I can adjust the value or hue by small amounts. And when you do finally have the value relationships right, you can get amazing depth and subtle textures of colors.

A new series with lots of trees and foliage

 

Mt Adams Early Light

Some friends asked me for paintings from three different photos they took on a July 4th camping trip, taken on different days and at different times of the day. I love Mt. Adams so I was happy to take the challenge. I took some liberties with the composition, bringing the mountain more forward (and larger) behind the middleground, and also making sure the dead branch was the same in each painting, as it was a feature for them. After taking the photos they noticed that it was always there even though the locations were different, so they asked me to put it in.

Mt Adams Sunny Day

The most interesting part for me was the difference in the lighting and how to capture that. The foliage in the sunny photo was a real test of patience, as the mix of white oaks, pine, and firs created a tapestry of greens and leaf outlines and textures. I didn't want any more detail than I needed to convey the mixed forest. I ended up blocking in the dominant color shapes before I worked on the detail. That and trying to match the subtle gradients in the sky colors took twice as long as I expect. The blues in the sunny photo were so close I literally couldn't tell if I had the right color or not as I was putting on the wet paint, and I had to wait till it dried and darkened to see if it was right. There was a very slight hue difference between the mountain and the sky, that also helped me get the colors mixed up occasionally. There was a lot of repainting on that one.

Mt Adams Sunset

The sunset picture gave me some good practice with shadow colors. As I've found before, shadow colors in the afternoon and evening are frequently warmer than one would think. All in all, it was a fantastic practice in drawing, painting the pine trees, and in color mixing. And I still love Mt. Adams.

It's all about the Composition

Goat Mountain Sunset

I've spent an awful lot of years learning to get the colors I want in a painting, and I'm getting good enough results now—not necessarily easily, but eventually—so it's time to get on to the next part of learning to paint: the paramount importance of composition, and how to create a good one. I take thousands of photos a year, and maybe 1% of them I recognize instantly as having a great composition. I've watched other people do value studies, and I've done some myself, but only a couple days ago, as I was contemplating what to paint next, I finally understood that it's during the value study that you adjust the composition until it acquires what it needs to attract attention. I always end up trying to fix the composition in the last third or less of the painting process, because I've been so focused the whole time on getting the colors right.

I frequently repeat the saying I read long ago, that "Painting isn't hard—you just have to get the right colors in the right places." So I was focusing on the right colors; now it's time to focus on the right placing.

I did a monotone value study for this last painting as the first stage, and I think it's been this experience that's made me fully absorb the process, and be able to think about it clearly. The study looked like this:

Then when I started painting over it, I first went with a blue violet palette, looking for something dramatic.

I decided I didn't really like that, and shifted more towards aqua hues, as I kept reworking the shapes and adding details, until I had the underpainting finalized.

And then I finished it, using a new trick to make sure I was capturing the composition that attracted me to the photo in the first place. I like to use my iPad as my color source now, but looking at an image that large (anything bigger than 5" on the short side) makes it really difficult to see the larger shapes—my brain just gets lost in the detail. So I print up a small image of the reference, no more than 4" on the long side, and tape it to the easel post right above the painting. When I stand back 8-10', I can easily compare the shapes in the painting to the shapes in the photo, and see how to fix things if I've gone wrong. Ta-da!

This view is not in the Columbia Gorge, it's from near Cornelius, at the edge of the coastal range.

Tackling a weakness head-on

I figure the only way to get good at painting flowers is to paint a lot of them, and this year is the perfect year for it!

My wildflower expert friends had been saying how many more flowers there were in the Columbia Gorge this year, more than any year they could remember. I got a chance to join them last month and we hiked two days to see the yellow flowered Balsamroot that covered many hills in bright yellow. We were lucky enough to get those great Gorge spring skies as well (not showing in this painting) and I got lots of photos I want to paint. This one was my favorite, and after a warmup sketch of another photo, I jumped into work on it.

There was so much of this one color of lighter yellow-green that I started by painting it over the entire canvas panel. Then I roughed in the yellows, followed by the darks in the top trees and beneath the large clump in the lower right sweet spot. That anchored everything important and from there I struggled with the flowers (hard) and the leaves (much harder, trying to get the values right.)

The paintings that don't kill us make us...

Rain Clouds Over Mt. Hood

...frustrated? humble? or just more stubborn?

This painting started out as a formidable adversary, and never let up till the last brush stroke. Which may be partly because I had a really clear vision of how I wanted it to look. I wanted the perfect combination of blue-violet and yellow-orange—tertiary colors, and complements—and I wanted Mt. Hood to look as massive and impressive as it feels when you see it, despite its distance and the more overwhelming drama of the thick, dark rain clouds.

It didn't help that for the more than two months it sat on my easel I was never able to give it more than one or two sessions a week, and some weeks, nothing. It's been so long since I started it that I don't even remember all the problems I ran into, but I do know the two biggest were giving sufficient detail to the bluffs and getting the colors balanced to give me the harmony and mood I wanted.

I really hope it's true that the more you struggle with obstacles, the more you learn in the process. But I guess if this demonstrated again that the key to success of any kind is to not quit till you're happy, then that's lesson enough for me. Never give up! Never surrender!

Wrapping it all up

I spent most of the last week working over the rocks,  a day on the grasses and minimizing the outlines of the columns, then two more on the sky and the tree. I'm happy with the overall dark-light pattern of the loose rocks and how it angles up and to the right, curving slightly around this end of the butte.

The most interesting thing that happened was a disagreement between me and the bottom left corner of the sky. I wanted it to be dark clouds, to match the upper right, but overnight I realized that made the whole left side look as heavy as the right, and dragged down the energy of the whole painting. The next idea I had was to turn those clouds into lighter, more bluish shadows—but as I worked on those, the whole small area turned itself into light sky instead. As soon as that happened, it made the white clouds look even brighter, punched up the green of the grasses, and for some reason made the face of the columns stand out more, both in brighter values and also in a dimensional sense.

I was so taken with that brightening effect that I invoked my artist's license to delete the bare tree growing out of the butte face on the left side (sketched in, in previous versions) so it wouldn't detract from the vertical lines of the butte. My excuse is that 100 years ago, that tree would not have been there, but the butte and the rocks, and probably the grasses too, would have looked the same as they do now.

And I got just the spring color combination I wanted!

Balancing rocks for depth

Working on the foreground rocks has been interesting because they need to attract the eye and lead it  into the painting, but they can't attract the eye back down once it gets to the butte face. They have to be detailed enough to be interesting, but not enough to be more interesting than the butte. They need to be relevant to the design, but not stand out.

They're not finished yet, but I believe their shapes are defined enough now. I started by using dark gray washes to fill in and darken the whole foreground masses. Once they were sufficiently dark overall, I switched to a lighter gray and carefully painted the rock faces I wanted to highlight. After I had those highlights where I wanted—where they would establish direction in the overall design—I went back with the darkest dark yet to reinforce the shapes of the individual chunks of basalt.

At the same time I darkened the background scree slope on the right where it's in shadow.

All this is to try to show depth, and to focus attention on the butte face.

Main cliff done

I've put in a lot of detail on the main cliff face and the fractured columns in the upper right; I think it's time to stop working on this area. The colors and values are pretty much where I want them for now, and from 5' away, it looks like what I remember.

I'm surprised how rough and sloppy the edges of the individual columns look in close-up, when they look so great from a short distance away. Not going to change them now.

More green

The stones are almost all defined, and I've painted in a few of the highlights on the cliff face. I've added a lot of green tint on the columns, and darkened some greens in the grass. Not sure how much of the blue I'll be keeping in the next layer, which will be the red-brownish gray.

I've noticed one thing about this painting—the smaller the image is, the better it looks. Up close, it still looks like a rough watercolor. I'm still having fun with it.

Light to dark

I was working on darks today. I needed to identify the shadowed surfaces on the butte face so I can get the right colors in the right places, and I worked on the mid- and foreground rocks to shape them and bring them closer to their final color. I worked simultaneously with six different hues: a neutral gray, a blue gray, a red-brown gray, a more neutral brown gray, an ochre gray, and an olive gray—every hue I can identify in the reference photo. For the most part, I put them on pretty dark, a luxury that working in that acrylics gives me. Whenever I need to lighten an area, I can mix in white to do that. Which answers the question I was asking myself yesterday—I'll start using opaque colors as soon as I have to lighten something.

The work I've done so far really reminds me that the first art instruction I ever got was in watercolor, and in that training I learned to work light to dark because we weren't allowed to use white. When I finish the darks as much as I can, I'll start putting in the lighter bits—the lichens, lighter surface scale, and more reflective areas. To me this looks like a watercolor now, still having a high degree of translucency, the white surface of the canvas contributing to the highlights. I always hate to lose that translucency, probably because of that watercolor training.

Romancing a color scheme

I'm starting a new painting of yet another place in the Columbia Gorge—this is back in Catherine Creek State Park in WA, at a tall basalt butte called Wankers Column, favored by the rock climbing crowd for its crevices & columns. I took the reference photo on a partly rainy day in March while hiking with a friend. For those of you who have been there, this is the south face. There were no climbers out that day.

I'm in the middle of defining the dark areas in the rocks, boulders, and columns. I decided to use ultramarine blue with brown as the base color for all the stone (except that one red strip), partly to give the feel of a cold spring day. My plan is to continue using transparent washes on the stone surfaces. I'll be working on them with olives and pale gray for the lichen, burnt orange for the oxidized areas, and violet- and brown-grays for the rest. I'm curious to see when I'll have to switch to opaque colors (other than when I screw something up.) Usually I'll block in the first colors with opaque hues, then use washes on top of them. Just a slight difference in approach.

I had a big argument with my projector (the Tenker) about the photo I used; it wouldn't accept the format of this particular photo, while it did fine with others. I ended up having to convert the jpeg to a  tiff, and then to convert the tiff to a new jpeg before it would accept it. Still not sure what the problem was, but it wasted over two hours.

The problem with night scenes

Night Watch

I've finished the larger painting of the night scene at Horsethief Butte in the Columbia Gorge. I followed the same process I used for the study, except I did use the projector for the drawing. I had already applied a textured gesso layer to the canvas before I glazed the study and decided it was too much, so I went over it with a second layer of gesso with a scraper, which covered up a lot of the texture, but there's still some of the effect, particularly on the bottom. I'll be playing with it more in the future, but maybe not on landscapes so much. I first painted this one in daylight colors, then turned the lights off with overpainting. That may be the slowest possible way to get a night scene but it really makes a realistic night effect.

It took me a long time to get the colors and values right. The problem with night scenes is, if it's too light, it doesn't look like night, and if it's too dark, then you can't see it when it's hung! I had thought the commission-er was going to be hanging it in a brightly-lit room, so when he told me it was going into their living room, I decided to take it over there and try it in their room light before I glazed it. After some last minute touchups the night before, I decided I was finally happy with it. Fortunately, he was very happy with how it looked in their living room, so I've got it back and am glazing it now.

I made a lot of use of thin color washes—phtalo blue, deep violet, and burnt orange, plus black where I needed it. Maybe someday I'll learn to mix every brushful the right color to begin with, but I do like how layering the washes creates a sort of ambiguous patina that looks like all those colors at the same time, with a kind of a elusive shimmer due to the variations of intensity of every brushstroke. It's easy to do if you give each wash sufficient time to dry (at least a few hours) so there's a minimum of lifting of the previous wash. I did do one wash way too dark, and ended up having to lift most of it off with water and paper towels. That was no fun, scolding myself while I dabbed with crossed fingers.

There are a lot of small textures in this one and I got more practice of working with the brush in one hand and a tissue in the other, ready to dab off any extra paint. I used the same technique as on the first Horsethief painting to get the effect of the sharp-edged basalt rocks—handling the different layers with different brushes and colors.

I've got too many good gorge photos to stop now, so I'm getting ready to start another one—this time of Wankers' Column in Catherine Creek State Park. Not going to do a study, just going to jump right into it.

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!

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.

Just a little bit off can look a lot wrong

The Lotus Pond

12"x16" Acrylics on linen panel $175
You can purchase this painting HERE.

It took me what seemed like a long time to get the right color balance on this one. Mostly it was too light, but the greens were off, the reds were off, and the grays on the wall were really hard to get right. I reworked the shrubs above them a few times without making them look good, and it wasn't until I noticed in the reference photo that the bottom half of the wall was a shade darker than the top. When I made that correction, that whole area clicked. Getting the highlights on the top of the balusters light enough, the roof color right, and the background dark enough finally made the painting look like it was in bright sunlight. At last!

This was a really good lesson in how little it takes to keep a painting to come together, and you just have to keep looking for those tiny adjustments to get the look you want.

Happy Holidays To You!

A snowy road

I wanted a snowy local scene for my Christmas card this year, and I've had this photo for years but not been sure how to deal with all the detail in it. Containing it to a 5"x7" offered the obvious solution—eliminate all the detail. I spent a couple hours studying all my Emily Carr pictures—books, calendars, web sources—for a warm up. I don't think I found a single snow painting, but I have lots of Group of Seven snowy scenes for reference.

It took me a couple sessions to work up a prototype that was simple enough and had a nice balance of colors. I've always loved the swoopy form of the road in this photo, so that had to be the focus. I also had to invent the colors if I wanted anything besides gray and brownish gray.

Snowy Road

I worked up my favorite fir tree colors, added some deep blue and ochre to suggest afternoon shadows and highlights, substituted a blue-violet gray for the muddy parts, and accompanied that with pale yellow for some "pop" in the foreground.

No snow here yet, but that's fine, I can wait. It's really good to have the rain.

Painting the weather

Early Spring Clouds

I just finished two paintings of my local weather. The first one is from a photo I took from a fast moving car on an early spring plant-shopping trip a few years ago. I started working on this one last fall, but just couldn't get the clouds right until a couple weeks ago, when I stopped trying to do the whole sky in one session, and built it up over a few days. Painting clouds is one of the few times I almost miss painting in oils.

Snow Coming

The second one is from a drive home just as a snow shower was starting. I love the gray days and I love clouds and rain, and I hope I can get good at painting them. Wet weather is such a big part of living in western Oregon that to not paint it seems like a missed opportunity.