Learning to paint clouds

I made a commitment to try to learn how to paint clouds this winter. I'd like to get to the point where I know them well enough to be able to invent realistic looking clouds. My goal is to finish ten small cloud paintings. I've just finished my third and have started my fourth. I forgot to put the first two up here, so here they are. Both are of Spring clouds in the Columbia Gorge, looking north from the Oregon side of the Columbia River, in the vicinity of Tom McCall Preserve, west of Hood River.

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.

Getting the lines right from the start

White Salmon Canyon Overlook (SOLD)

I've only been realizing the last couple paintings that I've done a poor job of the overall lines and shapes from the get-go, before I finish the painting. It never used to dawn on me till well after I'd finished glazing and framing it. This one, I figured it out in time (I hope) to partially fix them. The problem was, I had made the outlines of the yellow hills too rounded, making the composition look cutesy, and not the impressive vista I had seen. I also made the foreground slope not steep enough, but was only partly able to correct it. However, the change I made was enough to drop the cartoonish look and make it more true to my memory. I hope next time I'll make more certain of the major lines while I'm still at the drawing stage.

I've felt all along that the overlapping triangle shapes was the big attraction about this composition, along with the opposing blue darks and yellow lights, not quite a harmony but interestingly close. I'm thinking that having those lines and proportions correct is key to capturing the visual feel of a landscape--not to mention the demeanor of the whole composition—the big zigzag here is what I always think of when I see this, or remember first seeing it at sunset on a brisk fall day in the gorge.

This view is looking north up Washington Hwy 141 from White Salmon, with the river off the left side.

The Moon In The Window

Back to doing sketches. I've gotten all wrapped up in learning how to make silver jewelry, using wire and clay, with multiple steep learning curves and lots of brain work. But Robert Burridge's facebook painting challenge made me get my brushes out again. I've had pictures of the moon through my bedroom window for years and wanted to paint it, so I started it a few days ago and made more moves on it this morning. I'd like to learn to see the minimum essential elements of an object that sufficiently define it for the viewer, but are enough to carry the mood, the feeling of it. I think you can often do that better with a rough sketch than a finished painting.

I want to do a lot more of these sketches; it's been a long time since I put in any time just playing with the paint.

Bromeliads

Bromeliads

This was the most interesting and challenging photo I had from Villa Catalana from last year. I've never painted gravel, or bromeliads, and I wanted to try. Once again I turned to copying a photo, because it was a splendid photo, of truly splendid bromeliads in a beautiful environment. I have not yet gotten good at the art of making up paintings out of my head, there are too many things I want to paint that I don't know how to.

I believe it's the colors that I like most about all these plants, and about the painting.

I've been thinking I need to go on a painting binge again, so today I went through part of my backlog of photos and made a point of picking out the ones that I had a feeling about, mostly the feeling that I had when I took them. Not all of them seem like ideal candidates; some are very simple in composition. I want to see if I can put in any of the magic of place I felt in those locations, and make them come alive.

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.)

Sometimes you have to paint detail, darn it

I want to paint loosely; I don't want to paint details. But when it comes to flowers, I feel like I need to paint some level of detail—more than I want—because I haven't painted enough of them to know how to capture their form in a loose fashion. The last thing I wanted to do was try to make this look photographic, and I'm happy it doesn't, but I am trying to paint flowers that are detailed enough to be recognizable, because I'm a gardener and a plant lover. (For you other gardeners, there are alstromerias, astrantias, barberry, corydalis, and one allium.)

What I did here was put in the background foliage first, getting both the shape and the overall dark-light and color pattern of the gentle curves down before I even thought about where the flowers would go. I felt like the background established the structure, and that structure was really the most important element of the painting. I still remember this planting as incredibly dense, dozens of different plants crammed together and foliage so thick you couldn't poke a stick through it, and I wanted to get that overabundance in the painting.

When it came to painting the flowers, I quickly discovered that my reference photo wasn't sharp enough to be able to make out the separate flowers in the big clumps of alstromerias, and in the end I didn't even try. I settled for working up only the bottom two clumps as realistically as I could, and capturing just a rough color pattern of the rest of the alstromerias.

The purple astrantias were just as difficult because they're so textured, such fuzzy little puffballs, in all shades of dark red violet to near-white. Again, if I wanted them to be identifiable, I had to make them somewhat detailed.

The lesson for me was, the first time you paint something, it's very much a learning process. I wasn't painting the flowers so much as trying to figure out how to paint the flowers, and this painting is the result.

Hang around with creative people

I've had the glass rings and most of the copper pieces in this mobile sitting on separate shelves in my studio for three years. Every few months I would pick up the rings and chastise myself for never finishing it. Fast forward to two days ago when I was at a garden meeting talking with several friends who all do creative work or hobbies—sculpture, glass, painting, and garden design, and I mentioned to a new friend who is multi-talented that I was getting back into glass and metal work. The next day I was in the middle of working on my current painting when I suddenly started seeing mental images of the rings and some of the copper finally assembled into a mobile. After the third one I stopped trying to paint and pulled out all the elements and started arranging them in different ways, and Shazam! I have a new mobile! (And it feels so good to finally finish it!)

Recreating the light of late evening

Last year's paintout at Villa Catalana Cellars was a really spectacularly lovely evening, despite the presence of too many yellowjackets (fortunately they weren't interested in the food I'd brought to eat),  and as the last light was waning I got a photo from the house patio. It didn't begin to capture the colors my eyes saw in the sunset though, so when I got ready to finish it in the studio, I made myself two references—a dark one that showed the colors and values of the clouds and sky, and a much lighter one so I could see all the foliage and pond details that came out black in the dark image.

Since I usually work from photos in the studio, this happens to me all the time—getting a photo that shows my composition but not what my eyes were really able to see. This is the first time I've ever used two photos, and it really helped me a lot. I really wanted the dark shapes to be somewhat differentiated, to recreate the sensation of being just able to make out things in the dim light. The only really tricky parts were finding the right values for the white tiles on the pagoda roof, and the hanging lights there and on the pavilion. I settle on a muted brownish-orange for the hanging lights.

Painting a loss

I was in the middle of working on a landscape painting when my brother called to say that our mom, whom I'd just spent a few days visiting in hospice, had passed. Just a week shy of 94 years old, her body had been almost completely disabled by a massive stroke. Later that day as I was standing in front of the canvas again, I wondered what it would look like to see a person's life energy leaving the body and going back to the timelessness of the quantum vacuum, as it's now called. Instantly I saw this beautiful image in my mind, and really wanted to paint it, as symbolic of Mom.

Now I remember those first days after her passing as full of thoughts of her long and purposeful life, our family, and the love between us, not of the pain of her loss. The hours I spent working on it were actually happy—like I was being imprinted with the true nature and beauty of Life, instead of the sadness of physical loss. It became a permanent memory of her, from the point of view of that unknowable, non-physical part of us. When I look back on those first days after she passed, they're full of love, not of pain. I'm very thankful for that.

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!

A wonderful summer evening

I wanted to share this picture I took Saturday evening at the paintout at Villa Catalana Cellars. There was lovely live acoustic guitar music by great musicians, a colorful sunset with drifting clouds and a light breeze, and lots of happy people enjoying the food, wine, art, and wonderful weather.

If you're an artist interested in participating, contact Burl & Cindy Mostel at Villa Catalana Cellars.

PS. I made some progress on my painting but forgot to take any red, so I just worked on the foliage. Next time!

Paintout time again!

It's the annual Art In The Garden party at Villa Catalana Cellars in Oregon City this evening, and I can't believe the weather is this cool! Tickets are still available at their events webpage. Lots of food, wine, artists, and art! I'll be there working on a new painting and bringing along several of my previous paintings of their beautiful gardens and winery.

I'll be trying to turn this value sketch into a real painting:

Maybe I'll remember to bring the right colors this year!

Gettin' corny

I was visiting my friends in the gorge last week, and they hosted a group of plein air painters while I was there. Fortunately I had brought my gouache paints and stuff. The others were mostly hanging out on the bluff over the river, but I picked out a well-shaded spot, out of the strong wind gusts, that just happened to be next to their corn patch. I like gouache; it's easy to paint with, and like acrylics can look very much like watercolor, but can also be opaque. On hot and/or windy days it's way easier than trying to keep acrylics moist.

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.