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!

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.

Painting rocks and pushing colors beyond the "real"

Horsethief Butte

Hiking around Horsethief Butte last fall with friends, I got a great photo that I hoped to make into a painting. These massive basalt formations are on the Washington side of the Columbia River just northeast of The Dalles, next to the Columbia Hills Historical State Park, which is also a worthy destination for the collection of Native American pictographs and petroglyphs there.

The interesting thing about these formations—and all the other exposed basalt bluffs and cliffs around them—is that from a distance, like across the lake from them, they look BLACK. But the closer you get to them the more colors you see in the stone and the lichens that grow on them—reds, browns, ochre, yellow, even green. Before I started painting I studied every photo I'd taken that day, then googled for images of basalt, and finally decided I wanted to show both how black they can look, and how colorful. That meant I had to invent my own colors, which is always more complicated, but also more fun.

I really wanted to paint the formations as accurately as possible, so I used my digital projector to draw in the outlines, and the first painting I did was to establish the angular vertical shapes of the stone in both buttes with a color value underpainting. After the initial blocking in I ended up adding multiple layers of thin washes, including violet, gray, burnt orange, brown, and black, lightening and darkening alternately until it finally looked good to me. By far, the most difficult part was getting the highlights on the left butte to look right. It took me three days to finally hit on just the right hue and value of grayed red-ochre.

The bottom line is that I kept trying different things, and if I liked it, I left it, and if I didn't, I painted something else over it. I particularly appreciate how easy this is to do in acrylics. You don't have to use medium, although you can, and I used to—now I just thin the colors with water. It's taken me a couple years to learn (and remember) what you'll get with all different dilutions of washes, from barely visible to barely transparent. I do give them at least a full day, preferably more, to cure before I put on the gel medium isolation coat and protective layer, and when I brush that on, I do it with a very soft brush and very carefully.

A different canyon, a very different experience

I wanted to paint this canyon as soon as I saw it; it seemed like the archetype of a high desert canyon. I picked it for my second try at Zion and was hoping for another short and easy sketch, but by the time I had five hours on it and it still didn't look anything like I wanted it to, it obviously wasn't either.

I decided it must be a problem-solving session for painting rock formations, and that's something I want to learn to do, so I just kept working on it. The big question in my mind was, how much detail should I put in? I guessed the answer is, however much as pleases me. I had to try to find a balance between the endless textures in the photo and the minimum amount required to make not a quick sketch, but a painting. It lacked the strongly delineated shapes of the last sketch, so it seemed that I would have no choice but to work on the surface textures of the walls. I put in what seemed like a medium level of shapes, feeling like I should concentrate the detail around the canyon opening. After that I spent quite a while first figuring out the colors, and then contouring the shapes. I left two areas without any detail just to see how they would compare with the rest, and I decided that was not enough detail.

There was one area I just couldn't get to work with the other sections, and I stared at it for a day without getting any ideas. But the next morning I woke up knowing I was ready to gamble that something good would happen if I just kept working on it. So the first thing I did that day was cover the whole area that didn't work with a wash of dark red. Immediately it not only fixed the problem, it completed a larger pattern of blocks of color that I hadn't really noticed beneath all the textures. It occurred to me that the design of this painting, rather than being lines, was the shape of those color blocks.

A couple of the sketches I've done lately have had more interesting compostions that I had in mind when I started them, so I've spent some time studying them. I'm going to try and keep track of the ones that I like.