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.)

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.