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.

Day, night, and textured gesso

This was a study for a larger painting of Horsethief Butte. I wanted to try painting on textured gesso so I first coated the canvas panel with a thick-enough layer of gesso and then used a stiff dish-scrubbing brush to create an uneven vertical texture on all of it. The side effect of that was getting tiny gesso splatters on everything on either side of the panel, including the shirt and vest I was wearing. The splatters came off pretty easily while they were still sort of soft.

I started out with a daylight painting, copying the colors and lighting from a photograph, and found a real problem with the texture—how hard it was to get color down in the cracks. I had imagined that I might get a watercolor-like effect with the white undercoat, but the only place I liked it was in the sky.

I stared at it for a couple days until I decided I really wanted to do a night scene like I'd been seeing in my mind. I was about to paint the whole thing over with near-black paint and start again, but at the last minute decided instead to just wash the land with black and deepen the blue of the sky. The dark wash had the instant effect of turning it into a night scene, dimming down all the values proportionately. Happily, it also filled in all the white cracks.

I needed, however, to lighten up the foreground hills and brush, and add some highlights on the high cliffs. I found that the heavy texture made any fine detail impossible, but helped create a suggestion of grasses in some places. I do plan to put on a gloss gel finish, and I have no idea if that's going to work. Even without the gloss, my mostly overhead lights reflect strongly off the texture.

While I was working on this study I was also preparing the canvas for the larger painting, and used the same texturing process on it. After struggling with the texture in the study, however, I went back with more gesso and all but obliterated the texture, leaving just a faint trace of it. I didn't really like working with it, or find it that interesting as a part of this painting. if you're not looking for that specific effect, it just adds difficulty. On the other hand, if you'd like to cut down the amount of detail you default to, this could help you in that direction.

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.

Discovery vs. Planning

House of Love

This one evolved quickly to something very different from what I started to paint. As Bob Burridge would say, it turned left quickly and kept going all the way to the end. I started with a random distribution of the large, short strokes, playing particularly with the violet and red-violet against a yellow-orange background. I covered the canvas the first day and was totally unsatisfied with what it looked like. The next morning I decided the problem was exactly that—it looked random, and stationary—with no direction or energy. I first worked on developing two dark areas, but it still didn't have any energy so I began repainting it, organizing the strokes into to groups and a movement pattern began to emerge.

Pattern begins to emerge

At that point I started liking where it was going, and realized it wanted to be vertical rather than horizontal. I kept working with that, adding more groups and finding a pleasing pattern with the different hues of violets and yellow-oranges. I'd give anything if I could figure out how to get the many shades of yellow orange to translate to computer images. I tweak the heck out of them in photoshop, but my camera doesn't capture them correctly (the top photo is pretty close, though.)

It was actually the twisted colors in the photos that led me to add the bits of green to balance the one-sided hot palette, though—a real serendipity because I would never have come up with that, and I really like the green with all the oranges now. It's closest to a violet-orange-green triad, but with a lot of intermediate colors.

The title came to me as soon as the pattern emerged, but I couldn't understand it till it was totally finished and I realized how symbolic it was for me personally, having to do with personal growth and the challenges of life.

My process ended up being largely one of discovery and invention, rather than executing to plan. As soon as I focused on letting it evolve, finding the things I liked and being OPEN to keep repainting until it began to talk to me, it became fun and kind of exhilarating to work on it. Scary, definitely challenging, but very rewarding in the end.

I cheated on the big version

Underwood Fire, 7:14am

I finally got to making a larger, more finished version of the Underwood Packing Plant fire last October. I enlarged it to 18"x24", which gave me a chance to do a lot more work on the smoke clouds,  and the foliage detail in the left foreground (which still barely shows in the photograph). But after struggling with the proportions of the barn in my last painting I really wanted to get them right from the beginning in this somewhat historical subject. I didn't want to have to draw a grid and then paint it out, so I got out my old Artograph opaque projector and used that to draw in the outline from the photograph. I feel like it saved me my usual hours of re-drawing and repainting when I'm 3/4ths done with the painting and suddenly figure out that the angles or shapes or sizes of the elements are off enough to make the painting look awkward.

The bigger a painting is, the harder it is for me to get all the proportions and placements correct in the initial drawing. I feel like all the extra time and paint it takes me to fix those errors is a waste—I'm not getting any better at drawing on large canvases. If I were, it might be worth continuing to try drawing the outlines the hard way. I give up. I want to spend all that time working on the painting part, getting the colors the way I want them.

In fact, with plans for more large gorge paintings in the works, I decided to buy a relatively inexpensive digital projector with a bright LED lamp that I can use during the day, unlike my old Artograph. A preliminary test showed me that I can use it fairly easily in my studio, and I'll share more details on it when I start using it later this winter.

In the meantime, I'm starting a big abstract.

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!