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.