Spring Color: Indian Paintbrush

Spring Color

Painting No. 7-E-12

9"x 12" oil on canvas panel

The recent Spring rains have left the hillsides full of wildflowers. My favorite is the Indian Paintbrush. I love the vibrancy of the color and the way it grows in small colonies, almost like bouquets in the desert.

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Sun Glow

Painting No. 3-E-13

8"x 8" oil on canvas panel

 

As some of you know I'm painting full time in Moab, Utah. The good news is that the paintings are selling and requests are coming for subject matter. So I headed up the Colorado River and painted in the shade of the Navajo stone walls during the mid-day sun. This little painting took about an hour and felt really good. This is the light quality that can be captured when a painter takes the time to go outside to paint in the field. The plein air technique of painting from direct observation is the only real way to become a better landscape painter. I've completed approximately 400 outdoor paintings and I'm looking forward to the next 1,000.

Painting a Large Sky Scene Part 2

From Part 1 of Painting a Large Sky Scene; I transferred the line work from my preliminary sketch to the canvas surface. Now I concentrate on blocking in large areas within the painting with singular colors. For example, the entire cloud mass is painted this blue gray as a mid-tone starting point. Later I will come back and add darker shadows and lighter shadows. Later still I will add high-key sunlight spots.

At this stage I have added the darker areas to the underside of the clouds, I have added lighter areas of shadow to the clouds, (everything in this style of landscape painting is about modeling how light falls on a surface. I always try to model the shadow (low-key) areas for dark-medium-light tones and the sunlight (high-key) areas for dark-medium-light. At the bottom of the painting I have painted a medium-base tone for the distant foothills and a odd shaped foreground mass. Notice the blue sky values; the upper painting is an intense blues that fades as it falls.

The final painting has highlights in the clouds, and a corresponding foreground brightness. The lower left corner has the airport buildings and highway shown as a scale reference. The distant rain showers are hitting at various intervals for a more elaborate depth perspective.

Painting a Large Sky Scene Part 1

It all starts with an idea, a spark, something that catches your eye and stays in your thoughts while your working on other projects. That's how this studio painting came about. It started with me driving to Grand Junction, Colorado from Moab, Utah. I drive this route every couple of weeks and I always love the color and shape of the clouds that occur around 13 miles north of Moab. So a couple weeks ago I went out on a cloudy afternoon and painted this 8"x 8" plein air study. My original thought was to turn this into a 36" x 36" large work, but I started noticing the great clouds floating by to the right of this thunder head. So I photographed it as well.

Back in the studio a few days later I did this preliminary 8"x 8" painting of the different cloud layout, using the original plein air piece for a color reference.

Next I built a stretched canvas, using stretcher bars from French Canvas of New Jersey and primed canvas. This photo is from a canvas I built last year but the construction is the same.

Now that the canvas is on the easel the first thing I do is texture the surface. I use acrylic paint to add brush strokes as an under painting. Once that dries, I paint a wash over the entire canvas. I don't like painting on a white surface; this time a chose a light blue/purple wash because I'm painting mostly sky and I didn't want to struggle against an opposing color, like orange. Once the wash was dry I drew a grid out on the canvas surface . I also drew a grid over a scaled drawing and photo. Then I transfer the outlines of the clouds and ground to the canvas, using the grid as a guide.

See Part 2 for the remaining steps