Painting: Sun & Clouds

For this painting I was inspired by a near by landscape of the Bear Gap area which holds some real beauty.  In them, you can see the way I like to arrange the composition of my paintings.  In it the various elements will guide your eye into and around the image.  This will hold the veiwers attention for a good amount of time as opposed to moving on to the next painting in an exhibit.

I prefer to paint on site (plein air painting) but often times photos have to be used for many of my artistic creations and have allowed me to capture the world around me, especially the Pennsylvania landscape.  I should note that these two photos were taken in two different years, but are of the same place.

The very top sketch is a rough of what I wanted to arrange my painting.  I used grid lines to allow my self ease in having to re-sketch this picture for my final drawing that goes onto the canvas.

On the canvas, I added in the same grid lines and a the center marking it easy to transfer the image. As I added the shadows with paint, I began to play up the detail.  Afterwards, removing the penciled in grid lines in preparation for the toning.

For my first tone I used a combination of Naphthol Red, Raw Sienna (which added a nice fairly transparent tone to the final product), Raw Amber, and some Matte Medium for my color tone in this photo. I normally prefer a more brown-tan type of color tone for my art, this piece just so happened to have a higher red content due to the addition of the Naphthol Red.

After the application of tone some of the shadow were subdued or lost, thus I increased the darks in those areas to make the over painting easier.

After finishing all the tone and shading, I then began building the painting with layers of color and light.  As always, I used the traditional dark to light process.