Saturday, July 4, 2009

Demo Painting

As promised, this is the 10"X10" demo painting from yesterday's opening. It took about an hour and half to complete, with plenty of good advice from the onlookers (most of which I followed!). It was great fun once I got started. We got held up in traffic and arrived a few minutes after the demo was planned to start, so I set up in a rush and had a moment of panic when it was time to begin. I went over the source material; a photo, a value sketch, and the two previous paintings, explaining what drew me to this scene, and what I liked and disliked from the previous efforts. I tinted the canvas, then did a quick drawing, and we talked about the composition. Then I blocked in the trees, bushes and clouds with paint thinned with Gamsol, followed by a reshape of those objects with the grass and sky colors. At this point we did another review of the composition and I got some great comments and made a few adjustments. This was followed with adding darker darks and lighter lights (using a small amount of linseed oil with the paint), leaving quite a bit of the first layer showing. That was it, and I think I like this version best of all.

3 comments:

  1. Elizabeth MichaudJuly 6, 2009 at 1:07 PM

    I like this one best of your paintings of this scene, as well. Something about it has more movement and three-dimensionality than the other two. The clouds are especially handsome, and really capture what those tall ice cream stacks of clouds look like on a fine summer day!

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  2. That's a beauty. Transports my imagination anyway. O for a summer of days like that where I am!

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