Two days of sketching

 Since painting outside I haven't had the time to sit down and paint. The time to set up and get started just hasn't  presented itself. So the last two days I've had my sketchbook out drawing thumbnails and value studies for large paintings. Typically I spend anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour drawing a day to keep that skill from diminishing. The last two days I've been drawing for more than two hours. Usually it comes in 10-20 minute intervals though. The top thumbnail is from my front porch looking into the back yard. The second is from a photo of the Beverly shores train station. The last three are from photos taken from the top of Mt. Baldy at the dunes. Two of those final sketches are just variations on each other. The last thumbnail I've drawn close to thirty variations over the last couple of days and it will definitely become a large painting. These drawings usually take 1-2 minutes to do and will be used to make contour and value studies from. With as many variations as were done this should mean a fairly smooth process leading to a final painting. Doing these thumbnails and value studies have saved me a lot of time when it comes to finishing a piece.

Back Outside

This morning I went back outside to paint and this was my first attempt back at the easel. I walked around for quite a while trying to decide what to paint. All I had to paint on was old grounds that needed to be cleaned so I set up shop and wiped it down with turpentine to remove a good portion of the old pastel. While this the ground was drying I started doing value sketches of a few scenes around me and couldn't come up with anything I liked. After finally saying enough doodling around I went to get the dry sanded paper and then this group of trees caught my eye. They stood there with the light so bright on the trunks casting shadows to their sides that I couldn't paint anything until that was captured. This painting measured 12x18 which is about as large as I've painted plein air. This is going to be one of my standard sizes because you can get more detail in than the small paintings I'm used to.

Full weekend in plein air

 After yesterday's poor turnout I decided to go out again today and see if I could get some good paintings in before the weekend was over. For some time now I have been telling myself to document my painting process for my own learning purposes and to help others. Today I luckily remembered to document part of a painting that emphasized an important part of my process. When I plan out a painting the first thing that I do is turn everything I see into large abstract shapes. Then those shapes are combined until I gain 4 or 5 large shapes which I assign values based on creating the illusion of depth and for composition purposes. Sometimes it turns out successful.

Anyway today I got situated on a sandbar down in a creek and painted looking through a silhouette of trees onto this hillside that was lit up with sunlight. The tree that attracted my attention the most was the tree in the mid right that was standing straight up against on top of the bank. It was standing there with the hill as its backdrop just asking to be painted. As you can see in the top photo refrence I had blocked in all the main masses and was beggining to do detail work in the top shape when I decided to take a photo for analyzing the progression later on. It was taking this picture in black and white that helped me realize where I needed to go next. As you can see there is a lot of contrast between the trees and the hillside like I wanted. The problem is the contrast was so just as strong against the other trees which drew attention away from the focal tree. The best way to fix this was to darken the background trees behind the hill to lower the contrast on the trees to the left and right of the focal tree and this also helped with a few other things as well. First it helped the hill to really shine. When the background trees were the same value as the hill the entire top third of the painting was so bright that the hill didn't stand out. Adding the slightly darker value above the hill helps push the eyes back into the painting when they wander up the tree silhouettes. The other thing darkening the top did was to blend the edge of the other trees slightly so the focal tree has the hardest edges giving it the look at me treatment. I would advise anyone that has a digital camera to take it with them and record their progress as they go. Do this in color and black and white. Who knows what you might find out about your painting by just taking a picture of it.

This is another painting from today. It turned out to be more abstract than I had planned. There were tons of trees coming out of this gigantic bush(which was actually just a bunch of smaller trees). I liked the way the large trees came through the top and were all lit up from above casting down filtered light onto the smaller trees.