Crossing mediums

 A few weeks ago I had cut a piece of wallis paper into some standard dimensions. When I was done there was a strip 2"x12" left. I cut that piece into 6 small squares. At the time I was working in oils and was toning canvas panels. When I was done with the panels I laid the little squares out next to them. I've heard of people painting with oil paints on the paper, so I figured toning it wouldn't hurt it. Today I got these little squares out and did a bunch of little drawings and then did the value studies that I've mentioned before. It is hard to see here because I took the photos while the paint thinner was still wet, but there is a lot of color shining through the pastel value study laid down over it. While I haven't finished these little paintings yet I think it looks very neat so far and would keep me from having to cover almost every inch of the painting with soft pastel. I'm going to experiment with this further when I get my new wallis paper.

Today's exercise

These value scale under paintings are all 5"x7" and took about 5 minutes each to finish. I started by drawing quick thumbnails of all the photos in my current potential paintings folder. After 15 minutes and 30 drawings later I chose these 4 (because I only have 4 pieces of paper left) to paint. I circled my favorite four and then transfered them with slight adjustments to sanded paper. I then got a dark purple hard pastel and filled in the dark and mid values and used paint thinner to push around the pigment for a painterly effect. Im getting to the point where drawing these thumbnails is almost art in itself and it doesn't seem like work. It is easy to see now how some painters of old became so immersed in their art that it consumed them completely.

Preparations for a large painting

 Last night while looking through the remaining photos in this round of paintings, this one is going to be a larger painting. So for today's daily painting I decided to do thumbnail sketches along with three color maps. This is from the smokey mountains. When Cristina and I were walking up this trail there was this huge rock on the left side of us that looked as if it could come down at any second. The main trail kept going up the hill but there was a small trail that went up to the rock. Apparently some people like to get up on the lip and wonder what it would be like to be a stain on the forest floor. I took the photo and got back to hiking up the trail.
The value sketches are at the bottom of this post. I started by doing a thumbnail of how I would like it laid out. Then did a mirrored version with some slight alterations. Typically I will do three or four layouts with mirrored version but I really liked the first one so I went with it. Then I did a value scale thumbnail below it. Again I liked the first one so didn't go on with more.
After the thumbnails I did three quick sketches at 6x4.5 on 90lb watercolor paper and began making color maps. The first map used greens, blues, and purples with orange accents. The green made up the foreground since its the warmest in that color set with blue in the mid ground and purple in the background. Typically I would go with purple in front of blue but because I was going to use the orange as the accent in the mid ground the blue popped out from the purple background.

 The second color map consisted of blue and orange only. I went with darker blues in the foreground and lighter in the back. The orange for the trail, big rock and highlights on the smaller rocks.

 The third color map was with yellow brown, purple gray and light blue.