Today we started out in a misty foggy air and we finished in a beautiful sunshine, that gave us a wonderful opportunity to play with colorful grays, and then exciting and lovely greens and yellow based foliage. I did 2 demonstrations for the class and again I will show you the photograph of the scene and in the afternoon demonstration I will show you 2 different views I used to compose my painting.
The point of this demonstration was to really work on getting subtle changes in the grays using a wider color palette than just ultramarine blue and burnt sienna. I use cobalt, ultramarine, and cerulean for my blues and mixed them with many colors that are somewhat complementary burnt sienna, cadmium scarlet, cadmium orange, cobalt violet and olive green. By using these many colors I came up with a nice expressive sky that really evoked the feeling of the foggy misty morning.
This painting was about the scraped trees, birch trees, and putting them together with some houses that were on the other side of the road. The lesson was to use the entire landscape for subject matter not just the pieces that were close in proximity. Composition requires an eye for grabbing what you need in order to tell your story, and in this circumstance I think it works quite well. I also really tried to get some lively greens and oranges which were produced by using all of my yellows mixed on the paper with all of my blues to get the wide range of greens. My palette consist of many yellows because I am trying to find some substitutes for the now changed New Gamboge, so I am playing with many new tubes of color. Hansa yellow deep, auereolin, hansa yellow, new gamboge in the new form, transparent yellow along with raw sienna and burnt gold. The good news is that I have a lot more choices than when I went into the painting with just three yellows.
Really expressive sky and wonderful birch trees! 🙂