Today we had a wonderful day lots of sun, shade and cool temperatures but not a drop of rain, hooray. My lesson was to try to use a creative passage of white paper to lead the viewer through the painting with focal stops along this continuous white shape. At each focal area I want to put in strong texture, hard edges, and color to entertain the viewer in all areas of the painting. One focal point is not enough the entire painting should have variety, color, and contrast so the viewer has a reason to keep looking. Entertain don’t simply record and replicate.
After the drawing was finished, and I tried to make the subject matter touch all the edges of the paper, I began to cut around the shapes, leaving white paper, with a round brush and lots of vibrant color, I really push the greens, starting with new gamboge and hansa yellow, following with cobalt blue, olive green, thalo yellow green and hints of burnt sienna and cobalt violet. I wanted to finish the foliage in the first pass making sure I had established a value range from light middle to dark middle. I then scraped a few poles, trees, and pilings and put in the contrast colors for the areas of interest. I think this painting turned out pretty well. COME NEXT YEAR AND YOU CAN HAVE SOME FUN TOO!
This is the scene I was looking at and as you can see I really edited out and pulled in subject matter. Try to remember what you are seeing is just possibilities to use in you painting and you can move and leave out any shape you want to.
Artist Studio
