Landscape with Tree

Tree on a Hillside

3 1/2" x 5 1/2" pen on paper

Went out today for my clinic visit, saw this beautiful tree as the van went past it. Sketched fast to block in its general shape in pencil, then started inking details and decided to create a background out in nature with some more distant trees over the edge of a hill. Put the smaller darker one behind it to give contrast to the pale trunk and foliage and liked that, inked it in.

Sometimes a drawing begins with a life drawing and everything else in the picture is composed from memory to set it off. That's what this one is. I like how it came out. Slopes like that are common in San Francisco so this is really a combination of several views.

Day 29 Orchid in Pen and Watercolor

Orchid

3 1/2" x 7"

Another reference by jlloren for the September 25, 2015 Weekend Drawing Event. This pot of two flowering orchid stems that may be the same plant was very artistic in itself, shot against what looked like a gradated charcoal background, the flowers were overexposed. It was the form of the entire plant and the little glass ink pot with incense sticks in it that were the main point, not just the flowers. I could not detail them or even tell what kind of orchids they were.

But the overall shape fascinated me, so I abstracted hte form a little. Penciled and then inked with that magic Pentel brush. I'm getting better at the delicate control needed to get thick-thin lines where I want them instead of a shaky hand and a weird series of blotches. Watercolor was something that I'd meant to put in a wash leaving the overexposed flowers white... but once again it reached a point of "No. This is done. Not one more stroke. Don't ruin it."

I have no idea what I'll do on the other side of its page but it will have to balance properly with this, the white space is an important part of the composition. Might be something vertical-ish about that size coming down from upper right to make a diagonal composition.

Day 21: Red Peonies

Red Peonies 

6" square, Sennelier oil pastels on watercolor journal

I finished and posted this yesterday on Leslie Saeta's 30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge, but forgot to blog again here. So today may have a double post due to catching up!

I actually sketched this from a photo by Ural Jones on WetCanvas back on the 20th, but did the chrysanthemums faster since I knew this one would be some work and I wasn't sure what medium I'd use for it.

Sennelier oil pastels are the very softest. They are very nearly paint, with a texture similar to oil sticks. Blended them with a Derwent color shaper, which I happened to have handy. I also used a little odorless mineral spirits to dissolve the light green and yellow background elements for a smoother texture, saving the heaviest painterly textures for the flowers.

I think it's one of my better compositions, surely one of the more complex ones. I like the value pattern and the way the red-green color harmony breaks the mid-dark area dramatically into foreground flowers and background leaves. The colors pleased me and the whole painting came out better than I expected.

My first thought was to use gouache or watercolor for it, but I like this better. Toward the end I wasn't sure if it was too rough and textured. Then I stood back and pow, yeah, that was just the "under my nose" effect. You can't really tell about whether a painting works when you're focused on one small area right on top of it. The best test is to stand back. 

If standing back physically is too hard, as it sometimes is for me, takng a photo and looking at the thumbnail is a good way to get an overall view of the composition. When I saw this an inch across, it surprised me how well it hangs together. Definitely a step forward in composition!

Wildflower Scene with Stages

 Wildflower Scene 

5" x 7" on Uart 400 Sanded Pastel Paper

Today I did something a lot like a painting lesson. It was an experiment in several ways. Would the palette of Terry Ludwig's 14 Best Loved Basics be a good landscape palette to do a scene with hills, trees, a wildflower meadow and a beautiful blue sky? I'm happy to say yes, the results are above!

And I took some progress photos to show how I did it.

 Stage 1 Alcohol Wash In Progress

I tried something I've seen in several videos and blogs by serious pastelists. An alcohol wash like the ones Karen Margulis uses. I've long admired her results and she's a mad expert for painting wildflower meadows. Mine's just a crude attempt in her direction, she is much more concise and has the practice to say in two strokes what takes me six.

From what I saw in her examples, it doesn't take much pastel on the paper to do an alcohol wash. The alcohol should be 70% Rubbing Alcohol, the kind you get at a drugstore. Not the drinking kind even if some artists use vodka. Put the vodka in the artist and the rubbing alcohol swished on the painting with as big a brush as you've got. If you can't tell the difference, stop drinking. Do not store these in unlabeled containers for that reason.

Just swish the liquid around over the pastels within the area to be washed that color. Really don't worry about edges. I was too careful here and treated it more like a coloring book but I wanted to keep the rough abstract shapes of my bands. Karen would've slopped it on and let it drip mingling some colors for cool effects down in the meadow. That's practice for you. This is my first go. It actually will still work done this way.

 Alcohol Wash Complete

Here's how it looks with the wash in all over the painting. Now I'm not using plain beige paper anywhere. The color has gone deep into the crevices of the paper and maybe soaked in between the sand grains. It's not going anywhere. Any flecks of paper that show between my strokes or in a broken color passage will be the color of the underpainting.

The trees band is brown and the meadow band pink because these warm colors will make the green sticks in my Ludwig set pop and look greener. Since those three greens are nearly brown, I thought that was seriously important to try to give an impression the forest wasn't dead yet.

Background areas done.

Work back to front, which in a landscape like this is top to bottom. I painted the sky first and forgot to take a photo of just the sky in. There are three shades of blue in the set plus a very pale yellow nearly white. I used all four of those colors to gradate the sky. I could have blended it more to give a smooth gradation but I liked that look as if wispy clouds were blowing up in the distance.

The hills were mostly the light and medium dusty violet in the set with a bit of sky blue in the shadows to lighten and harmonize the darker violet. 

The trees I used all three greens, the gold stick and the deep dark violet. Yay for the deep dark violet in the darkest shadows at bases of trees. It helps define them. They are too small and too far away for me to put in trunks and branches but in a larger painting I might have brought some trees and bushes forward into the meadow band too to help give scale and those might get shadows and trunks.

Here's the finish again so you can see the meadow up close:

Finished painting

I did not pick out any grass blades or weeds with leaves. Most of that area I just used blocky vertical strokes with the ends of the pastels, the shorter side. I put a little green in over the gold and a touch of brown then started adding flower passages with the corners of the flower colors. At the end I added some white and blue flowers. I deliberately scumbled over the distant ones with the pale violet to push the middle ground back into the distance and cut down into the meadow area with the forest colors again. Then signed it.

A cool little experiment that worked. I might try this again with a good photo reference and see what I get, since I still have the other piece of Uart 400 to play with. Small paintings like this are fun to use to try different things, you can always try again if there's something about it you don't like!

Clouds Coming In

Clouds Coming In

pastel on paper, 8" x 10" horizontal

photo reference by tj84 on WetCanvas.com reference image library

This painting gave me some frustrating moments. I had some design problems with the areas on the land and one patch in the clouds bugged me. So I hung it on the wall across from where I sat and did other pastels and other paintings. Half the procrastination was physical, just not being up to getting out what I needed to finish it.

I went from hard pastels at the start to Rembrandt and finally finished with 120 Unison Half Sticks because that gave me the range I needed for the finish. The shadow area was too muted once I got it to the right value, so bringing in some purples made that work. I played with the foliage some more and having different hues and values in foliage colors helped enormously. 

I put in a tiny patch of sun hitting some distant trees. There's other little fun areas where light causes details. I gradated the water and added the cloud reflections, that helped a lot. It was really just finishing strokes for most of this - but every one of them was needed.

Paintings sometimes go through an Ugly Stage where it looks like you've ruined it. The last details need to be done and the finishing touches, without them it looks horrible but that is the right underpinning for those final touches. I first ran into this doing Colourist works in Charlotte Herczfeld's class because it looks ghastly right before the end - those finishing details are always needed. 

This time I think I just got tired when I was finishing it and looked down, noticed the ugly stage and choked. A couple of friends on WetCanvas provided critique. Many of them said it was better than I thought. Now I think it's better than they've seen - but thanks to them I didn't chuck it, did go finish it. 

I much prefer being decisive and moving on to the next painting than endless reworking! I hope I don't catch the wibbles again like this for a long long time!

Orange Tree by the Lake

Orange Tree by the Lake

7" square pastel on 

Stillman & Birn Beta Journal 

Photo by StormeRider (LiveJournal)

Storme and Nonny gave me permission to use a number of beautiful photos they took when they lived in Massachusetts a while back. I copied it and saved it and meant to paint the autumn scene - today's the day I did.  Very different from the photo's composition and by the time I was done they weren't the same trees either. But I loved the reference and it gave me a very clear memory of the forms and colors of a forest that is turning - some trees all the leaves are gone or brownish gray, last few bits of warm color, others still green or starting to turn, the blazing center beauties rivaling flowers in their glory.

I've seen scenes like this so many times in my life. All the years I was in New York State. All the years in Chicago or Minnesota or Kansas or Arkansas or Colorado, so many places I've lived had these scenes and roads soaring through it. I've been on drives just to see the fall colors. Taken photos I lost later on, that happened often, but it's all there in memory and this reference opened all those memories.

Rembrandt pastels work wonderful on Stillman & Birn Beta rough heavy paper. I used them with all my techniques and the deep texture gave me plenty of white flecks that I used to advantage in foliage texture for "highlighted leaves" and some sky hole effects, while others showed me good places to dot in a hole through that tree to show the foliage behind it. I like the laciness of the star tree and the way the colors blend a bit in the distance but shine around the best one. Had fun with reflections too.

Plein Air Iris Pond

Iris Pond - Plein Air in Golden Gate Park. 9 1/2" x 12" / 24cm x 30cm Pan Pastels on Buttercup color ClaireFontaine PastelMat coated pastel card. The link is to my Etsy listing. Plein air in Golden Gate Park has been my goal from the day I first decided to move back to San Francisco. Heck, it's been a dream of mine since I first read about San Francisco and wanted to move there back as a kid. Yesterday, I actually made the trip.

A local artist friend Reba whom I met on WetCanvas met me in front of the De Young Museum. We didn't have far to go to find a wonderful spot to paint. A small memorial garden right next to the museum had paths running everywhere and a gorgeous natural planting in the central island in a round pond. Mallards swam in the water along with a turtle.

 I did three pages of sketches, took 300+ reference photos and painted the best plein air scene I have ever done in my life. The composition almost planned itself.

Both of us noticed the balance of the area around that big rock. Reba's painting focused more on the water lilies and she has a larger area of water and rocks under water in hers. I focused on the stone and the irises planted next to it, though I moved most of them to the left of the rock replacing a clump of different plants.

Unlike all my previous attempts at plein air, I took command of my painting. I moved elements freely to strengthen the composition. I left out plants that I thought were beautiful and could have painted in detail. I have reference photos of them for later paintings anyway, I wasn't there to imitate a camera. I was there to paint from life and that's what came of it - a bold, big, loose, colorful painting that almost painted itself. I spent three hours entirely with the Pans on it.

I had meant to use stick accents for small details but the corners of my Sofft sponge gave a better look to the irises. Otherwise I might have tried to detail them as if I waded right up to them to do a flower macro. I could do that on another trip. Some of the same irises were planted in long grass near the garden, so I could roll up close to them and paint just the flowers the way I used to. But that's not why I went plein air.

I can find flowers in people's gardens, window boxes, supermarket stands easily enough. It's the outdoor landscapes shaped and maintained by the incredible gardeners at Golden Gate Park that I went there to paint. I could go back every day for years and not run out of new things to paint. I could spend a lifetime just in that park.

There's a buffalo enclosure so if I want to do something with a cool Western theme, I'll roll out there sometime for life studies of bison. I remember the Japanese Tea Garden had that intensity - thousands of wonderful views each worthy of a painting every time I moved or turned my head.

In some ways Golden Gate Park is like copying masters. Other creative minds and souls went into crafting the beauty I visited to paint. The whole park is a massive collaborative work among architects, gardeners and donors.

I have yet to visit the botanical gardens or the pond or streams but the paths run everywhere. I've got a map of it now and both of us definitely plan to do this again. We might get into a habit of painting out there regularly as well as visiting the great museums in and around the park.

 I've finally achieved a lifetime goal. This was one from the "bucket list" of things to do before I die - paint plein air in Golden Gate Park. It was so fantastic that I can't resist doing it again and again for the rest of my life. Meeting a good online friend and hitting it off so well that we're now happily offline friends is wonderful too.

Some of our trips, we'll leave the city to visit some of her coastal plein air spots around Pacifica. We tested whether the two of us could manage to heave my power chair into her small convertible's back seat and it worked! So in future you'll see some plein air seascapes too, from every vantage point that can be reached by a paved path. This is only the start.

Today I'm glowing with joy at the sight of it and feel much better than I usually do after a massive exertion. I got a little sunburned, just enough that I got enough sun to feel great.

I've got home care coming, so today's daily painting will likely be done in the evening by artificial light. I have all those photos to sort through and choose a good subject for today's painting though, so watch for a new post. I feel good and definitely ready to paint again! My home care worker just arrived so watch for a new post - today's post - in a few hours.

Yesterday I was a bit too tired to post after I got back but it was completely worth it! Big thanks to Reba for making the day such a joy!