What are those pink flowers? 4 '14

  "What are those pink flowers?" a friend from the West coast wrote.  "They're azaleas",  I wrote back... but wait I thought... I don't know if she will believe that answer.   It's a good question to keep in mind when one is attempting to paint a scene the viewer might never have experienced. I grew up in the wide open ( but arid) spaces of the west coast myself.  A large azalea on the west coast might reach two foot tall and three foot wide.  Had I not seen it with my own eyes, I might have suspected that  the profusion of vegetation was a bit overstated  if not outright fabricated.  Let me assure you, it is neither. 

Small Part of Brookgreen Gardens' Pine forest in Spring

The sheer size of the flowering plants  in Spring can be overwhelming.  In the older established gardens, the azaleas can reach twenty feet, and the flowering trees are taller.

The photo below will give you some sense of the heights...  They dwarf me.

CC  with azaleas at Magnolia  Gardens

And they are everywhere

 Magnolia Gardens path

There are acres and acres of woodland paths and walks like these at at Magnolia Gardens and Brookgreen Gardens

Brookgreen Gardens walkway

Even personal gardens are a mass of blooms.

Azaleas and Dogwood  at Pawleys

 It can all be a bit overwhelming.  The sheer profusion makes it hard to  know what to focus upon, much less even get a clean photo of it.. Painting the scene becomes an exercise in deciding on what is the center of interest, and trying to remove anything in the scene that  might distract the viewers' focus.

Brookgreen Garden's Gate

The photo  above shows the garden gate where I painted the scene below.  ( en plein air not from the reference photo).  Far from being overstated, I actually had to subdue a lot of color and edit out  many shapes to keep the painting  from seeming cluttered and even garish.

My painting of "The Garden Gate"

 Maybe that is why so few artists tackle full blown flower filled  Spring landscapes.  They require hard mental work and  are very tricky to pull off well.

WIP Day 5: Ricefields on the Ashley 7"13

You are now looking at a photo of the finished painting: "Rice Fields on the Ashely".

"My Grocking" is done! This morning. I differentiated the bushy  foliage on the lower right of the foreground so that the willow is distinguishable form the tree behind it.  I also,  adjusted the saturation of the yellows in the middle ground (rice  fields grasses have more cad-yellows than before), and added a touch of blue to the sky just above the tree line on the horizon.  I even signed it (after I took the photo). At this point I consider the painting process complete.

The next step is to  wait until it is dry enough to have a professional photo taken of it*, then varnish and frame it,

* Note All of the photos for these mini lesson  posts were taken with a hand-held camera, under my studios ceiling lights, while the canvas was still wet..  The professional photos will  use a spots to give an even lighting over the entire painting, and a polarizing filter to ensure there is no reflective glare from those lights

See all four earlier posts of this process beginning with the post on July 16th

WIP Day 4 Foreground of Rice- fields on the Ashley 7'13

Today I finished the grasses and water in the foreground and foreground tree, widened the waterways in the middle-ground of the Rice fields so that they function more as  lines of direction in the painting.  At this point  all of the colors and values are as I want them.  You can clearly see the contribution of the red underground in the sky and the marsh.  It is what makes the sky appear purplish in the upper left corner,and the underside of the cumulus-nimbus clouds  warm ; it is also what adds the warm glow under the distant grasses in the middle ground of the rice-field. the clouds  All of this was achieved  by applying a thin glaze of color over the red ground rather than a thick layer which would cover it.

 I am still deciding whether I want to pull out the small  tree in the right lower corner more or leave it less defined.  .  That is where staring at it while it is sitting on the easel  in my living room comes in.  My husband calls this process "grocking". (Apparently that is a term used in some sci-fi book for which means "to deeply study an object  so as to fully know its nature")..  Sounds like a pretty  good description of what I will do next to me.

See all three earlier posts  in in this process beginning with the first on July 16th

Jane Woodward demos at Seacoast Artists Guild Nov Meeting

Jane Woodward

Jane Woodward is an award-winning area painter with combined oil and acrylic experience covering more than thirty years.  She exhibits at area galleries and teaches both privately and for CCU’s OLLI program.  At the  Seacoast Artists Guild November  4th  2012  general meeting, Jane talked  about and demonstrated techniques for painting sky and clouds.

Jane talks about different tones in the sky

  Jane's demo included how to develop a realistic range of tones in your sky, 

Jane demos how to begin forming a cloud

 and how to develop different forms of clouds using different sizes of brushes and strokes.

Evening sky 11/4/2012

As though mother nature were trying to reinforce what we had just learned,  we were treated us to a fantastic evening cloudscape  just as we left the meeting

More wildlife paintings completed

Three Wildlife Paintings in progress

Remember this photo I posted of  the Wildlife paintings  I was working on last week? 

 Two of the three are complete.

Egret in progress

Here's a closer look at the process.  A lite coat of Cadmium red light acrylic was used as a mother color over a gessoed artist panel... After the acrylic dried, I sketched in the main shapes.  Then I used ultramaire blue, alizarine crimson, and Cad Yellow Dark oil paint (plus minimal Titanium White) to block in all the main shapes.  After that dried, I when back and refined the values in those areas using the same paint hues.  Finally, when I was happy with the background,  I painted in the egret using white tinted with the colors in the background.

Finished Egret on a Post

I used the same process in working on the Redwing Blackbird.

Red Wing Blackbird in the Cat-tails

Creating Harmony with a Mother Color - March 20th

A mother color is a color which is used in every mixed color in a particular painting.   You can select whatever color you wish as a mother color. It can be a neutral gray or brown mixed from the leftover colors on your palette, or it can be a straight-from-the-tube color.  The logic behind doing this is that it harmonizes all the colors in an individual painting, creating a unity in the color and composition.

The mother color  can either be used as the starting point for the colors you create by (a)  mixing another color into some of your mother color,or (b)  by mixing a little of your mother color into every color, or (c) by under toning the ground with a single color. And finally you can use a mother color to harmonize a painting  by finishing the painting by glazing over tall the other colors with a single transparent mother color.  I've tried all of these methods but my favorite methods with oils are (b) and (c).

When I am painting a scene that is dominated by blues and greens  I often paint  tone the entire canvas first with a medium shade warm hue  like cadmium red light or cadmium orange.  I try to choose a shade that  is a natural complement to a hue right in the middle of the range of blues and greens  I will be using.  The warm hue will show through in areas where there is no paint adding sparkle, and it will warm other cool transparent colors like ultra marine blue.

When I am painting scenes that require an overall warm palette, I often use a blue hue as my mother color.  Blue by its nature ( even a warm blue) is cooler than most of of the hues I uses in my paintings,  so blue adds a nice touch of contrast.

Which blue you ask?   My four main choices are: Cerulean, Cobalt, Phithalo, and Ultra Marine Blue.  The one I use depends upon the painting.   I let the actual scene tell me which one to choose.

A mother color is that it can be used as a dominant color (or color theme) within a painting, or it can be used less prominently. One problem with  using a mother color too strongly is that the colors are too similar (in tone and hue).