The formidable Ghost of Paintings Yet To Come knocked on my door and I, like some reincarnation of Scrooge, answered with both trepidation and a decidedly cranky attitude. I knew my week would be incredibly busy, yes I would have to carve out time to paint and hopefully improve upon last week’s experience. Even though my eventual result was satisfactory, I still felt the weight of all the time I lost trying to understand the medium, and wanted to avoid a similar situation while also taking up less time. Thankfully, a friend of mine suggested we go paint on one of the nearby mountains, a place which provided both interesting and beautiful scenery. The weather was hot, so when we arrived we walked around looking for shade, and found some in the shadow of the main building up there. Avoiding sunburn is an essential part of planning a painting session.
Setup went mostly smooth, however, the wind blew quite harshly at various intervals and my cup of paintbrushes was blown onto the ground three or four times before I just set it on its side on purpose. Thankfully, we had tape to keep everything else in place. This time, when I chose my paints, I made sure to select French Ultramarine instead of Cobalt from the get-go. This made it immensely easier to obtain dark colors without a strange muddy tint. The view I selected was not one of the distant mountains, instead I liked how a line of telephone poles cut through the trees, leaving a swath of warm colors in the midst of a sea of green. I felt this particular scene told an interesting story, and I also wanted to challenge myself to not be afraid of painting trees.
Using what I learned from the textbook and a few YouTube videos, I blocked out my general scene in burnt sienna for a warm undertone, and then worked back to front. The mountain was the darkest, made darker by the accent shadows cast by the trees. The sky was much lighter, but the lightest of all was the dry grass and telephone poles cutting through the form. I made a blue sky that got gradually more hazy towards the bottom, and this helped add depth behind the main form of the mountain. In fact, the mountain ended up being my favorite part of the scene to paint. Utilizing my new knowledge, I treated the trees as geometric objects with planes, and painted a simple dark side and light side. On top of this, I gradually added lighter and warmer colors on the side facing the sun. The mountain was a dark tone at the base, and this made it immensely easier to distinguish each tree and provided a cool fading effect into the depths of the woods. I even made the trees grow smaller and smaller towards the back of the mountain, but at second glance this area of the painting likely should not have been made that detailed.
At this point, I was feeling much more confident and was even having fun, and then I remembered I actually had to paint the telephone poles. After struggling with the grass for a bit, I decided to take my small brushes and just make general marks for the poles and then refine them. The refining, unfortunately, nearly did me in. No matter what I did, the strokes were wobbly and translucent, and blended strangely with the background colors. Even adding lighting to them produced a similar effect despite the thicker paint. I did the best I could, and afterwards asked some more experienced painters about a solution. Their advice was to invest in reliable, thinner brushes and go in with the background color to patch up any unevenness, two things I will be trying in the future. It is worth noting at this point that I forgot to take a picture of my palette. However, the only colors of paint I used were Burnt Sienna, French Ultramarine, Cadmium Yellow, and Titanium White.
Overall, this painting session went much more simply than the last one. Breaking it down into steps helped keep me on track, and painting in the shade was a marked improvement. Maybe this isn’t so bad after all, and maybe those are my famous last words. Stay tuned for my next attempt, where the plan is to paint in a graveyard and hopefully not bury my painting hopes and dreams while I’m there.
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