Here’s a deeper look at some of the paintings I did in November based on my own, personal photos.
The Last Red Maple in South Medford
Another foliage painting! This really belongs with my October foliage paintings (part one and part two).
Why I wanted to paint this scene: While most of the other red maples have dropped their leaves, this one struck me with its luminous redness. The sky was also perfect on this day, intensely blue with an aqua horizon.
Loved: Vibrant colors, high contrast shadow, looseness.
Learned: The background is a bit boring and spare, I could have kept more of the “distracting” background details or put something else.
Color Notes: I used DV Permanent Red (PR188) as the main color in the maple, and I like it a lot. You can get similar colors with other mixes in my palette (e.g. PR209 + a bit of yellow), but this is quite a convenient starter for a maple color. I mixed in a bit of Hansa Yellow Deep (PY65) and shaded with palette grays, made mainly from Cobalt Blue/Indanthrone Blue. The sky is Cobalt Blue + Cobalt Turquoise.
Bolt of Blue
Why I wanted to paint this scene: Dramatic sky! Mackerel clouds! The golden clouds and surprising bolt of blue in the sky near the old-fashioned church steeple. How Godly (and New Englandy).
What I wanted to change about the photo: A bit too dark with a confusing jumble in the bottom.
Loved: The difficult balance of wet to dry to get those spotty clouds. The overall effect of golden hour. The gorgeous color in that little flash of blue sky. That I erred on the side of making my grays violet. The buildings give the right effect, and the one spruce silhouette came out well.
Learned: That church steeple is just a bit wonky – perhaps a smaller brush, underdrawing with a ruler, etc might have helped? Or working bigger in general to prevent having to make precise details so small.
Color Notes:
- The gold underpainting is Naples Yellow Deep of course, though I switched to MANS for adding yellow to cloud mixes.
- An unusual thing I did this time was to use Permanent Red (PR188) for the red undertones in clouds. The result is very muted mauves with an edge of orange, which feel a bit less vivid-violet and more tense than my usual PR209 or PV19 violets. I like this technique and would use it again.
- The perfect-blue-sky color is a mix of Cobalt Teal and Ultramarine Finest.
- There’s a lot of UF in the clouds, too.
- “Indigo” hues from Permanent Red + Phthalo Turquoise.
Goodnight Moon
Why I wanted to paint this scene: The juxtaposition of a lovely crescent moon amongst fairy-tale-like, golden-hour clouds.
What I wanted to change in this scene: The moon is too tiny!
Loved: Vibrant blue sky colors from Ultramarine Finest + Cobalt Teal. I always say “I don’t like a granulating sky” but these really are the most magical sky colors. White gouache plus MANS and palette grays also made nice clouds colors.
Learned: I actually think the moon could have been smaller and placed differently (more off center). Uneven moon spots might also have been good. There is also something bizarre and unfocused about this, though I think this might be deterioration of my phone camera giving a vaseline-lens effect.
Goodnight Brook
Why I wanted to paint this scene: This is part of my project of painting “archive” photos from my Google Drive. I liked the clouds on this one.
Loved: The upper cloud turned out pretty good. My practice of painting blue over a light wash of Quin Coral is reasonable for skies with pinky clouds.
Learned: This is a challenging scene because of its abstract patches of darkness and, yeah. The painting turned out pretty abstract looking. I’m not sure what I expected.
Morning Light
Why I wanted to paint this scene: I loved the gold-ness of the morning light on the facing house (which is ordinarily white), and the silhouette of the tree. I also liked the bird on the wire, which contributed to the morning feel.
What I wanted to change from the photo: The photo is shot at a weird angle, with a screen in the way, and the bird isn’t prominent enough.
Loved: Surprisingly decent straight lines (for me!) I don’t usually paint houses or architecture due to my fear of lines, but I don’t mind these. I also think I captured the colors pretty well (though it was hard to photograph properly). I especially like the detail of the upper window being more turquoise and the lower windows being darker blue-gray, which I think is doing weirdly a lot of work.
Learned: A more crisp tree shadow would have told the story better; I should have done it wet on dry. There’s something strange about the perspective.