Week 5 Winter 2012 Semester

Winter 2012 Acrylic – Foggy PV Lighthouse

I will try to recap what I didn't manage to get posted last week so we can get caught up.

Before I put in the clouds, I used my toothbrush and gesso and put some stars in the darkest part of the sky. This is only an option, you don't need to do it but I thought it was something you needed to see.

The clouds can be done with either a knife or a brush, I think I worked with both. The color was a blue/gray ( blue with touches of sienna, purple and gesso to lighten it a bit). This was my base color for the clouds in the sky and the fog but to it as I painted I added other colors like red or orange to suggest the color of the sky reflecting into the clouds or fog, sometimes I added blue to darken the color to suggest shadows or gesso for lighter areas, this is impressionistic so what and how much is up to you. Even though this is impressionistic it is probably even more important to remember that the direction of your strokes with brush or knife need to follow the the thing you are painting. Clouds roll and boil so your strokes need to do the same.

I took the fog bank that is on the horizon almost all the way across the painting going behind the point with the light house. I need the dark there for later.

In the ocean area I mixed a gray blue/green with blue, Hooker's green and the fog gray and enough gesso to lighten it some and with the knife added this color to the ocean. This darker color needs to be along the horizon and in front of the point to help define the point and into the bay. It is okay to leave some of the under painting as highlights on the water, but try to get the areas closer to shore which is further from the light source, almost solid, this helps define the cliffs. You can use a knife or a brush.

I added the green to the top of the far point by adding more green to the mix I was just using.

Add enough blue, sienna and purple to that mix to make it gray again for the fog that is closer in, add gesso or white to lighten to the value you want. I tend to stay in the same area of my palette if the colors are close to the colors I have been working with.

One thing I did do that I corrected last class was I brought the fog too high up on the nearest cliffs, I had to go back in and add back some of the rocks I lost.

That was where I stopped the previous week, the following is what I did this past week:

I am at the point in this painting where I need to think about finishing up. Where can I add more light or dark? Do I need more or less fog? What is bothering me the most?

As I said previously, I thought I had too much fog in the foreground so I added back some of the rocks, I also added back some of the water around the rock in the water along with lightening some of the fog to leave a sunny break in the fog to light the rock. Notice that the fog in the foreground is darker than the fog on the same plane as the rock or the cliffs, this gives a reason for the highlights and shows a path for the sun.

I also added more blue to the water around the point because I didn't have enough to make the point stand out.

The grass in the foreground was that fog color with more Hooker's green and a touch of sienna. I used my brush to pat it on to give it a fuzzy look and as I put that color on I picked up other colors like blue or purple to darken the corners or touches of gesso or yellow to lighten. I did want it to look misty so I kept it cool in tone.

Finally, I put in the lighthouse and palm trees on the distant point. Whenever you add something like a lighthouse or a building be sure that you get the proportions right between the place it is sitting and its surroundings. In the photo, I measured the lighthouse then measure it against the cliffs, I found that it took a little more than 2 lighthouses in length to go from the bottom of the lighthouse to the bottom of the cliffs, this keeps the lighthouse from getting too big. If you let your brain try to do this on its own, your lighthouse will be 300 feet tall because the brain will assign importance to it and it will grow and look out of proportion to the cliffs.

Also, there is NO DETAIL in either the lighthouse or the buildings. I used gesso with a tiny touch of yellow and a bit of mud on my brush (what ever you have on the palette) and made a very light warm grayish color to block in the lighthouse and the buildings. These are JUST MARKS, just blobs of light paint to SUGGEST buildings. I used a bit of burnt sienna to touch the tops to SUGGEST roofs but that was it. Down and Dirty, no one haired brushes, it is too far away. It is the same for the palm trees, I used a grey/green color and just made a bunch of marks to suggest the palms but there is no detail.

The light beams from the lighthouse are gesso and a tiny touch of yellow to warm it up starting at the lighthouse and using a dry brush technique, I pulled the color away from the lighthouse in a "V" shape, I also used my fingers to pull and soften this color as it moved away from the light source. This is the reason I needed the darker fog behind the point so my lighthouse and light beam would show up.

There may be some things I will do to finish this up this painting once I have lived with it for a while but for class, I am calling this one done. We will be doing some studies starting with rocks so please find some images of rocks to have for reference for class, there are some on my reference photo page but it is good practice to have your own. See you all in class.

Animal Portrait Class

To recap what I have done the past couple of weeks on Jackson, I realized that I had some problems with the proportions on the face. The more I looked at it the more I realized that I had missed a whole section of his head when I was doing my drawing so I ended up painting out all of his face, redrawing and repainting. This happens to all artists regardless of how good they are especially if you are trying to talk and paint at the same time.

Once I had my face back in where it should be, I got to work on the details. The fur will take layers of dry brush to make it look like soft fluffy fur it also takes adding colors my may not see right off the bat. Just because he looks like a gray and black dog, he actually has a lot of other colors in his fur. I dry brushed in blues, burnt sienna, some pale oranges and some lavenders as I was adding layers to his fur. I would have put them in even if I couldn't see them because I know that they are there. If you look at anything bet it plant, animal, or rock, man made or nature, you will start to see that most things are not just one or two colors even something that "appears" to be one color. Look at a white wall and try to analyze it. Compare the sun lit areas to the shadows, if there are plants or grass near the wall look for reflected light in both the lit areas and the shadows. Look for the reflected violet light that is in the lighter shadows. You will see all sorts of colors and that is what is happening in an animal's fur as well. Adding other colors brings life to the fur as long as they are subtle they will add to your painting.

Many beginning students misunderstand the use of purple. Purple is your natural shadow color so when you are mixing a color for your shadows it is good practice to add blues and purples to the color you are mixing, it doesn't mean that it is totally purple, it does mean that the color is on the cool side. These are subtle colors, not ones that hit you over the head unless that is what you want and it dose take practice to mix the right colors in any medium but once you understand it, your animals will look more real.

Sometimes adding colors you know should be there go against the grain of what your brain tries to tell you. This is usually your left brain trying to call the shots and in my case, my left brain was telling me that dog noses are black. Period. Well, that usually isn't the case. Just like everything else, the nose of an animal is influenced by light, texture, reflected light etc as well as slight variations in the color of the nose. This dog the nose leather was just slightly warmer where the top curved into the front of the nose and there was a tiny touch of pink on the inside of the nose, plus there was a reflected blue light on the top and sides and the highlight. All of this is what makes the nose look wet once I fought my urge to just paint it black and added the colors I knew were there, his nose just pops off the canvas and looks cold and wet like it should.

I've also started to add the markings to the face so I can get a better sense of where I am with Jackson. From this point on I will be refining this dog. Looking for highlights, checking the shapes of things especially the markings, making sure I am following the growth patterns of the fur, basically getting him ready for the final touches to finish him up, which I may do next class with any luck at all. The next animal I will be doing is my late little white dog and I will be working in pastels.