Revisions, revisions...and finally the final!

Well is this the slowest moving demo ever, or what?  Sorry about that, and thanks for sticking with me! I  haveenjoyed this painting, but  I struggled with the foreground boats I had planned to include.  I took them out and put them back in several times. I felt like I wanted something there to lead the eye into the picture, but the boats as I had them seemed to block my entrance  rather than aid it. So I finally settled on a single rowboat to lead the eye in while still allowing some breathing room.

After that was all hashed out (whew! ) I set about laying in the background boats against the retaining wall, half of which are in shadow, and half in light.

Next came the masts, sails, and water. The reflections in this scene were very soft and shimmery. Light reflections tend to cast a wee bit darker than what is being reflected, and dark ones are a tad lighter. I tried to keep the whites on the warm side, as they take on a lovely golden glow as they glimmer in the low angle of the sun.

"Pescallo Glow" Oil on Linen, 24x30" (SOLD) ©Jennifer Young

So, did I keep with my grayscale plan I mapped out at the beginning of this demo?  You tell me:

grayscale sketch by Jennifer Young

I must say that I liked having the grayscale notan and I actually did reference it often during the entire process of my painting. While I think it is a valuable tool, I think I would still have benefitted from doing a compositional line drawing in addition, especially with such a complicated scene. I probably reference the notan sketch more throughout the painting, but a strong compositional line plan may very well have eliminated the foreground boat dilemma I struggled with midway through the painting.  Live and learn!

Moving forward (Lake Como W.I.P., continued)

At this point in the process I feel that I have sufficiently addressed the nearest hillside to the point that I can now move forward and focus on the middle distance boats and water.

lake como painting in progress by Jennifer Young

I also realise that there is still a lot of white canvas around this painting and I really want to at least block the rest of it in so that I can better gauge my color and value relationships. Ideally I probably should have done this earlier, but as you might have noticed I have been short on easel time in the last week, and I want to address the water in as close to an alla prima fashion as I can, because otherwise I end up having to scrape off a lot of dried paint from my palette and remix everything to try and get back to where I had previously left off.

Pescallo painting Italian landscape

Ah, that's better!  I've painted in the little stone wall/pier to the left, and have at least suggested that there is a lake here somewhere! The paint layer on the water is still a very thin block-in here, but at least I have some color down and have indicated approximately where the boats are going and where the water highlights will be. This last picture shows where I had to leave off this morning. No matter how early I try to get out to the studio, I seem to always feel that I have one hour too little. But that's the way it goes, right now. Depending on how much painting time I will get this weekend, I hope to finish this piece up in another session or two.

painting-in-progress of Pescallo Italy

Lake Como W.I.P./Demo (continued)

Well I promised color in my last post, so let's get started! I don't know if I mentioned it lately, but I have been experimenting with expanded palettes for my latest paintings, and that exploration continues with this one. Regular readers may remember that I have for a long while used a limited palette of red, yellow, and blue, plus white (like this one). For this painting, my palette is (as I lay it out from left to right) Titanium White, Cadmium Yellow Light, Golden Ochre (Rembrandt), Cadmium Orange, Cadmium Red, Alizarin Permanent (Gamblin), Cobalt Blue, and Ultramarine Blue. (I've specified brands where color names are specific to a particular brand.)   I haven't used any pre-mixed greens, as you can really mix a zillion different greens with this palette. I have used most of these colors off and on, with the exception of Cobalt Blue. To be honest, I was really hoping that I wouldn't like it, because it is a terribly expensive tube of paint. Of course, I love it!  It is a cooler blue than Ultramarine, which has more red in it. I still love Ultramarine, but Cobalt has some really wonderful possibilities. Any way, back to the painting...I start by painting in the sky, which contains the light source and is also the farthest in distance. The sky is Cobalt blue plus white, with cad yellow lt. added as it nears the horizon. For the clouds I've mixed a combination of blues and cads red and orange + white for the shadows, and Cad orange and red + white for the highlights.

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Working from back to front, I next paint in the distant cliffs, which have a beautiful shadow casting down over them from low-lying clouds. The photo is a bit dark here (apologies) but I will try to get some more accurate photos in subsequent blog posts so you can get a better idea of the colors.

The distant mountains complete, I block in the buildings that jut out into the harbor, as they will serve as my area of interest in the painting, and everything will kind of flow to lead the eye towards them. I also decide to lay down my pattern of darks, to restate the plan I made in my notan sketch. Again, this photo just blackens everything out, but I had to make a choice between using my time blogging or photo editing, and at this point, I've chosen blogging.

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Next, I work on the terraced hillside in the middle distance. What a joy it is to paint...all of those shadows and varied greens! A nice round bristle brush is great for painting in those cypress trees, which have always struck me as distinctive punctuation marks in the Italian landscape. .

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 A mahl stick (shown in the next photo  on my easel below the painting) is a handy tool to have to steady the hand without smudging the painting, when painting details like architecture and tall skinny cypress trees.

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I have yet to paint in the highlights on the cypresses, but once I've done that I will be ready to move on to the middle distant water and boats, and finally the boats in the foreground. All that will be left after that point will be fine tuning  wherever's needed.

Lake Como W.I.P. & Demo

I mentioned in my last post that I had a new painting in the works, and I thought I'd attempt a little demo with this one. I say "attempt" because my laptop finally gave up the ghost, and these days I tend to do a lot of my writing via my mobile. Not only am I "all thumbs" (literally) but I have to sneak it in before my phone gets snatched away by the chubby little hands of my daughter who wants to "see pictures" whenever she sees it emerge from my pocket. This will be a painting of the beautiful fishing village of Pescallo. Pescallo is a tiny, sleepylittle place that sits just down the slope from Bellagio (also very beautiful). In fact, I could see Pescallo from the balcony of my Bellagio hotel, and the drama of the light as it poured over the mountains and harbor beckoned me to take a stroll down there many mornings before we started the day's touring.

I begin by sketching out a compositional plan that is also a value plan for the painting. I do this using light, middle, and dark value gray oil paints in my sketchbook. I often do a similar thing with Tombo pens (the grayscale ones), but mostly when I am painting outdoors as a way to quickly hone in and get a handle on my composition (in an environment that is bombarded with stimuli). But it is a good practice with studio work too. The oils are mentioned in Kevin Macpherson's book, "Landscape Painting Inside and Out," and I have long wanted to buy these paints so I could give it a try. They are Portland Gray Light, Medium, and Deep, by Gamblin. Hey, if it's good enough for "KMac", (as my husband calls him) it's good enough for me!

notan sketch

The point of this is to see if your painting has a strong underlying structure with a unifying value plan without getting bogged down in details. This is really supposed to be more of a notan sketch at this stage, which is a very simplified thing and addresses more of the armature of the painting rather than the pinpoint accuracy of objects and shapes. It's been a while since I've done this kind of study, and I realized at some point that I had not allowed much for the fourth value I was working with, which was the white of the paper. Oops! So I had to amend my sketch a little and add in some white for the lightest areas.

Still, I feel that my plan is solid and I'm ready to move forward by sketching out a line drawing on my 24x30" canvas.

oil sketch lake como painting by Jennifer Young

For this I am using burnt sienna (Winsor Newton), thinned with Gamsol mineral spirits. I don't much use this earth color in the rest of my painting stages, and while I could mix up  a good earth for such a job using my standard red, yellow, and blue, it is more of a convenience for me to use a premixed paint at this preliminary stage. I also like it because it lends a nice warm undertone to the canvas as I go along, and it doesn't bleed into my other colors (especially the light ones like the sky) when I move beyond the sketching stage.

Now that I have a plan, I am ready to start painting with color! I'll get into that in the next post .

Montalcino Valley (w.i.p. final)

Well I think I am about ready to call this one finished. This painting was a real joy to work on. I loved painting the rolling hills, the atmospheric perspective and the various patchwork of patterns woven together to make up the beautiful countryside that is Tuscany.

"Montalcino Valley" Oil on linen, 24x30" (SOLD) ©Jennifer Young

This painting is of the valley of Montalcino, a small town set in the heart of Tuscany. My vantage is the top of the hill in a vineyard, which I have painted before, a few years ago:

"Piccolomini Vineyard", Oil on linen, 24x30" (SOLD) ©Jennifer Young

 This current painting, however, omits the foreground vineyard entirely and focuses on the valley. We toured and tasted at this vineyard as well, (Ciacci Piccolomini) and sampled the famous Brunello and Rosso wines of this region.

Well, back to reality....The new schedule is working well. Of course I wish I just had one more hour in the day to myself, but I really can't force myself to get up earlier than 5 a.m., so this will do for now. By the time I get moving, dressed and breakfasted, it gives me between two to two and a half hours to paint before the hubbygoes off to work. That's nothing to sneeze at but I have to be pretty focused to make the most of my time.

But I am learning something about process with these constraints. I am trying to get my whole canvas up to the same level of finish in one session--especially at the start--so that when I return to the easel I don't have to spend so much time figuring out where I was and where I'm going next. I also have to paint in thinner layers and buildmore slowly, making sure I don't go too thick too soon, so that I can make needed changes on the way.   So while it's less wet-into-wet, I am trying to appreciate the opportunity I have with a painting that has had a bit of time toset up. This allows me the time to scumble and dry brush here and there, as long as the paint passage isn't already too thick. I'm still learning how I might take advantage of the time I have and how to make the process work even better for me within those constraints, but I feel (at least today) that I am moving in the right direction.