Blue Ridge mountains landscape painting: Lifting Fog II

Here is a painting in my "Southern Landscape" series that I've just completed. This painting shows an early morning Virginia scene of fog rising from the earth on a summer's day. I painted a smaller similar version of this scene some time ago and when I finished that one I knew I wanted to see it on a larger scale:

"Lifting Fog II" Oil on Canvas, 24x36" (SOLD) ©Jennifer Young

I mentioned the other day that these last paintings I've been doing of early evening scenes are lessons in value comparisons. I can say the same for this early morning scene as well. The values are fairly close together in some cases and the value shifts are very subtle, so it can take some doing to differentiate one from another.

The main thing I do is just to compare, compare, compare. I will mix a big load of color on my palette and dab a bit on the area of canvas that I'm working on, compare that to the other surrounding values before I commit.

Color temperature (warm vs. cool color)  as well as color intensity are other elements that help describe atmospheric perspective in a painting, especially when the values are very close together.

So, for instance, if I want to push a part of the landscape back into the picture plane to add depth, I may cool this area down, gray it down, or use less contrast (or all 3), as I've done with the above lines of trees at varying distances.

By a similar notion, if I want to push a part of the landscape forward I may use more contrast, as well as warmer, more local colors as I did in the twilight painting from my previous post.  Of course, with a blazing sunset in the sky all of this gets a little tricky, but that is part of the fun!

Sunset landscape painting; "Twilight on the Outer Banks"

Fresh off the easel is another landscape painting of my favorite time of day on the Outer Banks. The setting for this painting is again on Ocracoke Island, on a little inlet that has a small beach where you can watch the sun set.

"Twilight on the Outer Banks" Oil on Canvas 24x30" ©Jennifer Young

I am really enjoying the challenge of these evening paintings. The value ranges are relatively close in most areas of the painting, so I've really had to pay attention to the subtle differences in values and how they relate to one another. I'm still limiting my palette, but depending on what I am painting I vary the palette colors somewhat. I'll write more about what I'm discovering in my next entry.

New coastal sunset landscape painting; "Finale"

Fresh off the easel, this painting is of a spectacular sunset we saw on one of our trips to the Outer Banks of North Carolina this summer. It's Silver Lake Harbor on Ocracoke Island, to be exact. This painting and other recent landscapes will be included in my upcoming show called "Luminosity".

"Finale" Oil on Canvas, 24x36" (SOLD) ©Jennifer Young

I'm calling this piece "Finale" (as in "the grand finale") because, like a finale in a live orchestral performance, sunsets are like nature's final performance of the day. They never fail to dazzle, and yet no two performances are ever exactly the same.

Luminous landscape painting: Beneath the Haze

This is a new painting I've done as part of a series of works I am calling the Luminous Landscape. It is of a most unusual evening sky I saw while painting an adjacent view on location on Tilghman Island. It had been an incredibly hazy, humid day, and when I set up to paint en plein air, the sky was covered in a heavy haze. But as the day started approaching sunset, I saw the sun doing its best to burn through that haze. The effect produced a diffused comet-like trail of light across the upper part of the sky, and a bands of clearing closer down to the horizon. I really enjoyed the abstract qualities of this scene.

"Beneath the Haze" Oil on Canvas 40" x 30" ©Jennifer Young

I painted this larger painting in my studio on a gallery wrapped canvas with a deep 1.5" stretcher with painted edges, so it will be ready to hang without the need of a frame. Here is a side view:

Morning Meadow; Blue Ridge Mountain landscape painting

I have been spending so much time doing small studies lately that it really felt good to do a big-honkin' painting in the studio of the beautiful Blue Ridge mountains. Ahhhh! Big canvas, big brushes, and lots of paint.

Okay, so this painting is 30x40"--not massive but respectably large for me. I've painted other variations of this scene before but they sold before I could get a high quality photograph taken of them. This snapshot is off somewhat and caught a bit of glare but I will post a better image once I've finished the painting (a bit more minor tweaking to do.) 

I decided to try this with a limited palette of five colors (ultramarine blue, cadmium red light, alizarin crimson permanent, cadmium yellow light, pthalo green and white.)

Basically this is the palette Kevin Macpherson often cites in his very good book: Landscape Painting Inside & Out, (which I will write about more extensively in my next post.)

This pallette differs from the one that Kenn Backhaus uses that I had been experimenting with a couple of weeks ago painting on location in Easton Md. I rather find myself gravitating more towards the Macpherson palette, which varies the colors and omits the black. The jury is still out though and I will continue to experiment with both, as I do think I am learning a lot about color.