A good value

If you have been reading my blog long enough, you may find that I obsess a little over art supplies and gear. A few months back a fellow artist mentioned that a great tool for judging values was a Kodak Wratten 90 filter. So for a few months I was on a mission to find one that was A) big enough to comfortably look through (ideally 4x4) and B) low enough in price so as not to break the bank. After searching online and watching the bidding wars on eBay, I found the combination of the two criteria impossible to meet. Then one day it dawned on me that I used to have a little red value viewer tool that I'd picked up in a sewing store. I don't know what happened to it, but I thought I'd poke around on Amazon to see if I could fine something similar. Lo and behold, I stumbled upon this little number:

Like the Wratten filter, this value finder helps neutralize color so that you can more accurately discern the values in your reference. Not only that but it has 3 view finders of different aspect ratios that will work with a range of canvas sizes. It also has optional guidelines that you can overlay to check composition, AND a couple of value scales to check your paint mixtures.

The drawback is that the filters are red rather than the nice grayish neutral of the Wratten filters. This may not appeal to everyone. But with a $14.95 price tag it is a good option and specifically geared toward the painter. I have been using it with studio work and it does a good job at neutralizing color so that I can judge values with more accuracy.  I haven't used it outdoors yet but I think there it would be even more useful when making on the spot judgements, and I look forward to taking it along with me (hopefully this week) now that the weather is warming.

Sunlit Harbor, Varenna (painting complete)

Happy Spring everyone! It's been a looong winter, and I honestly don't think anyone could be much happier about a change of seasons than I am! Any way, to kick off the new season I will wrap up my painting of the Varenna Shoreline. Below you will see I've gotten the buildings of the village fleshed out and am just launching into addressing the water:

Next I work on getting the boats laid in, and adding a little more detail and highlights to the shrubs and trees perched along that wall.

Then the final touches of the masts and buoys are laid down. I use a liner brush to lay in the delicate lines of the masts, starting from bottom to top. A mahl stick really comes in handy here to steady my stroke. At this point I am nearing completion. I may go into it again, but I am going to sit with this a while and start in on something new. If it's not 100% done, it is close.

"Sunlit Harbor, Varenna" Oil on linen, 24x36" Click here for more info!

Light and Edges; Varenna painting progress (W.I.P.)

Here is some progress to report on the Varenna painting  I've been working on.  In my last post I had pretty well laid out the background. But when I came back  to the easel again I decided that before jumping into the foreground I should add a little more contrast to the nearest mountains and soften up some edges to the distance overall.

That done, I address the walled village of Varenna next. I want to establish the village before the water, so that when I get to the water I will be able to properly address the reflections. First, I set about laying in the darkest passages.

Next I start in on the buildings. The direction of the light is upper left. This was close to 11 a.m., so the sun is high but not directly overhead. Even so, I think with the movement of those clouds and the way the trees and shrubs are positioned, there are some interesting shadows being cast on the buildings. I hint at this in my study, but in the larger composition it took some time and concentration to get it to look right.

Here's where I am this morning with the painting. I'll be working on this today and again Wednesday, so assuming nobody gets sick and we don't get more snow  I will have some more progress to report this week!

Varenna's dramatic skies (W.I.P. continued)

When I traveled to Bellagio and Varenna, one of the things that struck me about the landscape was the dramatic cloud formations that settled over these little lake towns. Possibly this is due to the altitude, or the difference in altitude between the lake and the surrounding mountains. OR, it could have just been my timing. In any event, while they were very beautiful and created spectacular displays, they also made  it pretty tricky to sketch/paint en plein air because the daggone light kept changing from minute to minute. In the studio, of course all of that is much easier to control, and I get to celebrate the beauty of the clouds without at the same time cursing the inconvenience of them ;-). After I sketch in my composition, my most common approach to landscape painting is to lay in the sky and the far distance. Since the sky contains my light source, the highlighted sides of the clouds will hold some of the lightest values in the painting. Probably the only other things that approach this high value is the light bouncing off of the white painted boats.

I am not sure if it's evident in this photo, but I have used an array of colors(cad orange, cad red light, alizarin permanent, ultramarine and sevres blue) to tint the clouds. The blue sky is a combo of ultramarine, sevres blue, and white.

Next distant mountains progressively deepen in value, but they are still very cool in temperature, so that they will sit back behind what's to come in the foreground. After evaluating my composition further, I decided to raise the distant horizon line, so as to push those cliffs back a bit more, in relation to the foreground town.

 After I get the painting a little further on, I may come back and tweak what I've done here. But for now  it's time to address  the water and the heart of the matter; the town of Varenna.

Varenna Shoreline W.I.P.

I feel a bit like Punxsutawney Phil, poking my head out into the public for a brief moment, only to run back into obscurity and wait out the rest of winter. It's not really fair to blame a pudgy little rodent for my absence and for all of the crazy snow days we've been dealt this winter. But given he's fictional and defenseless and  I've no one else to point a finger at, Phil it is. Nevertheless, I've started a new painting based on the small study I posted in my last entry. This is the tonal lay-in on a 24x36" canvas. Some of the lighter  areas got a little too "tonal" as I made adjustments to the drawing, (most notably the boats) but as I have my study and photos, I will make those corrections when I get into color.

 There are only slight variations in design at this point-- just a minor reshaping of the distant hills to slow the speed of the downward slope. I also simplified and "skooched" back (sorry for the technical lingo) one building that sat directly behind the villa sitting closest to center to minimize the confusion of these overlapping forms and hopefully  create a more elegant design.

I 'm generally happy with the color plan I used in the study though, so at this point my plan is to follow its lead as I start my next steps of diving into color.

Studies

I'm baaaack. And I'm kicking off my return to blogging with a new Varenna study. I actually hesitate to call this a study, given the amount of time it took. I guess a month away from painting has left me feeling a litle rusty and slow! In any case, this painting will serve as a preliminary study for a larger piece.

Varenna Study Oil on canvas, 6"x9" Contact me for more info.

We have had rounds of winter sickness followed by school closings due to snow, so with my foray back into painting being twarted quite a bit, I had the thought to develop a number of small scale studies of some larger painting ideas that  I've been wanting to tackle. I'll be painting some of these to scale up to my larger sizes. For example this 6x9" piece will scale up to 24x36".

I've painted various views of this harbor a few times now, which you can see here,  here, and here. I guess you can tell I am enamored with this particular view of this  lovely Italian lake town! This composition emphasizes the strong horizontal of the walled town jutting out onto the lake, contrasted by the verticals of the buildings and tall cypresses.

While I almost always sketch out my composition on paper before I tackle a canvas, I usually leave the painted study for when I am out in the field painting from life. In fact, I have painted lots of studies and lots of larger scale studio pieces and quite a bit in between. Not all small paintings warrant a big statement, but I haven't been all that great about developing my viable studies into larger, more fleshed out studio concepts.  My schedule has been so sporadic for such a long time now, and with not much chance of an end in sight, I really feel like I need to have a more methodical  approach to my work habits. I am hoping that by tightening up my studio practices a bit, I might find more equilibrium when I do get a chance to enter the studio, and I will waste less time and feel less at a loss about what I am going to tackle next.

Well, nothing informs like experience, and since these small ones can presumably be completed in a fraction of the time, (ahem!) I thought it was worthwhile to have a go at a few of them, done, specifically with larger paintings in mind. I will also mine some of my other small works, in particular the plein air pieces I've done, as I think a number of them have potential for further development. I have worked from a number of them here and there, but I think there is more potential (especially in my James River series) and it could be something fun to do during these cold winter months when I'm not getting outside.

Finally complete- Tuscan Hay painting

I'm taking a break from chopping my vegetables to finally wrap up the latest Tuscany painting I left flapping in the breeze on New Year's Day. After I had my composition established and my canvas covered, it was time to go back in to further develop the background, middle ground, and foreground. It sounds very systematic, but this was really more of a back and forth dance because the value, scale, edges, etc. all have to relate and are interdependent with the other elements in the painting. For instance, in the image below, I thought I had the background fairly finalized...until I took a step back and decided the buildings were too large and too prominent in relation to my foreground house. As I moved forward to the center of interest it became apparent that these two areas of the painting were battling for attention. So I went back and softened the distant village and reduced the size and contrast of the buildings a bit more, and further softened their edges.

Here's the final:

"Tuscan Hay" Oil on Linen, 20x24"   

Progress on the Tuscan Hay painting

As is typical of my working method, I establish my sky and clouds first on my newly sketched canvas. This helps me to key the rest of my light values in the painting. At this point I also  lay in a first pass on the distant mountain.

Next come the hill town and terraced hillside of the background. At this point I am still establishing the compositional elements so there is not much color or value variation. I will go back into these areas again, but I really want to develop the entire canvas to the same level before it sets up too much, as I'm not sure when my next painting session will be.

Now for the middle distance, where my area of interest (the house) resides. I decided to lower the cypress to the right of the house, as I felt there needed to be some height/shape variation in the trees flanking the house.  I'll have to go back into that sky area again where I made this change to clean it up a little more. Good thing I still have plenty of that sky color on my palette! Again, I don't have much in the way of highlights yet...just a few value shifts to give certain objects a little form.

Now I'm ready to start laying in the foreground hill and those groovy hay tracks.

That was fun! Now I have the whole canvas covered more or less to the same level of finish. There's a good deal more to do, but this feels like a pretty good start for around 4 hours of work.

Tuscan Hay

I hope you all had a very Merry Christmas! Ours was filled with laughter and fun, (which is an easy achievement when there is a 3  1/2-year-old in the house). We are still in the middle of winter break, but fortunately I can still carve out a few more painting hours between now and the dawn of a new year. I've been playing around with a composition of the Tuscan landscape of a hillside decorated with the pattern of freshly gathered hay. The meandering pattern of those undulating lines of hay shaped by the rolling hills are what first inspired me to start sketching, first in my notebook, and then more purposefully on my  20x24" canvas:

My plan is actually to create those lines carved out by the harvested hay a lot more subtly, but they are pretty linear right now because I just want to establish their pattern. In the distance is a terraced hillside punctuated by cypresses, as well as  old stone walls and towers, and cypresses so typical of southern Tuscany.

Update on the Ansouis painting in progress

Now that we have some real Christmas deadlines looming, I've decided to give the self-hosted auctions a rest for a while. Thanks so much to those who bid and followed my auctions! It's been an interesting little experiment that I might revisit in 2014. But it was a lot more time consuming than I imagined, at a period in my life when it is a challenge just to maintain a normal studio schedule. Meanwhile, the painting of Ansouis is still on the easel (case in point!) Here are the latest progress shots:

  So now I have the whole canvas covered. I started in on some of the details sooner than I would have liked, but there were a few breaks in the continuity of my painting sessions that compelled me to tackle certain areas while they were still wet. Over the next session or two I'll be finalizing the background mountains and fleshing out the flowerbeds. I'm going to do my best to finish this up in advance of Christmas. School's out for a couple of weeks for Christmas break so my studio time is about to get a lot more dicey.

Ansouis (W.I.P.- continued)

Here's some progress to report on the composition I sketched out in my last post.

After laying in the sky and distant mountains, I set out to establish the broad areas of light and dark in the painting. I'm really trying to think of my composition in terms of underlying masses of light and shadow, and not just a group of individual objects.

I'm using a broad palette of colors- my usual red, yellow, and blue, plus cad. orange, cad. red, permanent rose, sevres blue, as well as two earths; gold ochre and burnt sienna (for the tonal sketch) and, of course, white (titanium).

This is as far as I got today- about 2 1/2 - 3 hours' work- before it was time to pick up my daughter from preschool.

I'd really rather not allow this to set up, as this is my "first pass," and there is so much more to lay in. I am going to try and work on this again tonight after my little girl falls asleep, but I'm not normally good for much creative work after wearing the "mom hat" in the evenings. We will see. Otherwise my next dedicated painting day will be Friday, and I'm afraid it may be too tacky for my liking by then.

Ansouis/French village painting in the works

Note: I have gotten word that some users are having difficulties placing bids on my auctions. I believe I have fixed the issue now (the bid button was missing!) But if you have attempted to bid unsuccessfully, or if you are having any issues now, can you please contact me and let me know about your issue? Now, on to the new painting! Not a great photo here, but I'm doing a bit of mobile blogging and the image editing options on my phone aren't optimal. Nevertheless, I  thought I'd share the rough sketch I've started on a 20x24" canvas of a French provincial village street scene.  Even though I mapped out the composition more or less to scale in advance, it took a little more editing than usual  to get the layout the way I wanted it (the first pass had things too centered).

The plan for this painting is to portray a square in the center of the charming village of Ansouis. I have a busy next few days with family, but I hope to be able to get back to this soon. I'll post further developments as they unfold!

The Potted Garden, Pienza (painting complete)

With school out for the Thanksgiving holiday, my studio time has been a little dicey. But now that we are back in session I have managed to wrap up my posting about the Pienza painting from earlier last week. Before I dive into painting the potted plants, I finish up the main architectural features of the painting-- the final touches on the windows and doors, and completing the distant bench.

 Now let's move onto the flowers!

Here is the final:

"The Potted Garden, Pienza" Oil on panel, 12x12" Click here for more info!

The hill town of Pienza is lovely for a number of reasons. First, it overlooks the gorgeous Tuscan valley called the Val d'Orcia. Second, like so many of these small towns,  the whole village is oozing with charm and dripping with flowers, just like the scene I have painted. Third, it is the home of Pecorino cheese! Need I say more?

Shadows, doors and floors

Here is a little progress on my painting of the Tuscan street scene I posted a sketch of in my last entry. Now that I have my design, I am ready to start laying in some color. My palette is fairly expansive, which I tend to do in the studio when I am more pressed for time. Here I'm using a few convenience colors in addition to my basic primary palette of red/yellow/blue. My colors for this piece are Titanium White, Cad Yellow light, Cadmium Red Light and Medium, Alizarin Permanent, Ultramarine Blue, Sevres Blue, (Rembrandt- kind of like Cerulean but a bit brighter with more tinting strength),  Gold Ochre (also Rembrandt brand- like Raw Sienna but warmer and more golden; yum) and Burnt Sienna (tonal sketch only). I start by laying in more concretely the pattern of shadow and light. I really love the way the shadows from the potted flowers spill onto the stone wall and red door:

 I use lots of the Gold Ochre for the wall, mixed with both blues and Alizarin in varying degrees, as the stone has lots of warmth but lots of variation in it too. For the door I started out with pure Cadmium Reds in the sunlit area, but whoa! I then decided to mute this a bit with touches of white and a tiny bit of yellow plus Sevres Blue to give it a more authentic sun-washed look. The door in shadow is a mix of Cad Red Medium, plus Ultramarine and Alizarin.  Next I start to lay in some of stone bench:

As you can see, I use violets in the shadows (Ultramarine Blue and Alizarin, plus touches of  white and yellow) to contrast with the bright warmth of the sunlit stone.

The bench established, I add a little more texture to the stone wall and then begin to lay some pavers. Even though they are terra cotta- colored pavers, they are still very light in value in relation to the wall. I've cooled them off with a bit of  Sevres Blue as they recede, to send them back and lay them down where they belong. Next I'll start working on the potted plants and add some more color to the scene. Stay tuned!

Shadows of the Blue Ridge

Well it took a while but now I've wrapped up my 24x30" studio painting that I started in my last post. I finally got rid of that white canvas. Hooray for small miracles! Here is the painting fully laid in, with the sky. I decided to keep the sky fairly simple in this one because I want to play up the large tree:

Next, I go about refining everything and adding more paint overall:

And then, the trees:

"Shadows of the Blue Ridge" Oil on Linen, 24x30" Contact me for more info!

A gray morning in the mountains

It's been a while since I have painted a studio piece of the American south, but my recent trip to the mountains has inspired me to explore the subject back home in the studio. This little mountain painting was a bit of an experiment, as I tend to shy away from painting gray days. The light is flatter, color is more "local", and values tend to be a lot closer. While I have sometimes been "forced" to paint gray days when I'm field painting, without that beautiful sunlight casting shadows across the picture plane, composing a subject of a gray day  is a challenge I too often tend to avoid. So this is a painting of facing that resistance head on.

"Morning in Gray and Gold" Oil on Linen, 12x16" Click here for more info!

It doesn't hurt, of course, that in the mountains many of the grayest days are incredibly stunning and full of quiet majesty and spectacular atmospheric effects. The sun was scarce on the first half of my painting trip, so I had plenty of opportunity to observe these effects.

This painting is based on wiper I did on site. The wiper didn't survive (which is why its known as a wiper!) but the memory did, as well as a number of photos I took of the area. This location is a birding trail I happened upon while exploring Nellysford, VA. I think those yellow flowers are goldenrod (?) They were everywhere, along with many other stunning wildflowers. The main attraction for me though, was the mist and clouds that settled on the distant mountains, with just a bit of the mountaintop peeking through. It was really something to behold.

Ancient Hills, Golden Valley

My latest sunflower landscape painting (the start of which I posted here) has actually been finished for a while. But once again I have been delinquent in posting. To make up for that fact, I offer you a slideshow of this painting, start-to-finish:

This painting measuring 20x24" is entitled "Ancient Hills, Golden Valley". For more information and/or to purchase, click here or contact me!

Pescallo cafe complete

We have had a bout of sickness at our house (first me, then my daughter) but I finally had a chance to get back to my Pescallo painting over the holiday weekend. Let's wrap this up! Picking up from my last installment, I am ready to paint in the flowers. Bougainvillea spills over the arbor with mixtures of alizarin crimson, permanent rose and a touch of cadmium red to warm things up. Normally I would block those colors in sooner but I was still trying to decide about the placement of that arbor structure and reds are such high staining colors that I didn't want to put them in until I had the composition pretty well established. Now I guess I am committed! ;)

Geraniums in shades of red fill out the planters using the same colors as the bougainvillea (but in much different ratios).  I also flesh out the columns on the terrace and I am nearly done with the pier.

Now it's time to move down to finish the foreground water and reflections. There is a lot of movement in this water, and with much of this water in semi-shadow, reflections are subtle and broken by waves rather than the strong, mirror-like reflections seen in still water. For the darkest shades I mix Ultramarine and Gold Ochre, warmed or cooled by touches of Cadmium Orange or Sevres blue as the situation allows. Water highlights are deeper shades of the sky color.

My finale is to include the rest of my vertical lines- the mast on the boat and the railing along the pier. These verticals act as a strong counter-balance to the horizontals of the mountains, boat and pier. I think the railing also serves to further push the background more firmly in the distance.

"Alfresco in Pescallo" Oil on Linen, 24x30" Click here for more info!

This piece was a challenge to me, largely because of all of the interruptions I had, which caused the painting to set up quite a bit more in between sessions. I much prefer painting wet-into-wet, to avoid the extra work of opening the painting back up and scraping the dry paint down off of my palette. But sometimes it just can't be helped. In any event, I hope you like the final piece!

No babysitting this week, so there will be lots of trips to playgrounds and possibly the zoo, and I likely won't have much in the way of new work to post until after my daughter is back in preschool on the 9th.

Moving forward

Before I could really tackle the foreground on my Pescallo painting-in-progress, I needed to establish the background water. It shimmers with a pale sparkling light in the distance, the color becoming deeper and more varied in contrast as it moves in waves toward the viewer.

Lest I got too caught up in the romance of Italy or the gentle waves of Lake Como, my husband brings me back to reality with a screeching halt and a critique of my painting. His opinion is to flip the direction of the boat so that it leads into the painting rather than out. I have to agree with him here, so being the always obedient wife (ha ha) I do as I'm told.

Next, I really need to address what is happening on the pier so that I can paint the reflections in the foreground water. I paint the tires that hang along the pier and serve as a rustic contrast to the elegant beauty of the backdrop. This epitomizes Pescallo to me; it is rustic but beautiful, quaint but elegant, sleepy but exciting, all at the same time. The tires are in higher contrast on the sunny side and in low contrast in the shadows.

Black is not black and white is never white. By this I mean that I don't use a tube black to paint black-colored objects, or a straight out of the tube white for most white-colored objects. This would create very flat, dead color. Instead, I mix my "blacks" with my darkest translucent colors on my palette, ultramarine blue and alizarin crimson, and just the tiniest bit of cad. orange or yellow to neutralize some of that purple undertone.

Flowers and flowering vines grow out of every crack and cranny around these parts, and I paint those in delicately so as not to overpower. The showy flowers will be the geraniums and bougainvillea to come.

School is back in session, which means that our babysitter has become a lot less available now that she's returned to college classes. It also means I will have less time to paint over the next two weeks until my daughter returns to preschool. I didn't get the time to paint outside last week, but my goal is to finish this studio piece with one more session tomorrow, so that I can still fit in a plein air session by week's end. I'm close...wish me luck!

Pescallo cafe demo updated

Ever tried painting on four hours of sleep? It ain't pretty! In fact, doing anything on "sleep fumes" (as I call it) is a bit like running through wet cement. That's how it's been lately for me as my insomnia issue has again reared its ugly head. And it's why I typically have avoided doing a full-fledged painting demonstration recently. Nevertheless, I have progressed a bit with the Pescallo painting, and I'll continue to share my process for it despite the break in continuity. When I last left off, I had a good deal of the background mapped out. Now I am tackling the foreground.

Even though I felt as if I had a pretty good compositional plan going in, I continue to tweak elements of the composition as I go along. For instance, I decided to extend the tip of the closest mountain off further to the right, so that it wasn't in danger of butting up against the foreground verticals. I also wondered if the boat was too large in the original drawing for where I had placed it in the picture plane. So I've experimented with reducing it slightly below.

Mainly though I've been working out the shadows and highlights of the foreground café and the pier. I need to get those pier elements in place before I can address the foreground water and any reflections down there.

I hope I can wrap this up in another session or two, depending on how much time I can carve out to do it. I'll continue to post my updates and painting notes as I go. Thanks for tuning in!