I think my shadows have been overly dark lately, so I’ve been seeking opportunities to “lighten up”.  An old reference photo of “China Cove” in Point Lobos did the trick. The photograph was over exposed, so everything was lighter than it would have been otherwise.

As I was painting this, the colors in the photo where washed out, so I also thought about pushing them further.  I had a good time with this painting, and very happy with it. It has the sense of light I was looking for.  I also reminds me of somewhat of Camille Przewodek’s colors. I tend to drift between schools of color, from Camille’s light key paintings to the more dramatic value changes of the Russian impressionists school.  I think I’ll stay in this key for a while, and see how things go.

Also, I took photos of the painting in progress, so created a little video (see below).

China Cove - Oil on Linen - 12×9

Here’s a short video of the painting in process.

Click to visit YouTube.  Be sure to click “Watch in High Quality” link, lower right.

We’re having incredible weather this week in San Francisco!  I crossed the street yesterday to Buena Visa Park the oldest park in San Francisco on a great hill in the center of the city.  I hiked up near the top, where this great view of the bay and neighborhoods below made for a nice light backdrop for the shapes of the Monterey Cypress trees.  I think this will make a nice larger work.

A couple of things to note in his painting: 1) The city below is abstract, just dots of mostly warm colors, with an occasional blue green to represent distant parks/trees. The city was fun to paint, as I could place dots of color in a way that’s both pleasing, and reads well from a distance. 2) When painting the sky, I not only need to represent the value change from bottom (lighter, warmer) to top zenith (darker), but also from right to left.  In this painting, the sun was on the right, so the sky is also lighter there. 3) One very difficult transition was from the distant hills to the bay.  The values needed to be very close, so I needed to show the difference between water and land with a slight color shift.

I’m very happy with this, although if i paint larger, I think I will alter the trees in the lower right, and make a more dramatic slope, to better give the feel of height of the park.

View from Buena Vista Park - Oil on Linen - 8×10

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Here’s another study of “Lands End” (Golden Hour) I started in my previous post.  I created a video of the process, by stringing together still photographs of various stages of the painting.  I like this composition.  The large tree reflects the strength and gracefulness of the Monterey Cypress, but I’m not sure about my darks…they may be too dark.  I may try another study today where I play with that a bit.  Painting dark darks provides nice contrast with light (which I clearly needed here), but it can also make the painting too “heavy”.

Lands End (Golden Hour) #2 - Oil on Linen - 12×10

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Click this screen shot to get the demo (be sure and click “watch in high quality” in the lower right corner of the video, a new YouTube feature.

Last Sunday was a beautiful day for walking, and the far western edge of San Francisco (known as “Lands End“) was striking the last hour of the day (”Golden Hour“). A couple of things attracted me to this scene: the light, subject (Monterey Cypress trees, my favorite!) and the shapes made for an interested composition.

Lands End (Golden Hour) - Oil on Linen - 8×10

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Below, you’ll see the reference photo.  Notice I edited out a few things. An artist’s ability to edit his own ideas is an incredibly key skill. A work that tries to communicate too many ideas, ends up communicating nothing.  Any Project Runway fans out there?   You hear the judges warning contestant designers about editing their own ideas all the time. It’s evident when a model comes down the runway whether or not the designer is able to focus on a single, powerful idea, or whether they’re show-boating, and throwing in every technique they’re capable of.

The Golden Gate Bridge is one obvious omission.  I tried putting it in, but, it didn’t work. As a man-made object, it drew a lot of attention, and it’s too small and not a good shape or position to be the center-of-interest, so why lead the eye there?  Second, if the scale of the painting where larger (this is an 8×10 study), I may have been able to get it to work, but at this size, it’s difficult to paint a structure like that and maintain the loose brushwork.  I would have had to use a small brush, and the texture alone would have detracted from the texture in the rest of the painting.

I really like the photos I took that day, so I’ll definitely paint more, larger works in this vein.

Just south of the art town Carmel lies Big Sur, probably the most majestic meeting of land and sea in California.  It’s been painted by many artists over the past 100 years. Unfortunately, it’s also been scared by the recent fires this summer.  I don’t know what the area looks like today, and am a little hesitant to go back.  How’s it changed?  if you live in the area, chime in, let us know…

This painting presented a number of challenges. I needed to represent three areas of distance: foreground, middle ground and distant background. This required careful control of values and color, especially hue intensity and temperature. As objects recede, a number of things occur, and you generally need to push each of these aerial perspective principles a bit to get your image to read well in the two-dimensional space of canvas. First, colors change, generally getting cooler (as the layers of moisture in the air add blue), but they also change by hue, getting less intense.  The level of intensite is different, depending upon the color: Yellows drop off first, followed by red, then blue. In addition to getting cooler then, they also loose hue intensity in that order (yellow, red, blue).
The second big change is values: values come closer together as space recedes.  Even so, you must keep your light and shade areas distinct, ie, all objects in light must be lighter than all objects in shade, and vice versa.

Given these general principles (follow or break them to meet your needs–do what works for you), the color of the ocean was particularly challenging. It was very intense, so more difficult to show recession in space.  As you can see, the blue of the water here is the most hue rich of everything else in the painting, and yet I needed to represent both foreground and distant water surface area.  The distant area is slightly lighter and duller, in this case. I’m not sure it reads well as distance, but let me know what you think.

Big Sur - Oil on Linen - 11×14

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Sunday was warm, clear and little wind, so a great day to paint the coast.  I wandered over to an area I like generally referred to “Lands End” (here’s a Google Maps aerial view).

On days with clear sky, you’ll notice that the shadows are quite blue as the sky color reflects directly on shadowed flat planes.  This was really easy to see on this day, particularly since the white water provided the perfect platform for viewing clearly the color.  One art teacher used to have us place a white piece of paper on the ground, part in shadow, part light, to judge the color of shadows and light that day. The other observation I had was the color of the light, and again, the white water played the role of that white paper on the ground.  The color of light was yellow, and of course as the afternoon progressed, it picked up more orange (I finished this in about an hour).

Painting a single monolithic object is a challenge compositionally.  I certainly didn’t want to place the large rock in the center of the canvas.  I used the “thirds approach“, and so placed the center of interested at roughly the verticle and horizontal thirds of the canvas.  Once I’d decided on the lower right, I needed to balance the space out with other rocks.  Luckily, the lower left rock was actually there, but I improvised others.  I dulled out and simplified the top half of the painting to provide a neutral backdrop for the lower half center-of-interest, high-saturated colors.

Another challenge here was the fact the rock was multi-colored.  I couldn’t really tell whether the top was white from “bird contributions”, or weather it was a different type of rock.  Probably the former. With the top half white, and the bottom warmer earth colors, I needed to ensure the light and shadows read properly.  So, the shadowed side of the top of the white rock had to read as white in shadow.  I needed to keep it just slightly darker than any of the planes in light. I also needed to ensure I didn’t duplicate that color with the white water shadow color. I’m always very careful not to repeat two color/value combinations in a painting for different objects.  It doesn’t (rarely) happen in nature, so it shouldn’t here. The shadow side of the white rock is a dull, blue violet, whereas the white water has more saturation and color variation.

Seal Rocks Beach, San Francisco - Oil on Linen - 8×10

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I am headed to Russian River today for the weekend, and hope to get some painting done along the coast, or who knows, maybe figures around the pool at the RRR!

This is just a little figure study I did from a photo book.  I am looking forward to painting live models in the next few weeks when David returns from Latin America.  Painting the figure is by far the best way to learn to draw. I drew the figure a year with charcoal and newsprint before I first picked up a paint brush, in 2001. Drawing and values are the foundation of representational painting.

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Asleep (Green Room) - Oil on Linen - 12×9″

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