In the last post I said that if I was smart I'd space out the posting of my paintings backlog. I'm not that smart, just distracted. Anyway, the above are two parts of the same gouache painting I did in the last week of November. I kind of like each on their own. I wanted to try rocks again, ideally with some transparent water to show the rocks below. I grabbed a frame from a high-rez YouTube video and ended up cropping all but a little bit of water out of it. I was working with a limited palette at first a couldn't get close to the colors of the reference, or even a satisfactory tone overall. Here's what I was working from:
Looking at it now, "How did I get so far off?" It's so much darker and monochromatic. To be fair, you're not seeing the painting when I was still trying to capture what was in the reference. I gave it a rest then looked at it from afar and thought, That's looking fairly good. I just have to take it a rock at a time." Not the best strategy for a strong painting, but I was more interested in problem solving and playing with the water. Dove back in and, to my eye, things got worse.
I have a fantastic book on landscapes by James Reynolds who was an western impressionist painter with realistic results. He wrote that he'd often move or add trees or other pieces of landscape to make a better painting. His pointed out that a painter is not a photographer. Your goal is to make a great painting not to perfectly capture what you're looking at.
Well, I was not on a path to greatness so I stopped trying to capture the background rocks and made them much darker. I went the opposite way with the right side of the painting and added bright autumn foliage. And then I fought with that dang water puddle. I could not get the transparent feel. Some of that was working so small, these paintings are only three and a half inches high. The other problem was that I kept reactivating the lower layers of paint. I need to try an all puddle painting, maybe even doing a master copy of an existing painting. It's just something I want to conquer. It's like working out a puzzle.
So here's what I ended up with:
Geez, looking at this side by side with the reference, "How did that left center rock get so small? Especially since it's the source of the painting's major problem?" Quick aside, I had purchased a jar of Dorland's Wax Medium to preserve the paintings from moisture. Not usually used in sketchbooks, but that's all I work in. Again, I am too precious with these sketchbooks. Anyway, after a couple of days of playing with this one, I decided to call it quits and coated it with the wax. Once you do that, you can no longer paint on it. Which means I could correct anything.
Usually, I don't try correcting anything because I'm tired of working on it. Mentally I just want to be through. The Hellboy painting in the next post is a case where I liked it so much, and was clear on what I wanted to correct, that I did go back in and am pleased with the result. But after I waxed this one, I saw it with fresh eyes and realized the weird pear-shaped rock in the center looked more like an actual pear than rock, didn't feel connected to the ground, and had awkward shared outlines with the smaller rock beside it. And the smaller rock also feels like it's unconnected to the ground because of a very few paint strokes. The mossy rock in the left foreground is mostly warm with some cool colors where it faces away from the light. But those cool colors look like they're the bottom edge of the small rock - just because a couple of grey strokes at the bottom. Lesson learned?
I highly recommend the James Reynolds book. The landscape book is hard to come by but Traildust is easily attainable. At the time of me writing this, it's still on Amazon. I used to show it to background painters to examine how he used shadow and light in paintings like "Monsoon." Alas, our schedules and budgets never allowed for the scene specific level of color design that would be required to capture it. Little did I know when I bought the book at a shop in Sedona, Arizona that James was probably painting just a few miles away.
Check his website here: http://jamesreynoldsartist.com/
Stay Safe --Tad
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