Oil Painting on Cotton Canvas, December 2023
Reference and Inspiration:
Two Organic Shapes With Different Sizes and Temperatures
This was the first of about half-a-dozen Christmas gifts I painted for my family members. To come up with painting ideas, I listed out their names in one column and wrote gift ideas in another column, mostly pulled from our shared photos and image searches on Google. This one was for my step-mom and dad.
I picked it because they have often gone skiing together. Also, the two mountains seemed like a pair and in a kind of harmony. The orange and blue temperatures made me think generally of a “range of emotions”, like from a person’s memory of experiences, and so I thought these things tied it together as a nice and meaningful subject for a painting intended for a couple who skis. Hopefully reminding them of good times taking in mountainous landscapes.
Also, my first decent painting I gifted to them was a mountain. So I guess I’m copying past successes here. Hey, I never said I was original.
Thumbnail Sketches, Wash, and Underpainting:
A Dark Foundation, Light Mountains, & Midtone Sky
Using Graphite Sketches, as well as Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna to Figure Out the Right Lines and Values
Here’s my definition and use case of notan or thumbnail sketch to better understand the following paragraphs:
A notan sketch is a thumbnail-sized sketch artists use to learn the darks, midtones, and lights of a new piece, as well as play with its structure/composition before starting the actual artwork. It’s a prototype. It’s easier for the artist to correct big mistakes when the mock-up is miniature. Often, it helps to shade a dark-to-light gradient nearby and pick a limited pallet of tones to work with (Example [assuming black = 10/10]: an off-white or 3/10, a regular gray or 6/10, and a near-black or 9/10).
The notan sketch in my sketchbook was pretty easy and fun to do, because, for me, the big shapes of darks and lights looked obvious in this photo. I used a few graphite pencils in my sketchbook (2H, HB, 2B, and 8B) to block in the values.
The shapes in this image are pretty interesting; some are simple and others are very complex. I got a better idea when I made an outline without shading to understand the lines, their angles, and the primary design that they make. In doing this, I considered the orientation of the lines in relation to the canvas’s edges, and the proportions of the shapes that those lines make.
Once satisfied with my thumbnail sketches, I moved on to painting the canvas with a neutral-colored wash, and laying down the underpainting of lighting and shading. After this, the bottom of the mountain was nearly finished because the underpainting almost matched it.
Sidenote: I am frustrated because I forgot to take a picture of this part, and I’m trying to document each part of my process. Oh well, my bad. Future blog posts should have images of each stage.
Blocking In Color:
Planes of Orange, Blue, and Purple / Violet
Intentionally Mixing & Filling in Big Shapes with Color
Blues:
A whole lot of blues were needed for the sky, the cool shadows of the foreground mountain, and atmospheric perspective affecting the background mountains. You can’t mix blue, since it’s primary, so I needed to play with a few kinds of blue: Cobalt, Pthalo, and Ultramarine. Cobalt is cold and what most people would think of as “normal blue”, Pthalo is warm and slightly greenish, and Ultramarine is warm and slightly reddish.
Oranges:
The orange light was a bit easier to get and required less primary color variations. Since it's a place where a lot of direct light is hitting the mountain, this “orange” is actually made mostly of white. There’s small amounts of red in it here and there.
Purples/Violets:
As I said before, the darks were mostly taken care of with the underpainting, but there are cool blues and purples that were necessary to add. I started by glazing (thinning the paint and placing that transparent layer over the original dark layer). I did enjoy this dark purplish color and mixed more, so I could paint heavier layers over top, and I pulled some of that color up in the crags and shadows of the mountain.
What’s on my pallet?
- Titanium White
- Burnt Sienna
- Ultramarine Blue
- Cadmium Yellow
- Indian Yellow
- Bright Red
- Cobalt Blue Hue
- Phthalo Blue
- Dioxazine Purple
Of these colors, I used Ultramarine Blue the most. No surprise there.
The lighted areas of the painting were mixed with white as the base in most cases, though the temperature and saturation is so warm, I was pulling in a lot of Indian and Cad Yellow, and some Red here and there. Where there’s a lot of redness in the reflected light of the rocks, there is also a lot of Burnt Sienna. Those colors make a nice smokey red color that I like a lot.
That Diox-Purple is dangerously strong in pigment, and was only mixed into the shadow side of the mountain, as I said before. The other blues were only used for the troublesome sky, as stated before.
Painting Challenges & Solutions:
Mountainous Textures. Gradients in the Sky. Snow in Different Kinds of Light.
Bringing in the Pallet Knife, Repainting and Repainting, Color Corrections
I learned that it’s a real pain trying to paint a mountain’s rocky and snowy texture with a paint brush, even a chisel-shaped one (called a dagger or bright edge). It contains so many polygons of various colors and sizes. After screwing it up a few times, I used a pallet knife with a roll of paint VERY GENTLY, letting the paint break into various shapes as I pulled it over. Then I worked on those shapes with the tiny chisel brush.
Another challenge I faced was mapping the gradient of the sky from top to bottom. Blocking blue in evenly is fine-and-dandy, but getting that gradient was difficult. It shifts from a saturated midtone blue to a desaturated light (basically, a light gray), and it has some greenish-yellow in there. When I didn’t get it just right, it was obvious to me. The solution was essentially measuring the stages of the gradient on the reference image and then going over the real thing with a few layers until it matched.
I had difficulty when mixing the rightmost light value in the snow. It alternates between orangey-direct-light and the purplish-shadows with reflected light. At times, I went too saturated, and at other times too light. I have cheap plastic “viewers” for seeing value, which helped. Color-picking the reference image also helped, though I consider it cheating. Ultimately, I just had to keep mixing and repainting.
Final Impression and Lessons Learned:
Simple Shapes Are All You Need. Extreme Temperatures Make Boring Subjects Interesting.
The outline and underpainting came in clutch. I can’t imagine painting a mountain like this with so many hue, chroma, and value changes, not to mention so many organic shapes, without a sketch and underpainting. They helped to simplify it, lay down a good foundation, and make the whole thing seem less intimidating.
I think the mountainous texture is a bit impressionistic and inaccurate, but good enough. I was surprised how difficult it was, because I told myself it was just small shapes that I could “figure out”. Same goes for the sky, which looks like a run-of-the-mill gradient. And I guess it is, but painting that rapid change in value and saturation killed me. Who knew.
Similar to my painting Laundry Door, Sunrise, this extreme orange-blue temperature really is interesting to the eye. I’m not sure if people have adapted to firelight versus the cool light from the moon, and that’s why this works, or what. But this temperature contrast really works well. The different temperatures do make the painting look dichromatic, but, per my earlier sections, it didn’t limit my pallet much and was still fun to paint.
