Yellow Canoe. Plein Air Painting at Ryland Lakes, KY

Yellow Canoe.  Watercolor.
About 10 x 8 inches.

Sunset Over Cincinnati: A 2nd Study

As spring inches its way into Ohio, the light becomes extra beautiful at sunrise and sunset-- lately, there have been some gorgeous views.  This is the view driving down Winton Road in Finneytown one evening on the way to pick up pizza.  (I confess, I've developed a fondness for La Rosa's pizza.)  It's abstracted, of course!

Starting With Value, Or More Pears

This fall, I'm taking a color workshop from Barb Smucker.  It's a lot of fun, and very useful.  Barb is an excellent teacher, and the class has such varied participants that it's hard not to learn and get excited about art.  I'm going to try and restate some of the things we're learning, to help give me the language to talk about art.  Bear with me!

We started by talking about value, which reprents the light to dark range in art. Many, many artists recommend doing a value study when planning a painting.  This is a monochromatic small study to lay out where the lights and darks will be.  By extension, this leads into "notan," which is a Japanese design principle that applies to how the lights and darks are massed, or the composition.  If I understand this correctly, and I may not--you can do a value study without notan.  When you have reached a well-designed composition in your value study, then you have notan.  Here's a description from Mitchell Albala on notan and another example from Diana Mize for Empty Easel.

By extension, you can use an color for a notan study, and once you've laid out the lightest and darkest values, you can start to add in mid-tone values.  For watercolor, for the darkest value, I'll use a lot of paint and minimal water.  For light, I'll preserve the white of the paper.  And for a mid-tone in a monochromatic painting, I'll use more water with my paint.   Here are some thumbnail sketches for value studies for a still life using raw umber with three values--dark, light, and middle tone.  This study has three different interpretations--a mid/dark center of interest against light.  A light/mid center of interest against dark, and finally a dark/light against mid.  You can see, that how I choose to lay out the painting affects the mood and energy of the painting.

Then I need to extrapolate to color.  This is where it gets tricky.  I think I'll save another post for talking about the next step.  In the meantime, though, here are two of my paintings that I tried to translate from the value study (which, hopefully has some notan).  Both are limited palattes with prussian blue and indian yellow.  The high key light background painting at the top of the page includes quinacridone orange  (at this point, we'd eaten some of the pears, and we were down to one!).  The dark background (below) painting includes quinacridone gold and raw umber.

Post by Amy Bryce Watercolors.

Photographing Watercolors

If you ever want to try an exercise in frustration, try photographing watercolors.  The frustration level ramps up if you are stacking the colors in the painting (ie, transparent layers) or using intense colors that are close in value.  Take for example the following painting I tried, which has the following Daniel Smith colors: phthalo Blue, phthalo green, quinacrodone violet, carbazole violet, and permanent yellow deep.  The emphasis was on shape and hue (or color), so I tried to de-emphasize value. 

The picture on the right shows how close the values in the painting are.  There is some variation, but there it is small across the painting.  The picture on the right shows an attempt at getting the color correct.  I really like the painting to look at, but the photograph of the painting?  Not so much.  It should be much more uniformly--teal?  I'll keep trying to work out how to get an image that accurately represents the painting.

A Failed Painting....Try and Try Again

I was driving my boys home from a lacrosse match south of Dayton when we happened upon a tree lined field.  It was late in the afternoon, and the trees were casting long shadows that looked like fingers.  I love landscapes like this.  I stopped and gawped.  My boys wondered what the hold up was.  I tried later to do a thumbnail sketch to lay out the composition, like so:

The tree shadows were an grayed down ultramarine blue, and the trees and sky were about the same value in blues, greens and golds.  Since it was early spring, you could clearly see the tree branches, and the field tended toward a brown and gold.

I did not take a picture.   A thumbnail sketch and my memory is all I've got to work from for composition.   For more on thumbnail sketches, you can read here.

The painting did not come out at all like I planned....I need to go back and try again and adjust the colors and shapes.  Try and try again.

You'll notice, I've been repeating paintings--frequently it's for scale.  I'll experiment small and then scale up if I like the small work, or the study.  Or, it could be to fix issues like shape and color.  When I'm working from my imagination it can be hard to strike the right balance the first time out.  You can see that when you compare the paintings here and here.

Hopefully, next week, I'll be able to show you an improved version of the same landscape.

Outbuildings

I saw an article in the NY Times this morning about how photographers flock to Yosemite National Park one week in February to capture El Capitan when the light hits the granite perfectly.   If you're an artist, you probably obsess about the light too. 

One of my favorite times is sunset in Cincinnati (or the midwest) especially in the spring and the summer when the evening light seems so clean, clear, and golden.  I have a theory that the light is equally lovely at sunrise, but morning is never my best time.  You'll see where I've posted about sunset paintings here and here.

I have a second paining I did from our trip to MO at Thanksgiving--captured at sunset in IN.  Land of field farms, and beautiful light.
The title is Outbuildings.