Sunday, May 31, 2015

Teanaway painting

I stayed at Cle Elum last night and painted along SR-970 in this morning. Unfortunately clouds didn't clear until I stopped painting about noon, so it's missing deepness of colors. But as I've learned in the last workshop, I made the layers of background mountains/hills gradually lighter. I guess I needed more crip colors in the frontground. I think the drawing isn't too bad though. I sketched in the 6x8 sketchbook before start painting because I was almost sure I would be wrong with vertical scale in the composition.
Along the route, I took a lot of pictures of horses at ranches.

Sunday, May 24, 2015

Andy Eccleshal Workshop - Day 2

Less impressive but at least I tried clouds. I struggled with the colors of warm yellowish sky part. The original color was more lemon-yellowish, which Andy described "acidic". The snow mountains are a little off in colors.
Soon I gave it up and started the Columbia River Gorge. The browned tree color right next to the front bruff the building is standing on was not what I wanted in color. Andy suggested to make the value closer to the bruff right behind. I might try this again based on my own photo taken a year ago (I think).

Saturday, May 23, 2015

Andy Eccleshall Workshop - day 1

Andy Eccleshall is well-known as an atmospheric painter. I know that's not something I want to be but I thought it might help me how I paint sky and clouds.
There was not much instructions and demo at the beginning but we just started painting layers from the furthest, or bottom, layer and put layers on to it to get closer. I picked up a copy of one of Albert Bierstadt's landscape paintings Andy brought in, and started from the far clounds towards foreground. It was not exactly the process Andy showed us at the beginning. Because I didn't cover the entier canvas at the beginning. But managed to finish this in about 3.5 hours or so.
To me it was not much different how I paint outside. Some differnces were:
- under painting was cobalt blue+payne's grey+tinenium white that you can see on the edges of the canva paper, which was covered by tapes when I was painting. We all pre-primed them at home and brought them in.
- size is 11x14 so a little bigger than I would paint outside (9x12), so took a little longer (regulary 2h).
After finishing this, I started a cloud painting (only clouds and mountains are in composition). I'll finish that tomorrow morning hopefully.

Saturday, May 16, 2015

Skagit River Painting

By the way last week end I went to Skagit Valley to paint. It was a little cloudy in Sunday morning when I painted. So the colors are less interesting and the river water reflected clouds and whity. But the biggest disappointment was I couldn't paint fast flow of water in this painting.

Overdone the background

That happenes. I know I've overdone the background . I need to push it back more greenish and darker again. The shadow area too.
I'll also put my finishing touches on the cow to have more contrast. Then I'd be done with this cow.

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

"Mout Logan"

One of popular angles of Mount Logan (9,087 ft) over Fisher Creek Basin. I took this photo last summer when I hiked Easy Pass Trail in North Cascades NP. It was one of the most breath taking vistas in my life and I was so determined I would paint the scene although I couldn't paint on site. The trail was too hard to carry painting stuff over for me.

Still adjusting the drawing to be accurate before tackling with colours. Already showing the great composition. I feel it would become the greatest of the year. Or complete disaster.