Early Summer Patches Demonstration

I’ve been painting in the studio a bit more that usual lately and having some fun. Using a bit of Visual Vocabulary gained from continuous study and painting outdoors, I have been experimenting with design a bit deeper through inventing more in my painting. I had taken the trip up to Ptarmigan Lake outside of Buena Vista, CO, a couple of years earlier and had a great time hiking and glissading around the area on the “corn” snow that still remained this particular early June. This painting is from some of the photos taken that day, memory, and some artistic license.  I composed the painting below before I tackled the 36X48.

Before I painted this study, I drew out a value study and experimented a little bit with the spacing of the trees that comprise the foreground. When I achieved a rhythmic pattern that was attractive I dove in to this little 10X12 to get the relationship between the foreground and the background worked out. I didn’t go in to too much detail with the background in the study because at that size I think there is really only room for one focal point. Plus for this painting, I was more concerned with the difficulty of pulling of high altitude limber pines, so I put my focus on studying them.

Whenever I work large, I like to sort of outline the major contributing patterns of shapes. Because of doing the study, I had a solid grasp on how to layout the foreground and background relationship not only in terms of shape and their overlapping relationships, but because of the underlying sense of linear perspective. Having a strong sense of the three dimensional aspects of your subject will help tremendously when it comes to leading the eye of your viewer through the scene, moving entities around to better suit the viewer’s journey and lighting the scene accurately or according to the mood to be portrayed.

After the linear pattern and the arrangement of the major contributing shapes have been decided upon, I will go in with a full value and  color block-in with lean color.

Using the study as my guide, I’ll immediately get the gray tones going in the background while keeping it in a cool blue harmony to sell the distance of Goreman’s Ridge taking prominence in the background.

I decided to redesign the foreground snow shape to be closer in resemblance to the study. “When in doubt, look at your study!!”

Sooner or later I’ll have to get to the sky and figure it out.

Starting to refine the canvas as a whole. Defining the shapes and edges more and more through each pass. Getting the reflection working on Ptarmigan Lake. Adding ‘sparkle’ to the snow. Changed up the closest edge of the lake.

Worked out the sky and the foreground rock and snow shapes, signed it and put it in the frame!