In this forest scene (photo at left) from the Avenue of the Giants we recently visited, I see the forest of Redwoods cast deep shadows. I demonstrate here one of my most common approaches. Though the scene is less than 50% dark, I find it convenient to start with all dark. So here I coated my board (Have I ever mentioned I don't like canvas? No I haven't till now) with a near black latex house paint. That dried quickly, so this time I'm not squishing yellow into black, but working with darker colors on a darker surface as well as marking the approximate lighter areas.
Even though I will be applying lighter and lighter tones over many areas, to me the act of always painting light over dark (as opposed to always painting darker over light, as necessary on a white canvas), just makes sense because that's how nature illuminates the world. So this is the piece early on, about 1/2 hour.
Here, at 3 1/2 hours I abandon acrylics for oils.
Completed painting. Hues primarily used were greens, yellows, and blues. Blues in the shadows and yellow in most lights bracket the green, one warm and one cool. Sometimes my paintings go in a direction that's slightly off from the original because I'm not so much copying as what I think is mimicking how nature paints with light and sometimes pushing it a bit, maybe emphasizing a few kinds of contrasts, for example.
But enough beating around the bush, so to speak. I figured out why Michelangelo, before spending two weeks dismantling his complex scaffold that covered one half the floor space of the Sistine Chapel (the ceiling was done in two halves and one should notice how different and more bold the last half was, since he only got to see the full effect from the ground the first time he took down the scaffolding), made the announcement that it was complete. It was so he could keep to a minimum the number of comments like my wife made when I figured I was minutes from coming to an end with this one, my first Redwood forest painting...the likes of which went, as I recall, "I like the way it's going". I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to hear that after four years of work. But in my case, it was just a few days, so I got over that before the next crisis struck.
But enough beating around the bush, so to speak. I figured out why Michelangelo, before spending two weeks dismantling his complex scaffold that covered one half the floor space of the Sistine Chapel (the ceiling was done in two halves and one should notice how different and more bold the last half was, since he only got to see the full effect from the ground the first time he took down the scaffolding), made the announcement that it was complete. It was so he could keep to a minimum the number of comments like my wife made when I figured I was minutes from coming to an end with this one, my first Redwood forest painting...the likes of which went, as I recall, "I like the way it's going". I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to hear that after four years of work. But in my case, it was just a few days, so I got over that before the next crisis struck.
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