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Dreaming of Skye
36x36 Oil
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In my last post, I
spoke about winter painting—but winter is also a time to look
forward to painting in warmer times. This winter, I'm looking
forward to Scotland! Trina and I will be leading a painting retreat
on the Isle of Skye in June. This will be my third trip to Scotland
and Trina's second; and who knows, maybe we'll just end up buying
that little crofter's house by the water. But in the meantime, I
wanted to paint a picture of that house and the beautiful country
around it.
For this painting,
I decided to continue my experimentation with a limited palette of
only secondary colors from Gamblin: permanent orange, dioxazine
purple and phthalo green. (Read my previous blog post about my
approach here.) I'm finding this palette extremely useful for
painting the landscape. To start with, you find the secondary
colors—orange, purple and green—more often in the natural world
than you do the primaries. But what's more, when you mix these
secondaries to create versions of the primaries, you end up with a
variety of greys. These lend an even more natural feeling to the
mixtures.
In this painting,
I also used a substantial amount of the three Portland Greys from
Gamblin, rather than white. Although Scotland can have some very
vivid colors—think "green"—the weather, more often than
not, tends to greys and more muted colors. What little white
(titanium-zinc) I did use I saved for the reflective highlights on
water and a little in the distant sky near the horizon.
To start, I took
at 36x36 gallery-wrapped canvas and applied a wash of permanent
orange. Once this was dry, I gridded it with twine to help transfer
a design sketch with a small brush. (See my previous post on thathere.) I followed this with a bigger brush for the block-in of
approximate colors. Then I moved to a knife.
From this point
on, I used two painting knives exclusively, no brushes. These were a
3-inch knife and a 1-inch knife. Using a big knife for large areas
made the application of paint go much faster than with a brush; the
small knife I used for small shapes, details and lines.
By the way, I
based this painting on my gouache sketchbook from my last trip to Scotland, as well
as a few photos. Here's the gouache study. You'll note that the point of view in the finished painting is a bit different; I used a photo to help establish point of view.
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| 5x8 gouache sketch |
And here are
sequential photos of the painting, plus the initial design sketch (4x4). You'll note a few (small) design changes along the way. Also, the final photo, of the finished painting, has color closer to the actual painting. The sequence photos aren't true to the color.
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| Done. |
