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Hill Gate 12x16 oil on canvas |
Here’s a brief step-by-step of the painting I did
today. It’s another run through of
the approach I posted a little while back. If this is helpful, please let me
know. Sometimes I feel like I’m
wasting your time.
This was done
from a rough pencil sketch for design and value pattern, and a photo I shot
while exploring a wonderful ranch in Kerrville, last weekend. This is just one way to make a
painting, and not the only way that I use. The benefit of this approach is that it helps you stay
focused on a strong and simple design structure.
In the first stage,
you can see that I’ve painted a warm, transparent undertone to represent the
mid-value range of the painting, and on top of this I’ve scrubbed in the notan
pattern I designed. I’ll talk more
about “notan” in another post. For
now I’ll just say that it’s a two value design in light and dark meant to represent a
balanced and evocative arrangement of the major forms in a design. It’s a good idea to make either the
light or the dark shape dominant (occupying 60% or more of the overall design).

In the second stage,
I’ve dropped in the light value group, and placed the brightest color note near the focus. In this particular approach, I like to begin with a balanced design,
grouping the dark, light and mid-values so as to avoid the spottiness of values
that can occur if you don’t make a conscious decision about how they will be
grouped. If you’ll keep the three
values in simple related groups, and emphasize the focal area (in this case the
gate), you’ll have a pretty good chance of making a strong painting.
In stage three, I
pre-mix the colors I want in the shadows, making sure they all fall within the
shadow value range. In this case,
I mix nothing lighter than a fifty percent value. I like to lay in colorful grays. Just a personal preference for what turns me on. If you try this, try to keep the
intensity, or chroma of the various colors fairly subdued, or they will have a
conflicting relationship to the colors you choose to appear in the light.
In stage four, I
finish laying in the canvas by placing a couple of light, mid-value colors over
the mid-value shapes.
All of this kept pretty loose and flat without much effort
to control the edges of the various shapes. I leave that until the next stage, finishing.
In stage five, I go
back into all the shapes giving attention to edges. Edges need to be soft, hard, interrupted, broken or
lost. You really only need a
couple of hard edges, usually somewhere around your focal area. They will draw the eye right to
themselves. Too many will kill the
focus and give the painting a brittle feeling. I also adjust the accuracy of the various shapes, the
temperature relationships in the three value groups, and enhance the contrasts
around the focal area. Once all
this is done, I add a bit of calligraphy to tie things together and give some
indication of scale, and I’m done.