Leaning Mistakes

Okay, so early in the week I commented on my Facebook page about doing a romantic Boldt Castle painting. I had a glorious vision of sunsets, pinks, reds, and a stately castle carefully and meticulously rendered on a larger canvas. Unfortunately sometimes mistakes occur!

I will save the lesson of the mistakes for next week. I fully intend to revisit this vision, for I believe it to be a grand one with a great story, but without the mistakes! So next week we will talk about some of the things that happen and how you can learn from your mistakes.

Instead I will share another walk through on a piece I did earlier this week. I find lots of inspiration from Deviant Art and the artists there. This is where we start, with the inspiration.
My inspiration was these:

(Both are from Deviant Art the first one by:                         the second by:                       )

Okay, so I liked the colors of the first one. If you notice, they are already in a complementary color scheme. You have orange and blue mostly in this. I also loved the idea of light littering the ground and making the leaves light up. However, I wanted to use the bottom photo as my actual composition with a few adjustments for I like the path ending in light concept.

Here are the adjustments. First, the composition photo is too centered. The path and focal point is too much in the middle and remember last week, we said this is bad because it divides the painting in half. It is also quite boring and we don't want to be boring. So lets move that point over just a bit to the right to make it off center.

Here is my sketch of the initial composition:

 

I brought the trees forward a bit and you can see the right hand side ends at that dark tree on that side of the picture. I actually cropped the picture before sketching so I could remain on target. It really is too easy to get off track when sketching it out, especially with all these trees!

 

Since we are going to use only the blues and oranges in order to capture the look of the first picture, I used acrylic paint to put in some of the lights and darks to guide me. My focal point is not going to be the distant "white" light at the end of the path, but more like the pile of leaves to the left of center. I want my viewer to fall into those leaves! The path and the colors surrounding the viewer will pull them throughout the painting so that once they fall into the leaves they can get back out again without difficulty.

 

 

At this point we need to discuss something that is very important to this piece and that is atmospheric perspective. When something is farther off in the distance, though it be a tree, bush, house, etc. often it will look more "blue" and often lighter than you'd normally expect. This is because of atmospheric perspective in that you are looking at it through the atmosphere. You really get a great example of this with fog, for you are looking at things farther away through the clouds that are laying low to the ground and therefore things look 'foggy'. Well regardless of what time of day it is or what conditions there are outside, you are always looking at things far away from you through some sort of atmosphere.

Therefore, the trees in the distance in the picture look fuzzy and lighter than the trees next to the photographer. This has to be painted in a similar manner or else the depth of the painting will not be realistic enough.

So to get this look correct, we should start there first.

 

 

 

Notice all the trees in the background are blurry and blue/grayish. Even the leaves are duller, for you would not 'see' their vibrant colors until you were much closer to them. This gives our painting a bit of depth and you can follow along the path to wherever it ends.

 

 

 

I carried the blue/gray all the way through the background for the forest does not end with these few trees. You would see multiple trees in the background and it might go on for miles. However, to keep the viewer focused these trees need to be out of focus. Instead I want the viewer to focus on the colors, the light and the trees in front of them.

 

And here we are:

 

 

Obviously not everything is perfect, for so little is. But this did turn out a pleasant little landscape that helped me get into the mood for Fall. I also got to practice some of the things I have been learning about and one day hope to completely master!

 

Next week we will get back on track with Boldt Castle (I hope). I really want to share my vision with you and hope this week it turns out better! More planning and prep work (which I will share with you) should fix that.