For my tenth project in art class, I chose a scene from the Spanish coast, from my trip hiking the El Camino last year.
I wanted to try my hand at painting water, and fog.
First, here’s the photo:
I didn’t ‘grid’ this one out since it didn’t need to be as precise as the last painting with the pink car. Here’s how far I got in the first class (2 hours in):
The streaks you see in the white part are where I ‘primed’ the canvas (essentially, wipe it with a neutral color so you don’t have a bright white canvas staring at you)
And here is how far I got the following week:
Our teacher recommends starting from the back and painting forward when you’re doing landscapes. And that’s the order you see me filling things in.
Okay, so that’s 4 hours in so far. Here’s what I got done the third week:
I filled in more detail on the rocks on the right hand side. But, I was kind of feeling like it was too much of a blob. Luckily, I had time away from the painting so I could ponder how to fix it. The date today was 3/10/2020.
Later that week our teacher informed us that we were going to change to a virtual class because of Covid-19, so we all had to go in and pick up our paintings so we could work on them at home. Luckily, I had all of the necessary stuff (paint, brushes, canvas etc) at home already so I didn’t have to go buy anything new.
And here is my set up, on the kitchen table. Using her iPad, my teacher put updates she thought were needed on top of a photo of the painting that I sent her. That’s what’s up on my computer. The gray pad with the paint on it is called – ha ha! – The Grey Pad. It’s for mixing paint, as I’m sure you can tell. It’s pretty cool, kind of like wax paper, and you can rip off the sheet when you’re done and have a fresh one. Cuz I’m a cheapskate I let the paint dry and then peel it off, and that opens up more real estate for me on the pad for next time. This only works a few times though – the paper gets weak.
Here’s the update from the first virtual class:
I added shading to the big rock on the right but it still felt blobby to me. And, now, since I was painting at home, I was also painting outside of our normal class time, so, at that point I pretty much lost track of how much time I spent on it. Up to this point it was 8 hours. I think I probably did around 11 hours total.
I’m uploading every photo of the painting that I took as I progressed. Some of them may have only been 20 minutes apart, but, it helps to take a photo and look at it, as well as getting up and walking back about 10 feet and looking at it through a squint.
So, you’re about to get inundated with a bunch of photos and maybe not too many words …
The next 3 photos are what I did after class on the same day (3/17). You can see that the rocks on the right are less blobby now. I took a real close look at the photo to see what exactly was going on there.
I liked this much better but still not completely satisfied.
The next time I painted was on 3/24. Another class plus another couple hours I think. The teacher thought I should add some lighter areas to the grassy part so that’s the first thing I did.
But I wasn’t satisfied with the rocks on the left, or the bigger rocky area on the right. I didn’t feel like they captured the cragginess. So, I started trying to show that.
This felt like I was going in the right direction, but I also felt it looked a bit like ‘paint by numbers’ so, this was going to take a while to get it where I wanted it to be.
Still not happy with it. Time to step away for a bit.
I came back to it a couple days later – 3/26. Feeling like I’m going in the right direction now!
I finally got the rocks to where I was satisfied with them. Now to work on the mist in the background.
Doing the mist was a pain in the you-know-what. I mixed a color that matched the sky and added a lot of “fluid matte medium” that works to not only slow down the drying time of paints, but also can thin them out a bit also. I felt like the mist was kind of stripe-y so I wiped it with a wet paper towel, swearing as I was doing it 😀
OK, so I let it go for a while, until I had class again on 3/31. I lightened up some of the grassy area and added some flowers to the foreground. I also didn’t like the dark vertical bit towards the background so I fixed that and added a little different shape to the background too. Earlier my teacher said it looked like a dog face. Look at the painting above and I’m sure you’ll see it too.
So, here’s the final! I’m pretty happy with it. I feel very proud of how the water came out.
For my next painting I want to try tackling sky with clouds. I have 3 potential candidates to paint. Just need to make up my mind.
I’ll keep you posted!
In the meantime, please take care and stay safe in these very strange times…