Hard as rock.

Rocks Along the Creek, 10 x 8



Sunlit Rocks, 8 x 10

 In my classes this week, we discovered that rocks can be a tricky subject matter to paint. When painting rocks as the primary subject matter, without including much else in the landscape, the painting becomes like an abstract painting.  Our goal with this exercise was to use the reference photo only as a starting point, and reshape the overall composition and individual rocks to create a dominant rock shape and strong compositional movement throughout the painting. Simplifiying and combining shapes in the early stages are important steps.  I hope my students who attended this week persisted in completing this painting, since the later stages, when you can play with adding touches of color throughout, are a lot of fun!

The top painting, Rocks Along the Creek, was done as a paint-a-long for a private class.  For Sunlit Rocks, a demo for my group class, I decided to crop in even closer to really focus on just the rocks.  I also noticed that my first painting would've worked better cropping into just the bottom half.

Rock on!