Up Close & Personal, Part 3

Hidden Mountains, pastel, 10x8

In our third week of my class's Up Close & Personal series, we moved out of the water and into the trees. With trees, when you zoom in, you have lots of busy chaos...up close! My goal with this painting was to create connected shapes in the trees that would contrast against the distant mountains.

My reference photo showed a hint of bluish mountains behind the gold trees. I liked that color contrast and decided to move the mountains up a bit so that I could have more opportunity to set up that contrast with negative shapes peeking through the trees.

reference photo

In my underpainting I mainly focused on blocking in the dark values with a large connected shape, and then used a small amount of lavender to contrast beneath where the brightest gold hues would be placed (difficult to see here in the underpainting photo, but it's there). I also used a warm pink beneath where the blue-grey of the mountains would be placed, and then yellow in the sky to tie in with the eventual gold hues of the tree. I ended up covering most of this yellow, but I find that blues in the sky area have more life to them when placed over a warm hue beneath.

Sorry, I didn't remember to take my next photo until I was too far into the process. Stay tuned for Part 4 in this series!