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| December Glitter, oil, 16x20 |
You may have heard the comment that paintings sometimes go through an unpleasant but often necessary ugly stage. To be honest, sometimes I get frustrated when I get to this phase of the painting process. I've made the mistake of abandoning paintings at this stage when I should have known better and kept with it. This ugly stage is usually when an area has the large simplified shapes painted in, before smaller or contrasting details can be added. At this point, certain important relationships and contrasts haven't been defined, so much of the landscape doesn't make visual sense yet.
The two progression shots below are from early in the painting process, shortly after the block in (sorry for the glare in the upper left of these shots...it unfortunately adds to the ugly factor). I kept it to just the big shapes here, with just a few indications of where I'll have some finer lines/details.
In the large snow covered ground area, I gradually made small shifts in the value and temperature of the bluish snow, but since I hadn't yet added any warm highlights (which I couldn't wait to add!), the snow covered ground didn't yet have any dimension to it. At this point, I wasn't sure if I liked the painting ... it didn't have any life to it.
After tweaking the blues of the snow some more to make sure I had the correct value, temperature and chroma (saturation), I began adding the warm highlights ... just a little at a time so I wouldn't overdo it. I knew it would be the sparse, subtle appearance of these highlights within the large area of snow in shadow that would make them more dramatic.
I kept the trees fairly undefined so that I could use the additional details of the snow on the limbs to define the form of the trees, without distracting from the drama of the highlights on the snow.. The snow on the trees also created the warm/cool temperature contrast that finally gave the painting the additional life it needed, while the definition of just a few areas of the finer lines of the foreground grasses gave the painting additional depth from foreground to background.
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| December Glitter, oil, 16x20 |
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Been there myself. Put it aside for a couple of days then come back to it. It's like getting a fresh set of eyes to look at it. Always seems to work for me.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment, Bill. It's certainly true that coming back to a painting with fresh eyes is a good practice. The idea here had more to do with the necessary stages a painting needs to go through before the artist adds the contrasting elements that give it impact. I painted this one over a few days, so I did come back to each phase with fresh eyes. :-)
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