Happy Dancing Cloud, 20″ x 24″, Pastel Premiere “Italian clay”

Initial lay in of sky

Detail of colors in cloud

Hi Friends.  How are you all doing?  I’m holding out here with John, doing a painting a week, teaching, practicing piano, and trying to do some videos.  I’ve done two short ones that aren’t great!  But it’s a start. They are on Youtube under my name.

After doing the self portrait (which was revised since I posted it), I wanted to do something a little less demanding.  I had been looking at this cloud picture for some time.  We took this in Wyoming on a day when we were driving from Laramie to Boulder Heights to see our friends Ben and Susan Foster.  So I was a little concerned with time.  We decided to take a shortcut (it looked great on the map!) and ended up on a dirt path driving through open range land with pronghorns leaping about!  I’d never seen them but somehow I knew exactly what they were.  It would have been a rather happy occasion if we hadn’t been so lost!  But finally, I saw a tiny truck on the horizon, indicating a highway up ahead and sure enough, we got back to civilization.  But not before i took this photo from the car window.  I just loved this cloud and I’ve thought about painting it since 2017.

I would like to have done an underpainting, but i don’t have 20 x 24 UART and I wanted this to be a big picture.  So it’s on Pastel Premiere, Italian clay.  It’s really a lovely surface and not that hard to cover.  Nevertheless, it took some doing around the edges.

I did a color study of various Ludwig blues to get the right ones. I wanted a fairly dark and pretty pure blue sky with greens at the bottom fading off.  I ended up using a combination of Ludwig and Girault.  Ludwigs for the inital layin of color and the Giraults to smooth it out and fill in the cracks.  Worked well.  Later in the process, I added a soft very light red violet at the bottom beginning on the left and dragging some of it over to the right.

For the clouds, I began at the top and worked down. Here’s where I could have benefitted from an underpainting.  I got too detailed too soon!  I used a wide variety of light Ludwigs: violets, blue violets, greens, turquoises, pinks, oranges, and finally yellow.  It may not look this colorful  but all of these colors are there. However, it’s a very sunny day cloud so it’s all fairly light.  I also added some light warm color at the bottoms to indicate the reflection of the land below.

For the land below, I used a variety of soft warms–odd greens, brownish oranges, etc.  This is all very dry country so it has to be warm in tone.  I used the varying colors to create bands and shapes of colors to given the ground more interest.  In the foreground, I had to have a little more detail.  I first added some dark cool green under the grasses with a brighter orange around them in the very bottom.  Today, when I looked at it, I was  concerned about the completely different colors in the top and bottom.  So I added some of the blue sky color Girault to the darks areas under the grasses and also signed my name with a dark blue pencil.  It’s interesting how often the choice of color in the signature helps balance the colors in the painting!

This painting was really fun to do and it’s a cheery subject and a remembrance from a very happy day.  We had a wonderful time at the Fosters and were lucky to see them again last year.