Underpainting

Long Shadows, 12 x 16, UART 400

Today I did a second demo for my Monday class. I gave a brief lecture at the beginning on the different types of shadows: cast, half, and occulsion.  All are found in this image (sort of!), but the cast shadows are the main story. This is another painting from France. The morning light there was truly amazing and I’ll be doing another demo on Wed. based on a similar subject.  For this picture, I decided that the color scheme would be orange, violet and green. The photo was primarily orange and green but I wanted the violets to balance the warmth.  I began with a relatively cool underpainting of greens and violets, with orange in the sky. I used a cool red under the oranges, violet under the shadows, and cooler greens in the lit areas of the house. I really didn’t like the looks of this underpainting!  But it made me want to work quickly to cover it.

For the sky, I used a light violet, then a very whitish violet, then light yellow to give it a bit of glow.  I painted the large tree very quickly, trying to achieve the direction of the leaf clusters and adding in the trunks and branches at the end. The telephone pole was supposed to be an example of a “half shadow” –something that is partially in shadow and light. But I wasn’t sure that could be accurately achieved, so I just added light to the right sides in several places. The little building in the foreground was done very simply with a majenta on the left and red oranges on the right, and a cool violet on the top.  The shadows were a bit more troublesome, trying to get the color right. I started with a blue green, but didn’t like it and added violet, then green, then –who knows what!  They got better when I added the orange grasses over them.

This demo took 1 1/2 hours, followed by critique and discussion and a few changes.  Working quickly allowed me to keep the painting fresh and not overworked and I was pretty happy with it. By the way, the occlusion shadows are the dark shadows within the trees, just in case you didn’t know!