New Hampshire Farm, 14″ x 24″, Pastel Premiere Italian clay

Reference photo

Stage 1 with sky and background trees

Completed buildings before foreground added

Painting as completed on first day

Happy New Years to you all!  I have finally gotten back to painting for the first time since early December. Between a bad foot, then a bad back, then Christmas, it just wasn’t in the cards. So it felt good to get back to my studio.

When it was so cold, I spent some time looking at summer photos from New England. I found a picture of a farm in New Hampshire that we stopped to film on the road between Maine and Vermont.  I’m including the photo so you can see what it looked like. I love farms that have a series of buildings and I really liked the shapes of the house, barn and outbuildings in this farm. But the colors were kind of dull (to say the least!).  It was Sept. and so I decided to advance things a bit and put in a red tree and hints of red in the background.

While sketching and thinking about the painting, I decided to do it on a full sheet of Italian clay Pastel Premiere. I did the drawing at home, doubling the size of the farm buildings.  At first, I had it as 12 x 24. But later on, I decided it needed more foreground and added two more inches at the bottom. By placing the drawing in the middle of the paper, I was free to add as much as I wanted to the top or bottom.

I began with the trees and sky. I didn’t want them to be fussy!  So, I worked pretty quickly with them, using a variety of greens, blues, and violets, then adding some pieces of red and orange to give a sense of impending fall color.  I then began on the buildings. For the roofs, I began with a blue, then used a blue green on top–all Girault. I wanted something more interesting than the dull green in the photo.  For the white sides of the buildings, I first used a very hard Caran d’ache light “almond”, then added a softer yellow on top in places for emphasis.

There’s a LOT of detail in this picture!  The windows and cupolas were all rather painstaking to do.  I found I was using hard pastel a lot in order to keep things looking OK.

Compositionally, I lowered the bottom, as I mentioned, before putting in the grasses and I was much happier with it. Also, I moved foreward the small building to the left of the red tree. In the photo it’s roof is at the same level with the bottom of the barn roof, which I didn’t like.  By making it taller and a little bigger, it moved it foreward and broke up the line of the buildings, which I liked much better than what is in the photo.  I put the grasses in and left for the day yesterday.

Today I came back and took a good look at it. I immediately saw that the windows in the barn were too big and the dark open space was also too high.  I also tried to change the color of the barn (not shown) by adding blue to it. It seemed like there was too much of the same and I thought it might read like shadow. It didn’t!  And it called too much attention to the barn.  I really wanted the area around the red tree to be the focus of the picture.  But I did add some blues and pinks to the the three roofs to give them variety.  The roof of the barn is a big area that really needed to be diversified.

I’m so used to doing underpaintings that I’m sometimes stymied when I try to work directly. However, I knew that I didn’t want to lose the drawing.  I tried to use the paper color and let some of it show through a little, but there isn’t a lot of it. And I completely lost it in the barn after adding too much pastel and brushing off!

But I’m pretty happy with it now.  I’m interested in what you think of it.