Above left is a shot of the Eastern Shore of Lake Tahoe in Washoe County, Nevada. I shot this photo at about 9 AM on Saturday, Mar. 10, 2007. To the right is my blank canvas and the ensuing is a documentation of the painting I did of it...
1.) The first step in most any painting I do is to tone my canvas. I mix a somewhat burnt orange color most of the time for my ground. 2.) A painting this size, 12 x 16 is small enough to paint alla prima (in one sitting) or at least maybe in two, so I usually just dive right in to the wet paint and start my sketch by lifting paint off my canvas with a bristle brush wetted with odorless turpentine substitute.
3.) Once my sketch is done, I paint in the sky. People wonder how I don't make a big mess of things by painting such brilliant blue over top of its rough complement when it's still wet.
Here's my secret; it's sort of two fold. One, I practice "fat over lean". Fat over lean has to do with the oil (fat) content of the paint. "Lean" paint is paint with less oil than "fat". To accomplish this, my base coat is thinned a bit with Turpenoid (a turpentine sustitute), thereby reducing the percentage of oil in the paint volume-wise.
One would think that thin paint would soak right into any paint applied on top of it, but that's where increasing the "fat" in the top layer of paint comes in. I use a medium of walnut oil and alkyd (a resin) and by mixing that medium liberally with my paint I make it "fatter" and a bit "stickier" and so, with practice I've been able to develop a stroke that lays it right on top of the underlying "wet" yet "lean" paint.
4.) I typically approach a painting top to bottom, back to front and this one is no different. I paint in the distant mountains overlapping the edge of the sky I just painted. Then, I overlap the base of the mountains with the edge of the Lake.
Now, there are several things I need to be mindful of here. As things recede (with the exception of snow and clouds), the yellow light they contain becomes less visible, then the red. That's why mountains in the distance appear first purple and then the ones very far away, blue. Relative values are more compressed as well, meaning, the darks aren't necessarily all that dark and the lights aren't as light as they would be if they were closer to the viewer, so, even my "white" snow is quite yellow.
Additonally, as I begin to paint the water, I must represent the reflections. As light reflects on the water, in general, you have a similar principle of compressed values, meaning the darks are even less dark and the lights are even less light - the reverse of contrast if you will.
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