PLANNING IT OUT

To begin this painting, I chose a 30x40 Level 2 Canvas, and chose from the outset a variety of earthy colors, specifically acrylics in green, yellow, and blue. I'm a big fan of Winsor & Newton's Galeria series of paints, with Liquitex for medium glosses and the more basic blocking colors. For the most part, in this painting, I used:

• Sap Green

• Burnt Umber

• Lemon Yellow

• Phythalo Green

• Green Deep

• Cobalt Blue

• Naples Yellow Medium

• Naples Yellow Red

• Mars Black

• Pale Olive

• Azo Yellow

• Yellow Ochre

• Burnt Sienna

• Cadmium Red

• Crimson

• Cerulean Blue

• Powder Blue

• Yellowish Green

• Titanium White
  

For brushes, I worked off a variety - the hardened fossils from paintings past can be useful, especially for mixing, but for more of the delicate work, I preferred my Princeton Synthetics. I'm pretty hard on brushes so that sweet spot between quality and price is always what I'm after, and Princeton's acrylic line really hits the nail on the head. A couple wide brushes for blocking and composition, then Brights, Flats, Filberts, and my beloved Rounds for tree and cloud work all did nicely.

Next, theory. This is where I decided where the light would be in the painting, recalling things like diagonal highlighting, where the clouds opening reflects warmth on the opposite corner - and so too with darkness and shadows. I sketched this broadly out to give myself an idea of how I wanted to block the canvas in before painting subjects.

Even to me, this looks like mostly scribbles, however it does function as somewhat of a light/perspective blueprint, influencing the relationships of the colors to come.

I always start from the farthest subject and work my way forward - so in this case sky to mountain, to hills, to trees, to flowers - so having an idea on how light will interact from the get-go allows me to avoid common pitfalls and issues in the mid and late painting.

For example, going too warm in the distance will give me nowhere to maneuver later on... been there, done that! Always better to block it in with gray, dull first, then if you have to saturate, it's no big deal.

Since light saturates as it gets closer to the human eye anyway, this sketch allowed me to not only know where to shadow and highlight, but also the degrees of color and how warm and cold those colors should be mixed due to the various distances of the perspective.

This was one of three or four sketches. Sometimes it takes a bit but certainly doesn't have to be beautiful, as long as it makes sense to its creator. BREAKING GROUND

At last, an open canvas with tools and a plan. It's a beautiful thing.

First things first, I put 2-3 layers of a Gloss Fluid medium mixed with Transparent Mixing White to the canvas to prime it. This gets me out of the flat zone and evens out the playing field as well as any canvas imperfections before getting going.

Next, I decided to put one more primer layer on it, only this time it was more of a brown - mixing the gloss and white with my Burnt Sienna. The canvas was now kind of a crisp yellow-ish/brown (you'll see in the blocking photo below). Since this painting was to be depicting springtime in Colorado, it felt like a good jump-off point, color-wise. Colorado can be a very yellow state, after all. Now, were I painting more of a snowy landscape, or water perhaps, I'd probably have stayed with the white.

I started the blocking of the painting, bringing my sketch pad to the canvas and trying to capture the "blurry-eyed" light composition. What I mean by that is that with my unfocused eyes on the canvas, if I can't see the overall structure of the painting, then I know there is more work to do.

Blocking to me can be the most tedious thing about painting, which is funny because many find it the other way around. The thing is there is a lot of pressure to get it right because if you proceed ahead and don't examine and reexamine the tension of the light, you can step into mud pretty quickly in the depth-of-field department. Because of this, I am perhaps slower on this stage than I need to be, but considering I knew this painting was going to play with various distances and how light sits in them, I didn't want to take any chances in the foundational work.

FARAWAY TO START

Now, at long last, composition work, beginning from the top (or the farthest distance as the case may be) and working my way closer to the vantage view.

I wasn't really paying too much attention to the foreground (lowest third) as you can see because I didn't want to lock myself in to anything (done that before, too). Whatever was decided for the distance view as far as saturation and depth goes would later define the foreground's color. That was the plan.

I find that painting with this kind of compartmentalization allowed me to pivot on the "unexpected" surprises of the composition and gave me much more flexibility when it got down to the nitty-gritty details of shadow and color later on.

MOUNTAIN & MIDDLE DETAIL WORK

Now, it was time to bring in some of the specifics, always being more obscure at distance and more defined the closer it gets to the vantage, saturating according to the same scale.

I liked to have black on one side of my palate and white on the other, with my colors in between so that I could dash it from either side and create a working spectrum.

Since I knew I wanted some illusion of snow falling in the distance, I opted for a wispy violet to cool off some of the inherent reds of the faraway range.

For the darkest side of the mountain, a bit closer, I pulled in some deep greens and offset them with a bit more dark blue where the field meet forests, imitating patches of trees and, with a bit of umber for rocks and broken ground.

Next up came the forests, which in this painting I knew to not really be totally the focus. Since there would be a meadow (planning!) I wanted the forests to be more somber then vivacious, and so really accentuated the shadowy parts in detail first before adding highlights of color where light broke through the trees.

The sky being firmly above (and not, say, behind) the treeline, the highlights favored the top of the trees.

On an impulse, I added in a fallen tree for a little bit of midground action, not wanting the forest to be too boring. I also added a lot of skewed, horizontal lines of light and dark green, black and white, to showcase the unkempt nature of the forest.

I think the end result is a bit more dramatic than originally intended, but lends well to a persistent wind flowing through the woodland.

FOREGROUND: COLORS BE WILD

Moving into the closest part of the painting, to the vantage (the bottom-third), I wanted to bring in the real saturation of all the colors I'd been working with up to that point.

The river needed to not only convey reflection and shadow, but also movement.

I pulled colors down from the forest and bank above into the water, as well as adding colors from the reflected sky. Adding wisps of white and blue helps create energy, and tiny whispers of yellow indicated sunlight sitting on the water in the unsheltered part of the river.

Next came the meadow. I love painting flowers and I stuck with the same schematic as the rest of the painting - doing the dark first, particularly the sheltered left-hand side of the meadow, and then brightening as I brought the meadow into the sunlight.

For the flowers in the direct sunlight, I really wanted them to pop, not just in the brightness of the colors, but also the texture (since they are most visible within the vantage).

To accomplish this, I used a thicker brush and dabbed it heavily with paint, lobbing the paint on for the nearer flowers so they almost appear bulbous.

Since the meadow has both direct shadow and direct light, there needed to be a tension between both the right and left sides as far as the saturation goes. I didn't want to go much darker in the shadow because I thought it would make the painting too dark with the forest above, so I instead decided to brighten, bringing out happy yellows, bright lavenders, and cherry reds on the sunlit side. Since no flower sits the same in a bed, these colors were mixed around to create a little wildness and spontaneity.

FINAL TOUCHES

With most of the painting fairly well detailed and done at this point, I decided to return to my peak as I thought it was a bit underwhelming, and also was the natural place everyone tends to look on a mountain painting.

It needed something to indicate its jagged nature.

While the top of the mountain is in the dark section of sky and is essentially getting snowed on, I also knew that this was a tall mountain. Tall mountains carry wind in strange currents.

This gave me the rationalization to put sections of the summit in direct sunlight to add depth and majesty to the size of it (even from all the way down in the meadow, looking up).

This called for light!

So I let some in on the left side of the peak - the direction of the nearest light source in the sky with the sun breaking through the clouds.

It was a last-minute decision that I was happy I made. I think it nicely tied up the grandeur of the top of the painting with the meadow's soft chaos at the bottom.

I put the colors away & let the paint dry for a couple of days and then put on another couple layers of gloss medium to finish it off.

Overall, this was a challenging and immensely rewarding project.

I feel I've learned a lot towards the next one... Always the goal!

Here's the final product, under the afternoon sun and beneath artificial light (in that order).