Painting a Pretty Picture in a Day. Sunday November 22, 2009

Today I was supposed to be playing tennis but happily it was raining because I wanted to keep painting. I decided to set the goal of completing  a painting by the end of the day. Given that I was going to use a large square stretcher of 100cm x 100cm I chose to do a painting of a sqaure,  imagined landscape (seen at left) made on the computer earlier this year.  I brought the pic up on my laptop and drew it onto the canvas with a permanent black marker. I thought it would be a good project to photograph from start to finish, but stupidly forgot about the photos once I started painting. So I have no photo of the line drawing, however the close up in photo 1 below shows the tree trunk in black marker. Initially, I made up some colours similar to those in the original image and blocked in the relevant areas on the canvas as a starting point.


Photo 1. Shows black marker line drawing of tree trunk on primed linen.
Photo 2. Areas of colour filled in are  loosley based on the colours in the digital reference image. 
Photo 3. Tree and distant mountain painted in raw umber. Blue area over painted in transparent white to reduce intensity. 
Photo 4. Sky filled with a blend of aquamarine and white.
Photo 5. Shows sky during repainting with a lighter blue as the original sky was too intense.
Photo 6.  Sky colour now finished and lower part of  blue area lightly over painted with violet/white blend.
Photo 7. Tree altered with dark green sections. Phal0 green painted over landscape at right. This was subsequently altered again with a lighter tone.
Photo 8. (Kept forgetting to take photos) Black outlines  around tree, cloud  and the  landscape elements. Added small chrome yellow highlights to the tree  to bring it forward. Painted over the foreground with a transparent olive wash.  Among other things, this addition served to bring the red flowers in the foreground out of the picture space and also assisted in balancing the composition with the green tree foilage in the upper left and the green section at mid right. I also scumbled some raw sienna over the umber mountain that is cut off by the right edge of the stretcher.  I also finished the red flowers in the foreground with the addition of orange and magenta followed by black centres. Then painted over them with gloss varnish to bring out the olours.

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The ninth and final photo shows the completed painting taken with a flash because night had fallen. I started the painting at about 1:30 pm and painted continuously until about 8pm. Around 20 minutes later I returned and finished the painting with a blue wash in the lower sky at the horizon line and a gloss varnish over the tree and the green area at the right (hence the glare of the flash as seen in the photo).
Shortly before 9 pm the painting was finished and all up it took about 6.5 hours from start to finish. I like the Patrick Caulfield look of the original digital image, however I was determined that the painting would be something else. You'll have to take my word for it (until I take a better photo), but it looks better than the flash photo indicates. It is a pretty picture that is quite different from anything else I have painted. I have done quite a few flower pictures on the computer and may make paintings of some of them in the future.  
Then again, this might be a one off.