Painting Course – Day 3

Today I was working on the mountains and the trees. And I kept detailing the sky. I started with the sky the last day but it was a little bit dark. So I was adding some light violets and white. There is not a big difference but now it is closer to the original model. Probably I will work on it the next day, too.

Concerning mountains and trees, the teacher explained the goals to me: achieve the darkest background color in both zones, blue-violet for the mountains and green for the leaves. Once I finished, I followed the same idea with the trunks and some parts of the ground. I used browns made with cyan blue, magenta and cadmium yellow medium.

At the end of the lecture the teacher reviewed my painting and gave me some ideas about the next day. I will start to paint the leaves. Really he already started with the leftmost trees while he was showing how to use the secret weapon for leaves: the fan brush. I must buy a couple of them for the next day (no. 2 and 6). The teacher used yellow ochre for the leaves although we will also add madder carmine.

Painting Course – Day 2

We have started to detail the paintings. We have followed the same rule from top to bottom, thus I started with the sky. I had to fix some issues that the teacher told me in the last lecture as for example the sky color, the model tends slightly to purple (really, there is not a blue sky in the model, it shows a cloudy day in autumn).

I applied the new color in the darker zones and I used it with white to get different values for the shadows. I was not able to finish the brighter zones with white because the oil was too fresh and I only got a lighter purple. I will go on with it in the next week.

As I had some white and purple on the palette, the teacher suggested that I could use it to open some lights in the forest. He also told me it is better to blend the colors in the edges (specifically the sky and the tree), so it will be easier to add the leaves and other details. There were not major comments/criticism.