The Elements of Landscape Oil Painting by Suzanne Brooker

Author:Suzanne Brooker [Brooker, Suzanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3756-0
Publisher: Potter/TenSpeed/Harmony
Published: 2015-08-17T16:00:00+00:00

BELLA FIELDS

In summer, I love the scent of the dried grass, the sound of insects, and the quiet presence of the horses on the forty-acre horse farm painted here. Even in winter, the fields are a great place to seek out new views of snow patches, misty trees, and rain-filled gullies with the bent long grasses marking their borders. The coloring of the grasses suggests a double-toned ground as a way to include the coolness of the air and the warmth of the winter grass.

I first apply a cool mid value gray evenly on my canvas. Once the gray tone is dried completely, I use a cloth pounce to put on the second transparent, warm pigment of raw sienna for its cool straw-yellow color note. I draw into the wet paint to block in a rough composition. I continue to add or remove the tone with a large filbert brush, while the paint is wet and movable.

I next consider my palette by looking at my earth brown pigments. I choose warm sepia (Old Holland) and red umber (Old Holland) for their rich dark values; however, each has different tinting qualities: sepia is dull/neutral, while red umber is toasty. To connect the toned ground to the palette, I include raw sienna and ivory black, plus indigo blue for the water channel. For other dark or neutral greens in the long grasses, I mix indigo or ivory black with raw sienna. So in essence, this is a Y+R+B color schema.

To place the transparent dark values, I mix sepia with black to make a colorful shade. I pick out the pattern of the long grass using a large filbert brush for the bottom portion, and then switch to a smaller brush for the distant fields. I leave the toned ground bare in the areas of the lightest yellowy grass. At the top of the painting, I use black and gray values to loosely indicate the beginning edge of the tree line, which takes on an optical blueness over the toned ground.

I continue to develop the upper portion of the painting. I add a small dot of indigo blue into my grays to increase the cool color in the foggy background trees and bushes. This allows me to freely paint in the thin branches of the young alders in the upper field, using the tip of a new filbert brush and an oily dark sepia. It’s also a good time for me to work some indigo blue and sepia into the water stream, since the foreground grasses overlap areas of the blue.

Returning to the far grasses along the roadside, I combine new variations of raw sienna, red umber, warm sepia, indigo, and white—from greenish gold to golden brown. The tip of a firm flat nylon brush allows me to scumble a thin layer of new color and continue painting into the wet paint. I drag the brush corner in a ragged drizzle that suggests the far grass texture. I freely mix or soften edges as I go, rarely cleaning my brush (as all my color mixtures are variations of the same pigments).

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