Sunlit Canyon- Fremont Art Association Zoom Demo 4/7/21

Earlier this week, I did a demo for the Fremont Art Association, in anticipation of my upcoming CWA zoom-only workshop. There are still a few final spots left, if you’re interested! Follow this link to an earlier blog post, if you want to find out more about it and sign up. ;) The workshop is 9am- 4 pm, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, April 16-18th. We’re also providing a recording of the workshop for attendees to view afterwards, and a private Facebook group for feedback and sharing. Ok, now on to the demo!

Before I Start Painting-

I started, even before the demo, by assessing different photos. I recently went up to Fern Canyon, in the Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. This place was fantastically gorgeous, and I wanted to try my hand at something from it. Below you can see options 1 and 2, which I passed up. They’re beautiful, but both have issues—

photo #1

photo #2

Photo 1, in my opinion, would be better served by painting it larger. I really wanted to focus the viewer on that little “doorway” in the distance, and that’s a bit challenging to successfully achieve in an 1.5 hour demo on a quarter sheet. The FP is also very centered. I’ll probably try it later, as a 1/2 or full sheet. Photo 2 felt too top heavy for me. I want a more even distribution of values of the picture plane, which is what you’ll see in the photo I chose, #3 (below).

In Photo #3, I really liked this double banding from the two fallen logs and their two shadows. Leading lines like these help guide you through a painting, like a broken down Z, creating additional points of interest. One of the attendees asked what my focal point was in a jumbled subject like this. I was aiming for that little dark patch below the two logs, but things became clearer to me after finishing the painting. I’ll come back to that later, after the demo video below.

photo #3

my notan of photo #3

I did a notan the evening before, to make sure I could simplify things. This is a pretty sophisticated notan, that I noodled around with for about a 1/2 hour or more- more than is really necessary, but making them is fun! :) A couple of things quickly became clear. 1) The logs definitely needed to have bright edging around their backlit forms, for them to be read easily. This exists in the photos, but note how I accentuate it in the notan and the final painting, and 2) the upper back area needs to be dark enough to really allow the logs to be read as a strong form. Note how light that upper area is in the photo. It’s darker than the logs, but not by a whole lot. In the notan, the value contrast is bold, and it acts as a reminder to me as I paint. When you watch the demo, you’ll see how I keep going back into those areas again and again, doing little glazes to try and get it dark enough to help the logs pop!

Making notans likes these is a process of simplification and design. I funnel things down to the essentials, and that helps me make decisions, but once I get to painting, I open the image back up, complicate the values again some, etc. The final painting is informed and guided by the notan, but it’s not meant to look exactly like it. Much like sand through an hour glass (… so are the days of our lives….) LOL! Much like an hourglass, the composition process simplifies itself first, gets channeled down to the narrow neck of the notan, and then opens back up to complications again as I paint it… but always with the thinking of the notan in the back of my mind. Making a successful notan should be a thinking, decision-making process. When you can’t figure out how to make the image read as a notan, then that’s telling you this might not be a good subject to paint.

Here’s the demo itself…

After I’ve “Finished” Painting-

Now, making a painting is a process. Just because a demo is wrapping up doesn’t mean I’m done with it yet! :D After the zoom meeting finished, I did some more work on the image, and, even now, there are things I will change when I paint it again. But that’s what iteration’s all about! Learning through doing.

Here’s the final image with some notes on it. 1, 2, and 3 are slight changes I made after the demo.

First, I went back in and began to push little muted highlights into the dark areas for #1. Sometimes, this was just with using Cadmium Lemon, and Ultramarine Blue, because they’re pretty opaque, and sometimes I would add a bit of Permanent White. The dark areas were too flat for me at the end of the demo (much like a notan), and I wanted them to read with more sophisticated shapes once you really started to look deeper into it. It’s still dark and reads right, but it’s got some nuance now. For #2, I scratched in little highlights, and then added in darker bits to continue the forms of the branches. Doing this over the front log was particularly useful, because it helps situate the big log into the context of the rest of the image. I’m often interested in “weaving” forms together, to help our eyes continue to move and transition from form to form. For #3, I went back in again with a light wash, trying to get that light to really gleam off of the logs. I also did a light grey wash on the shores of the creek, to separate the pebbly sand from the shallow water… while also trying to keep them all as a comparatively light value.

As for the bubbles and the “activate” note, they’re a lot about focal points and design. Like the astute demo observer brought up, “What’s the Focal Point in this image?” It’s hard to decide, and part of that is because there’s too much competition. After finishing the demo, I did a wash over that lower bush, trying to knock it back. Even so, it ends up stealing too much attention. An argument can be made that it’s the focal point, which is not my intention. Once I had finished, it became clearer to me that those brightly lit ferns on the big log were really where I wanted our attention to go- they’re vibrant and chromatic, they have a lot of texture, and the value contrast is strong there. If I really wanted to make that the strongest focal point, I would move it to the right, off center, and push the bush to the left, so they’re not stacked so much. And 100% I would darken the bush on the creek’s edge, and reduce its contrast. It’s meant to be a stop-off on the journey through the painting, like a rest stop, but it’s definitely not the destination. Finally, if I had the time, I would drop more pebbles and such into the foreground. I want to push the depth, and that requires strong texture in the foreground for our eyes to hold on to.

Regardless, I had fun painting this, and I’m happy with where it ended up, all in all. The light is strong and the canyon feels very alive. That’s the most important part to me.