Jac’s 100 days of landscape

[Jo Sheridan]

Hi Jac,

Thanks for the YouTube video, it does help to hear things like this – we can all say things will be hard work when you are trying to get really good at something, but I often think that we then always underestimate what that means… and the frustration builds when once in a while you get things right, so you think you’ve worked it out, but then next time you get it wrong and realise you still have a long way to go….

You are right about finding ways to enjoy the process, so I have a cup of tea, a chunk of dark chocolate, some good music and am ready to go again for my next posting… Jo.

[Jack]

Day 58 19/12/21, Day 59 20/12/21 , Day 60 21/12/21

A multi-day update.

• I read more of Gurney’s book Light and Color. It sort of defies summary or note-taking as it itself a distillation of complex subjects into a few succinct paragraphs. The section on ‘The Green Problem’ was of particular interest to me. He recommended four tips:
  • Try leaving green pigments off your palette, mix them from primaries for weaker and more varied mixtures.
  • Avoid monotony. Vary mixtures of greens both small scale (leaf to leaf) and larger scales (tree to tree).
  • Weave other colours into the painting, especially reds and pinks (complementary of green).
  • Prime the canvas with pinks or reds, so that they show through to enliven the greens.
• I watched another one of Stapleton Kearn’s videos, week 6.
• I also watched the Zorn colour mixing videos from Todorovitch’s portrait painting course.  It reinforced what I was already thinking from Gurney’s advice, that trying a muted palette might help with the landscapes. I think I’ll pick this course back up once I’ve completed level 3 of Russian Drawing.
• I have been practising a series of noses from the Russian Drawing course, so I thought it better to do one big update as they’re all on one panel anyway. I’m definitely keen to get a shadowbox and some casts setup for next winter – but how people spend hours and hours on a single cast is beyond me, I haven’t the focus for it!

 

Practice Time: 3h,  2.5h,  1.5h – about an hour a nose!

 

 

[Jo Sheridan]

Hi Jac,

I’m so glad I’ve started reading your daily posts – I went onto a live-stream the other day – Dorien Iten – who does some great shading videos – was live streaming about cast drawing, and started off by showing one he did when he was a student – he spent 3 months doing one cast!!! I must admit at that point I did lose the will to live and decided that if that’s what it takes, then I had better not get interested in cast drawing  – so I switched off. I think with all these things its an approach you can take if you have the time, energy and focus – a bit like what I have come across with Bargue Plates – if you do that properly you can spend a few years working through those cast style studies….

What I do know for sure though is that we are not in the minority, and there are loads of folk out there doing great work without this sort of single minded application to one subject – some people might think for example that doing a drawing every day for 100 days is completely crackers!! 🙂

[Jack]

G’morning Jo –  three months on a single cast, oof! I have heard Dorien’s course on shading is very good. I don’t doubt the value of using cast drawing as a tool for learning to draw, but a bit like learning anatomy, for me, these hard technical skills must ultimately serve an expressive purpose. A bit like yourself, slaving over a 1:1 reproduction of a cast for it’s own sake doesn’t have a massive appeal.  Perhaps as you get better at drawing, the nuance of casts keeps you interested? For now, I couldn’t spend three months on a cast. It’d be no better than 3 hours.

Day 61 22/12/21

Finally got back to landscape, the supposed focus of this challenge, after a few days of licking my wounds from the weekend’s plein air attempt.

• I made a few small changes to the nose drawings. I always tape my practice work on the walls to seep out more lessons from completed work and remind me to keep my daily routine, but I always end up seeing stuff I want to fix. Some days I can’t help myself.
• I worked for 2 hours on a little sketch from an NMA reference photo. I’m running low on my own reference photos! Whilst no great work, there were a lot of lessons learned:
  • Following Gurney’s advice from my previous post – I used an even more limited palette, free of any greens. Just cad. yellow, yellow ochre, cad. red, alizarin, ultramarine, and white.
  • I used cadmium yellow sparingly (doing so would save me a small fortune), relying on yellow ochre instead, which I think really toned down the green mixtures in a pleasing way. I don’t think cadmium yellow is as suited to the British atmosphere as it is California.
  • I snuck a bit of red in where I could. It’s always a fun part of colour for me, seeing how much variety you can get into shapes without losing their cohesiveness. I’m still struggling with green being quite monotonous.
  • Light! I bought 3 clamp lamps from Ikea and some daylight bulbs. I’m really surprised how dark my room now seems without them, it definitely helped see colours more accurately. One of the problems I had was feeling the need to key up every painting so they didn’t seem dull, but this meant there was a lot of white in the mixture, desaturating the colours. Weirdly, this sketch seemed much more colourful and bright, despite being a bit darker. A bit of an ‘ah ha’ moment.  Don’t paint in the dark, who’d have guessed.

 

Practice Time: 2.5h

[Jack]

Day 62 23/12/21

My partner really wanted a painting for Christmas and maybe one day, when I feel they’re passable, I’ll indulge! But for now, I settled on making her a little Christmas card. First I tried to make a card out of woodcut block and inks – it’s something that appealed to me years ago, so I had the materials around, but man was it tedious and the results awful. After a couple hours of cramped hands, I went back to the  more familiar medium of oils.

• I sketched a postcard-sized picture of our house in last January’s snow – only downside is that it’ll be 2022 before it’s dry 🙂 Must plan better next year!

Practice Time: 2h

Nadolig Llawen

[Jack]

Day 63 26/12/21

After two days of over-eating and entertaining family, I was keen to get back to the normal routine. But I was fairly exhausted, so all I could muster was an hour’s drawing in preparation of a bit of painting tomorrow.

• One hour sketch from a reference photo of mine; trying to figure out the general composition and value hierarchy. I also did a couple thumbnails with just 2 values, to see if it worked in its simplest form. I like it enough to give a quick painting a go.

 

Practice Time: 1h

[Jack]

Day 64 27/12/21

What a day! In an attempt to shake-off the general grogginess from a lethargic and indulgent few days, I started the day with Gurney’s Color and Light. I read a few pages on gamut mapping, creating gamut masks, and arranging colour schemes. I must have re-read the handful of pages 4-5 times; they were revelatory. So I set about the day experimenting with colour, undoubtedly a big weakness of mine.

Gurney summarises the concepts neatly here for anyone interested ->  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfE4E5goEIc

The core ‘revelation’ for me was the simple idea that colour arrangement is a choice. It’s part of your design. I’d sort of assumed up to now that representational artists pick a palette of colours to maximise the number of colours they can mix (even on a limited palette) so that they can better reproduce what’s in front of them. The idea that you might constrain the possible colours, a gamut, to design a specific mood or idea in your painting, was a definite ‘ah ha’ moment, however obvious it now seems.

• First I tried to create a gamut mask using just a triad of colours; a bluish-green, red-violet, and yellow-orange, and their secondary colours (top left swatches). This gamut lacks strong yellows, blues, or reds.

• Next I tried what Gurney refers to as an “atmospheric triad”. It is supposed to be “moody and subjective”. This involves the gamut mask shifting to one side of the colour wheel without really covering the centre; using one chromatic hue, and two low chroma colours (see colour wheel below). I decided to try a painting sketch using this palette, so I made up a string of colours centred on a high chroma yellow-green, and a low chroma blue and orange (top right set of swatches above). I later learned that my yellow-green wasn’t really high chroma at all, probably because I used a mix of cadmium yellow and ultramarine, rather an out-of-the-tube green with some yellow. As a result, the whole palette was quite dull.

• I wasn’t as enthusiastic about the result of the sketch as I was about the colour theory that went into it – but man did I have fun making it. It felt like a real adventure and I was surprised how far a limited palette of three colours can take you.
• I finished the day by setting up another atmospheric triad, this time based around an out-of-the-tube cadmium red (see bottom colour swatches above). I’m going to repeat the same painting but in this different palette, see what happens. In theory, this palette will be using something akin to grey for its greens. Wish me luck!

Practice Time: 4h

[Jo Sheridan]

Good Luck Jac 🙂

 

[Jack]

Day 65 28/12/21

Focus of the day was to explore colour gamuts and masking.

• I read another couple pages of Gurney’s Color and Light on using edges to create depth, colour opposites, and colour constancy. I find colour constancy so hard to grasp that I’ll definitely have to circle back and explore it some more in the future. Essentially, it’s the human mind tricking our perception of colours; seeing a red fire engine as red regardless of the lighting conditions, for instance.
• I re-did yesterday’s sketch, except in a smaller size and with an “atmospheric triad” based on red, with grey being the closest mixture to green. Or at least that’s how I started – but it was very tricky, so I scraped it back and restarted a few times whilst gradually saturating the blue-violet/yellow-orange such that a mixture had some green to it. It was a really interesting exercise, it gets you thinking about the subtle nuances of colour and their relative relationships. My hope is this work translates into better control of colour when painting plein air.

• I was going to repeat the above sketch with a palette of only two complementary colours – but I found the drawing was distracting the exercise away from colour, so I changed it up and painted both a sphere and abstract landscapes using the same two colour palettes. I stole the idea of the abstracted landscapes from Edgar Payne in his Composition on Outdoor Painting, they were really enjoyable to do actually.

Practice Time: 4h

I have a relatively free week, so the plan is to get at least 4h practice in each day.

[Jack]

Day 66 29/12/21

 

• I watched the section of Russian Drawing on David’s ear.
• Then I set about doing the assignment and an additional drawing from the 3d model. The model is considerably more complex than the cast used in the lesson; I struggled with the whole organic-to-planar-to-organic approach from the lesson with so many additional forms to deal with.I didn’t have the patience. Must be more patient!

 

Practice Time: 4h

 

[Jack]

Day 67 30/12/21

I was hankering after something different today, so I thought I’d do a short portrait – first in pencil, then in paint tomorrow.

• I watched part 18 of Introduction to Landscape Painting with Fenkse completing a sketch of a lake. One of the things that puzzles me about his painting approach, is how he can go back over and over his work without seemingly creating a big mess. He doesn’t use solvents and doesn’t appear to use much medium. It feels like I have maybe 2 or 3 attempts to layer paint, fat over thin, until there’s simply no more I can usefully put on canvas before I must scrape it all back. Witchcraft, I suspect.
• I finished off the previous day’s ear with a few refinements.
• I completed a rough portrait sketch. It’s been about 7 weeks since my last and it felt unfamiliar. I wanted to do just enough to provide some confidence for a grisaille portrait tomorrow (I’ve got my eye on moving onto the Zorn palette as part of Todorvitch’s course).

Perhaps this is the mid-challenge crisis setting in, but something Stapleton Kearns said has me doubting my current approach to learning to paint landscapes. He said you can’t learn to paint landscapes from reference photos, you’ve got to have the subject in front of you. Given the British weather this time of year, reference photos is pretty much all I’ve been painting from (alongside occasional casts, also from reference). It’s made me wonder whether I’m better off painting unrelated subject-matter from life during the winter and working on landscapes when it stops raining. Will ponder on it some more.

Practice Time: 4h

[Jack]

Day 68 31/12/21

• I spent the day painting a grisaille sketch from one of NMA’s reference photos. I say sketch, it took much longer than I originally intended as I struggled to get it to work. I think the proportions and position of the features are decent enough, but I just couldn’t figure out the subtle value changes without the planes getting vague; and the brushwork was a struggle. Definitely bit rusty, I should make more time for portraits even if my focus is on landscape. As always, working in grisaille is a pleasure – it makes you realise how much time and thought really need to go into colour.

 

Practice Time: 4h

 

[Jack]

Day 69 01/01/22

• I read a few more pages of Gurney’s Colour and Light. One section on ‘adaption and contrast’ was interesting. It taught that our perception of colours is totally contextual, and affected by what you previously looked at (known as after images and successive contrast) and nearby colour relationships. He used an example where three busts were lit with the same light, but each appeared as the complement of its shadow colour. A reddish shadow meant greenish hue to the lit side. It partly explains the generic ‘cool shadows, warm lights’ advice.
• I had Kearn’s advice to learn landscape by painting from life rather than reference photo rattling around in my head. So I ended up watching the first two weeks of Bobkoski’s Introduction to Still Life class, with the idea of perhaps trying to draw/paint from life more often. The lighting in my house is inconsistent and short-lived this time of year, so I quickly built a shadow box. It’s a bit rickety, but it does the job for now.  The photo is a bit out of focus, but here’s an example of the lighting it provides.

• I set up a still life similar to what Bobkoski demo’d (although she painted from a picture). I completed a thumbnail using 5 values, as she suggested, before working on a larger pencil drawing to familiarise myself with the proportions and positioning.
• Then I completed a monochrome painting of the same scene. Quite enjoyed the process, except having to sit down to paint due to the shadow box being on a desk.

Practice Time: 4h

Here’s to a new year full of art practice, Blwyddin Newydd Dda!

 

 

 

[Jack]

Day 70 02/01/22

• I watched another couple lessons from Designing Your Landscape Painting with Kearns – week 9.
• After making a few minor tweaks to yesterday’s still life, I spent a couple hours on a tree sketch from a reference photo of mine, taken back during the summer. The photo of it doesn’t look too special, but in person I think it actually shows some improvement. From the photo reference I liked the strong side-light and how it lit the tips of the trees in a glowing golden light – but all the shadows appeared a colourless black, so I struggled with guessing what they might look like.
• I picked up a book of William Wendt’s art as a little present to myself, one of the things I’m going to try and incorporate from his paintings is the use of orange/reds in the foreground. Seldom does he paint a foreground field green, it’s always a mix of oranges, browns, reds, even deep purples. It looks a bit amateurish when I try, but I think this is part of the answer to the ‘green problem’ that both Kearns and Gurney refers to.

I also worked for an hour on the lay in of an oak tree by Wendt, but I’ll finish up and post that tomorrow.

Practice Time: 4h (that’s a full week of 4hrs of practice every day, well pleased with the effort!)

 

[Jack]

Day 71 03/01/22

• I read a few pages of Gurney’s Colour and Light on highlights (specular vs annular) and colour corona (eg flare effects). You could easily spend a few weeks studying colour corona alone. My hope is that I’ll remember the book has information on troubleshooting specific topics that I can turn to when they crop up.
• Continuing with the William Wendt theme, I spent a happy few hours studying one of his trees/landscape. You never know whether reference photos faithfully capture the colours of the original (or whether your screen settings are showing them if they did), so I didn’t get too hung up on matching colours. I did focus on form, value changes, temperature shifts of the different shapes, a bit of composition. A few lessons stood out to me:
  • Skyholes. I already knew that due to refraction skyholes should be lower in value and desaturated – Fenkse mentions it in his course, as does Carlson in his book – but it was the first time I really greyed down the skyholes and it made an immediate improvement to getting a transparent-looking edge. I was surprised just how grey they could get and still read. I had sort of assumed painters did  some blending to get the wavy look of half-sky half-foliage. Quite an excitement moment.
  • Brushwork: Wendt really pushed the brushwork to reveal the slanted form of the hill, which contrasted the opposing direction of the tree. I found myself intuitively flattening all his slants which makes for a much less dynamic and interesting painting.
  • Colour Variation: A familiar lesson, but when you really look, it’s amazing the colour variation he sneaks into his shapes.
  • Tree Value: The tree I was studying was a really low value, even the lights of the tree were very dark. I noticed in his other works that part of the skill is getting variety and modelling, even suggestively, into some very dark forms.
  • Temperature Shift: I really enjoyed how Wendt’s tree shadow looked cool compared to the light side of the hill, but warm in comparison to the tree, even the highlights of the tree. Admittedly, I was falling into the trap that tree highlights are in the sun’s light and therefore warm – but it’s all relative.  I haven’t heard anyone mention the need for a ‘temperature hierarchy’ like you do with values, but maybe there’s something to that – ensuring all your temperature relationships are reading correctly.

• I also spent a short amount of time on another ear for Russian Drawing class, but admittedly I wasn’t feeling it so I left it largely unfinished. I have no doubt copying curls and scrolls will improve the accuracy of your drawing, but I find myself not enjoying the process as much as drawing human features or still life.

 

Practice Time: 4h

Back in work tomorrow, so I doubt I’ll be able to keep up the 4h efforts without a lot more discipline.

[Author]

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