Painting in Coyotee Hills

When I moved to California in 79 I came with an appreciation for unspoiled open spaces.  I had lived in Michigan, Ohio, and Virginia.  In all of these places I was able to quickly lose myself in nature because it was close at hand.  When I came to California with my parents our home butted up against this land which was oil land.  It was fenced off with barb wire.  I was never able to get into this space.  There has been a fight over what to do with this land.

The fight as always revolves around making money off of the land.  The issue is trade off- space for development and you will get some token space for a park or parks or fight the City of Fullerton and their bed partner Chevron and take the land back.  Politics generally make me sick.  Rarely is it about making sure the right thing gets done.  I am not a resident of Fullerton but this is just another piece of land about to vanish.  http://www.votenow.com/blog

So with all of this about to happen I decided to go paint in Coyotee Hills.  I decided to paint a little smaller.  The bottom painting is the smallest plein air painting I have done to date.  I liked the subject and the shape of the painting on the bottom and will probably use it for a larger studio painting.

Jeff Horn Painting at Little Corona Del Mar

I had this amazing day of art last week.  I watched many of my favorite plein air painters paint at the Laguna Beach Plein Air Invitational, I met many plein air painters who came out to paint because of the event, I painted for the first time on my new easel above Crystal Cove, and then I found Jeff Horn painting down at Little Corona as I was taking reference photos of the sunlight on the amazing rocks by the ocean.

I came across Jeff Horn painting the same scene I had painted a couple of weeks earlier.  I watched as he "struggled" with his painting.  He was having this on going dialogue with himself as he was tweaking his painting.  When I came up it looked like he was almost finished.  He continued to pull things forward and push things back as he tried to get the amospheric perspective so it read right.  It was difficult because the rocks were deep in shadow in the distance and the light as the sun was setting was very warm and bright.  He used everything available to him to get the marks and tones he wanted-I was probably bugging him while I talked to him but he was very nice and I thought it was awesome of him to share some of the thoughts about his process with his painting as he worked on it.

It was funny to hear how unhappy he was with the painting as he was painting it.  I don't know if he was self conscious about it or being modest but I though it was beautiful.  I never paint this small so it was informative to see him pull out the key details and his handling of the light.

Paint Out with Ian Roberts

We met at the park.  Ian's demonstration was more of a class than a paint out.  The thought behind the class was that if you were going to contend for the attention of viewers in a show than you would have to master color intensity.  The reason for mastering color intensity is that you want the viewer to be interested in your painting.  A contest boils down to keeping the publics attention on your art and not someone elses.  If you can not master color intensity then your paintings will be like loose cannons.-

Ian went into detail about the key to keeping the viewer in the painting is mastering where to pop your color by controlling the color intensity everywhere else in the painting.  Keep the foreground intersting but under control by using muted, saturated grays so that your area of interest really captures the attention of the viewer

Ian went into what his pallet consists of and why.  His focus in the discussion was to establish a consistent base for the artist to work from.  His suggestion was to make everything familiar from the way you laid out the paint and arranged it on the pallet to the colors you used so that you could better focus on mixing the colors.  His pallet consists of a warm and a cool color of each hue.  Ian said the first step of the excercise could take the whole day. The most important thing was to be able to match the colors we saw and wanted to include in our painting. If we are to manipulate the attention of the viewer through our painting we must be able to realistically match what we see and put it in our paintings.  Once we were able to match the color chips that Ian provided us; his direction was to then paint an equally intense but different color that he picked below our color match.  There were only two pastelists and I was one of them.  It was very difficult to take an oil painting approach to mixing colors and to get them to match.  The effort above took a couple of hours.  You would be amazed how many colors I put into this

 

 

 

 

Paint out with Ian Roberts too



This was the other pastelist that was there.  She had brought a painting that she had worked on.  Below Ian critiques her painting.



Although we had been in class for four hours I still needed to paint so I walked down the road a little and got a decent start to this painting.

 

Painting in Orange Hills

The heat has gone and the fall seems to be here all at once.  Today the clouds were pretty outstanding all day.  I had spent most of the day working on a large oil.  They said it was going to rain; but I knew it wasn't going to.  I wanted to paint the clouds so I was going to have to be fast anyway.



This was a quick one.  I nailed  the clouds with a mid tone and then followed with the lights and then finally the darks.  I then went after the dark shapes of the trees and worked to the lights and finally the highlights. 

This pastel painting measures 24"X26".  It is painted on masonite with pumice gel and acrylic paint.

Painting in Box Canyon Park

The weather was changing and I did not know if I was going to be able to paint for long so I headed into the hills near my home.  The clouds were constantly changing but the hills had a saturated feel to them.

I set up at the edge of the park looking into the box canyon.  The masonite surface I used had the pumice gel and acrylic paint but Smaltz Hue is very transparent so you could see the masonite underneath it.

I tried to touch it once and leave it alone but I got caught up chasing the light in between the clouds.



Everything was flat because of all of the grays in the landscape.  The shadows started creeping across the foreground and as I worked the foreground, I decided to put them in.

The painting measures 24"X27". It is painted on masonite with pumice gel and acrylic paint.  I liked the hill on the left and the trees in the foreground but need to rework the clouds so they are moving more to the right hand side of the painting and smooth them out.  I also need to create more atmospheric perspective in the receding hills.