From Rockpile

The finished painting "From Rockpile" 30x30 inches oil on panel.

Now that everything had been added to the painting to a certain degree, it was time to relate everything within the painting by making adjustments to the value, shapes, and color.

The lower left hand corner is the closest place in the landscape to the viewer.  It had to be the darkest, the lightest, and have the most detail.  It was also for me the most difficult part of the painting to seem realistic because of the small space it took up.

Trying to establish the atmospheric perspective by painting the land mass in the back.  By doing this I am making color and value decisions about the foreground and middle ground of the painting.

I went ahead and finished the sky to establish the light and color key for the painting.  I also was thinking in terms of the underlying dark color in the rocks, beach, and bluff.  When I am thinking about the underpainting color of an object I am also making decisions about what the top or last colors of those objects will be.

Here I thought it was important to define the coastline by painting the water that shapes it.  One of the things that I continually think about is the interaction between parts of the painting. Defining something by what it isn't.

Every painting seems to have a different start.  There may not be a huge difference in these starts and I am not sure why I do not do the same thing every time.  Sometimes I will draw the composition in a specific color.  Other times I will just block everything in or put down big shapes to "map out" the composition.