Painting wild places...

Clouds add drama and compositional elements to a landscape painting - and for the artist, it's much more interesting to paint a sky with clouds than just a plain old blue sky!  The decision was finally made for the 4th wall of my mural - a view of Hurricane Mountain, so I was happy to return to work today.

I had several reference photos from one of my own hiking trips up Owls Head Mountain, between the Cascade Lakes and Keene, and they were the starting point for the painting. Off to the northeast there stood Hurricane Mountain, it's fire tower just barely visible - standing guard over the Au Sable River Valley and the northern High Peaks. There was just a touch of fall color, which helps highlight the contours of the land. This particular wall was almost square, and I followed my same process: I put light guidelines on it - a vertical one in the center, and a horizontal one in the center, and did the same thing to my reference photo, which I'd cropped to a square composition. When you're working big, it really helps to do that, so you get things in the right proportion.  I roughed in the composition with pencil, decided it was too close to the ceiling, erased and redrew it, then mixed up a grayish blue-green and went over the pencil lines. I know - I should have taken photos. Then I backed up and studied it. Even though the wall was square and I was doing a single mountain, I avoided placing it right in the center. It's close, but asymmetric enough that it made an interesting composition rather than a perfect triangle.

Then I mixed up more of that grayish, bluish green and started painting in the darks. This was a little bit of an unusual color scheme as the summit of the mountain was not brightly lit, so was darker, and the foreground slopes had patches of sun on them, plus fall colors, and were lighter. Normally the distant layers of the mountain landscapes are bluer and lighter. I used a big brush and filled in the dark and shaded areas. Then mixed up some lighter greens and filled in the rest of the spaces. Using light and dark to show the pattern of sunlight and shadow on the slopes as well as the contours of the mountain.  Immediately, when I had blocked in these main colors, I know the values of the darks were too dark. When I work with my oils, I often blend new colors on top of painted colors, to lighten or darken an area. But with acrylics, they dry practically as soon as I brush them on, so I've developed a technique of scrubbing the new color over the existing color- keeping it a very thin layer of paint that is not applied heavily. The undercoat often still shows through. I tried a lighter blue on top of my darks, especially for the upper part of the summit. Still too dark. Then I tried a purplish grey, that worked better. I think I scrubbed a 3rd and maybe even a 4th layer of lighter blue/green on the mountain - varying the values so the farthest, highest slopes are paler than the nearer ones, yet a darker color. I'm reminded of how the Impressionists used dabs of color to visually mix together and produce the colors they wanted the viewer to see (picture Monet's haystack series). I'm doing something similar - letting my dabs and brushstrokes of acrylic paint visually, rather than physically mix together to get the effects I want to achieve.

The sky - my reference photos had mostly a solid overcast sky with lumpy grey clouds. But on my walk last evening, there was magnificent and dramatic light and clouds, and I took photos as possible references. I made note of which direction the Hurricane view was (looking northeast) and I knew which photos were northeast views. Once I got the mountain basically filled in with paint, I felt compelled to cover the remaining bare wall color, so I looked through my yesterday photos and selected a couple that I thought would work. Bingo - things fell into place and I got some nice color in a dramatic sky. It was much more fun to paint this than a plain blue sky! A little bit stormy and threatening, but not over-powering.

When I quit today after 6 hours of working, I was really pleased - in fact, surprised with the results. It takes a lot of patience, stepping back to study what I've done, and playing around with color and value to make the paint work for me, but it's working! I'm ruining the 2 main brushes that I am painting with, because of the scrubbing, but it's worth it to get the effects I want. I hope to add more refining layers of paint and details when I return for the next day.