Beginning again...

South Light --- Why South Light, you ask?   If you know anything about art, painting by north light is ideal - the sunlight coming in is indirect but bright and there is no glare. Even if it's cloudy, the light is the same all day long - no sun rays to shine across your paints and your canvas.  The contrast is perfect and not too bright and not too dark.

Here at my little farmhouse, space is at a premium. I have no north light to speak of. But I do have south light.  That would be my second favorite.  Granted, in the afternoon, I do have some sunbeams dancing across the living room floor. This is where I have my easel set up - the living room. When I scoot my couch and chair to the walls, I have barely enough space to move around and paint.  But if I move my easel away from the sunbeams, the south light will do in a pinch.

I bought myself a big professional easel several years ago with the proceeds I received from a commission piece. It is nice and heavy, solid oak and will last longer than my lifetime - maybe one of my kids will want it someday...

I started this painting blog because I think it will help me to be more accountable to myself.  I need to be painting - especially since I've cut back on work.  I LOVE painting.   Above is one of my small plein-air palettes.  When I had my studio, I had a big 24"x 24" thick piece of glass on which to mix my oil colors. Easy clean up, easy to scrape off with a razor blade if it dried.   From left to right my oil colors are the basic titanium white and a warm and cool of each primary color and a couple of extra colors as needed.  White, cadmium yellow medium, cadmium yellow light, yellow ochre, cadmium red light, alizarin crimson, ultramarine blue, cerulean blue and viridian green. These are my basics.  I add other tube colors that may be little harder to mix.  I have done paintings on location with 3 primaries and white.  You can mix all your colors with just these three colors (ultramarine blue, alizarin crimson and cad yellow light), and you can get a darker, richer almost-black with lots more depth than if you use a tube of black paint.  Much more interesting!  I never use straight black.

What prompted me starting to paint regularly again is that I was asked to do a commission piece for a friend of my dad's.  He has a ranch here in our area, and a lake with a lakehouse/recreation/party house on it.  It's a beautiful hang-out, and I've been there to hang out myself.  This is one of the lakes we go fishing on, too.  My dad's buddy and his wife live a short distance away from the lakehouse and they wanted a painting of it to look at in their home.  So....

I went a few weeks ago and took some photos of the place and had the owner select the view that he wanted.  Here it is...

He also raises black angus cows and I'll probably add a couple of those in there somewhere, too.  I have some photos of the cows.  I had an 8x10 printed to draw my sketch on the canvas and from which to paint.  I do a gray-scale sketch of the photo, and I usually do a graph of the photo to get the drawing to scale on the canvas.  I used to use stretched canvas and still do sometimes, but I prefer a stiffer support.  I have been ordering some professional grade oil primed linen canvases mounted on boards and I'm really pleased with them.  They will last even longer than stretched canvas and not allow the stretching, cracking and shrinking that a regular cotton canvas might do through the years.

Next step, the drawing...

Normally, I would take a little more "artistic license" on the way this piece is arranged, but when you do a commission, you do it the way the buyer likes it!

It's a little hard to see, I know.   Now, for the block in.  The first thing is to thinly put some base colors on the canvas and get that stark white covered up!  Otherwise, you might find a few little white specks peeking through on the finished canvas.  Sometimes, you want that effect, but other times you don't, and with this painting, I do not.   So I begin by using some paint thinning agent and do some washes on the canvas...  This is what I got done today...

Tomorrow, I will continue blocking in and then begin laying in some thicker paint, more modeling and start giving some basic shapes to the structure, the trees and the lake.  It's important to work a little all over the painting so as to keep things connected.  If only one part is worked on and finished, it won't look right as the painting progresses.  It is a constant process of light and dark, warm and cool, fore ground, middle ground and back ground, hard edges and soft, correcting design and making sure the "eye" flows through the painting.  I hope I can accomplish all these things - it's alot to think about!  Can't wait til tomorrow!