The Painting Process - Issue Nº 2
In this series, I share the stories behind my paintings, my thought process, and the discoveries I make along the way.
※※※※
Living in the moment, Spontaneity and White clouds
My dog Sasha loves sunbathing on our veranda. Even though we walk a lot, laying calmly in the sunshine for half an hour is a special treat for him. It may not sound like something exciting to say to fellow artists, but this habit of Sasha’s has had a significant impact on my painting and well-being.
The point is Sasha doesn’t like to go too far away from me, so he’s always nearby. Therefore, he won’t go to the veranda alone. I have to go there with him and stay there until he soaks up enough sunshine.
I love this routine not only because I love Sasha and want him to be happy and healthy, but also because having to spend time with him on the veranda allows me to be a silent observer of nature, feel its pure energy and take it in. Sitting there, I can witness how the moving light changes the landscape. I can listen to the seagulls’ choking calls and see them teaching their young how to fly. I can see how Sasha is peacefully enjoying the sunshine without thinking about anything, and I learn to live in the moment through him.
I try to live in the present moment as much as I can. It means that I allow myself to think only about things I need to deal with right now and the things I want to do. I don’t let myself think about the past nor allow myself to have anxious thoughts about the future. If I want to think about the future it can only be something very positive, something I am dreaming about.
This approach to life frees an enormous amount of mental energy that can be directed at something meaningful and fun, and it makes it easier for creative thoughts and ideas to come through.
So, I use our “veranda sessions” as a sort of meditation. I just sit there outside and watch and listen to nature.
Just in front of our apartment building, across a small bay, a row of town buildings can be seen and there is a distant mountain behind them. I love that scene and I enjoy observing how clouds appear and disappear over the mountain and how the colors in the town change with the movement of the sun.
It was a glorious day. The atmosphere was so transparent, and the scene in front of me was full of colors. I was sitting on the veranda with Sasha in awe, admiring the perfect harmony of nature.
As my mind was absorbing the beauty of the landscape, the painter in me started to analyze the view in terms of value and color.
I started comparing the values of the sunlight striking the buildings’ white walls with the white clouds hovering over the mountain in the background.
I thought, both the sunlit walls and the clouds looked fairly white, but the walls were definitely lighter in value. In comparison to the white walls, the value of the clouds looked much darker even though without that comparison, just looking at the sky, the clouds appeared very light, almost white.
If I was going to paint this, it would be important to show the difference in value between the town’s walls and the clouds. I would use pure white with a speck of yellow for the warm sunlit walls, but for the clouds, I would use a warm light gray color to make them recede in the painting. This would show that the clouds are much farther from the viewer than the town walls, and that small value difference would be enough to create a sense of depth and atmospheric perspective in the painting.
I continued by comparing the values and colors of the sky and the water in the bay. The water was much darker and much greener than the sky.
Then, my eyes jumped to the shadows on the buildings and I thought that those shadows were almost the same tonal value as the distant mountain, but they were slightly warmer.
At that point, I thought, well I have already painted an entire painting in my mind. Why not go to the studio, open the window and quickly paint this scene with actual paints?
By that time, Sasha seemed to have basked in enough sunshine, so I headed back to the apartment and to my studio, opened the window, and started to paint. I always have my portable easel set up by that window because I like to quickly paint the same view in different lighting and atmospheric conditions.
When I started painting, the clouds over the town had already begun to fade, so I decided to capture them first, before anything else. I asked nature to hold those clouds for me for just a few more minutes.
Before I could paint the clouds accurately, I needed something to relate their values and colors to. I decided that the white of the paper would be the value of the sunlit white walls, my lightest light, and it made it easy for me to find the value and color for the mountain, so I painted the mountain first.
Then, I painted the shadows of the clouds. They were lighter than the mountain but darker than the sky. I added a bit of white to the color that I had used to paint the mountain and painted the clouds’ shadows with it.
Then, I painted the clouds in sunlight and the sky around them, and only after that did I move on to painting the town and the water. It was full tide and the bay was beautiful.
I had a lot of fun painting this study. It was like a game in which I had to find the correct color and value for every shape in the scene, and I had to do that as quickly as possible before the light changed.
That’s what "painting for fun" means to me. So, that day, Sasha got his dose of sunlight and I got my dose of fun!
You might be wondering what color one can use to paint white clouds that shouldn’t be pure white in the painting.
The answer is - it’s always a shade of gray: yellowish gray, reddish gray, bluish gray, greenish gray, purplish gray, etc.
It means that every color in the clouds should contain all three primary colors (blue, red, and yellow) plus white in different proportions. Blue, red, and yellow when mixed together give a gray color. When you let one of these colors dominate in the mixture the gray color gets a slight shift toward that particular hue, and thus you get either bluish gray, reddish gray, or yellowish gray. When both blue and yellow dominate you get a greenish gray.
In this particular case, for the light areas of the clouds, I used tiny specks of yellow ochre, cadmium red light, and cobalt blue plus white, with the yellow ochre dominating the mixture to create a warm light gray color. I controlled the lightness of my grays by adding white.
(I used a neutral gray paper for these swatches so that you can see how neutral and grayed down the colors that I used to paint the clouds were in the study above. You might need to turn the screen of your device to full brightness to perceive the values and colors in these images correctly.)
For the middle-value or the halftone areas of the clouds, I used the same color combination but with less white, and I let the cadmium red light dominate the mixture.
For the shadows on the clouds, I once again mixed the same three colors but this time I let the cobalt blue dominate because the shadows looked purple-blue gray. They were cooler and darker than the other parts of the clouds.
Thus every part of my clouds was painted with a gray color. I only varied the temperature and lightness of that color to paint different parts of the clouds.
Here is a cloud I painted, using the three gray colors from the swatches above. I placed a pure white brushstroke under the cloud so that you can see that the cloud is much darker than the pure white paint, yet it looks white when surrounded by the blue color of the sky.
The value of clouds always has to be carefully analyzed by comparing the lightest parts of the clouds to other light objects in the scene.
Had I painted these clouds with pure white, just like the town walls, I would have lost the sense of depth and softness that make the clouds appear deeper in the scene in the original study. The clouds would have looked like they were hovering just above the buildings and they would have competed with the town for the viewer’s attention.
I have made the clouds lighter digitally in the image below so that you can see what I am talking about.
Of course, clouds can be very light if they are close to the viewer or if the sunlight is coming through them, that’s why it’s so important to carefully analyze the value relationships in any scene.
The two photos below are good examples of scenes where objects that are closer to the viewer look lighter than the white clouds.
In the photo on the left, the white part of the building and the white boat are much lighter than the clouds in the sky.
In the photo on the right, the light on the white catamarans is lighter than the huge cloud over the mountain in the background. It’s very important to show such value differences when painting similar scenes.
Here are a couple more paintings in which I painted the clouds slightly darker than the white foreground objects. In both of these paintings, pure white with a speck of cadmium yellow was used only on the boats, the main focal points. All the clouds were painted with light gray colors to make them recede into the picture.
Color adds a lot to the aesthetics of a painting but the right use of value is what makes the painting look convincing and realistic to the viewer.
I hope you enjoyed this article :)
Lena
P.S. If you missed my previous publication from this series you can read it on my website here: https://www.lenarivo.com/blog
Download my free 30-page PDF, “Everything you Need To Know About Gouache”
In this 30-page PDF you will learn:
How to decide which colors you need when you start with gouache and how you can expand your palette to make it even more effective.
What kind of storage palettes to use with gouache to prevent your beautiful colors from fast drying.
Why you need to use two whites with gouache.
How to choose the right paper and what kinds of brushes work best with gouache.
About the setup that I like using for plein air painting with gouache.
You will also be provided with many useful tips that will make your painting experience smoother.
