Day By Day

Cloud Close Up!

A One Day Studio Landscape Workshop

Yesterday I went to a one day landscape painting workshop and even with the compressed schedule, I felt this was a valuable exercise for me! Every once in awhile we artists need these marathon paint challenges.

What does a one day workshop look like? Our instructor quickly showed us his landscape and plein air items - (value viewer, brushes, books, gesso boards etc.) and then did a quick value demo. Next we the students used our reference photos to create value studies on canva paper. Our value studies were created using only black and white paint. I was amazed at how well each of our value studies came out. We created the value studies in a very short time period, in about an hour.

B&W Value Study 

Limited Palette Painting

Next we posted our value studies next to our reference photos to create color studies - using limited palette. The limited palette I used was White, Cad Yellow Light, Alizarin Crimson, Ultramarine Blue and Black. I felt very confident in my color mixing skills - which really helped me adapt to the limited palette.

I was very pleased with my trees, a quick timeline helped me to create them and leave them alone (no overworking). Also, I thought the front of my barn house, that nice orangy color was perfect. Overall, I like the composition and feel of this painting.

My challenge was clouds which I have not painted before. For clouds, I put in the darks in a nice purple/blue ish first. I understand that clouds have the light top, mid-color  and then dark under --but it was still complex and a bit of a struggle. The time constraint of 1.5 hours was also an added challenge. I was very close to done when time was up! The last item of the day was a side by side review where we each showed our value study and color study (no one was completely finished). I was very impressed with how the compositions and values matched between the black and white and color studies for each artist! Amazing and obviously we were all good students! :)

At home I completed my painting by adding the orange foreground and the white around the barn windows. I also added a tiny bit of orangypurple to the dark area of the cloud which I think helps the overall painting.

If you get the paintportunity, I recommend a one day workshop challenge! Go for it!