Day Fifty Eight: Moonlight over a Pond by Lowell Birge Harrison
Hello and welcome to day 58 of 100 days of Tonalism.
Today's study is of 'Moonlight over a Pond' by Lowell Birge Harrison.
Lowell Birge Harrison was a popular painter in his day and was also well known as a teacher. He wrote a book that is still in print about landscape painting. I personally found this book highly informative and helpful in regards to understanding the Tonal painting approach. I found some great information about Lowell Birge Harrison in my copy of A History of American Tonalism by David Cleveland and I've read it on today's videos narration so please check that out.
Continuing on with our current assay regarding my Tonalist painting process; today, we're going to discuss the progression of my color palette since I began painting, especially what I consider to be the essential colors.
As I stated in my previous blog post, I started out with a very limited color palette, consisting of cadmium yellow, alizarin crimson, ultramarine blue and titanium white. I started out with this limited color palette because it seemed to me to be the best way to learn what I could do with oil paints. By trying to mix my colors from as few pigments as possible.
This sort of logic comes easily to me because of my experience working for screen printing as an illustrator. Quite often in screenprinting you are severely limited as to how many colors can be used to print a design. This tends to force you to get the maximum use out of every color you have available to you.
After this minimal start, one of the first colors that I added to my pallet was yellow ocher. Yellow ocher is a very flexible and an appropriate color for painting landscapes. I found it useful if not absolutely vital. The next color I added would be burnt sienna, another earth color. After that I added viridian green. Viridian green is a very deep, somewhat dark green, I have since replaced viridian with Phthalo green. Phthalo green is more transparent, has a much stronger tinting strength, and also is darker than viridian. While I enjoyed using viridian for quite a while, I feel that it is a bit chalky so I do not miss it.
Moving on, I replaced ultramarine on my pallet with cobalt blue. To be honest I do not care for the ultramarine very much. Is quite popular because it has good tinting strength and is also a fairly cheap pigment. It has a bit of a purplish cast and a underlying murkiness that I find less than pleasant. Many painters love ultramarine but I was happy to see it go.
Most of the instruction materials that I engaged with while learning to paint, discouraged the use of black. The logic behind this is that new students of painting will try to use black to darken their colors or for painting their shadows instead of mixing new colors. This tends to give a cold and unpleasant effect to landscape paintings. A superior dark color can be easily obtained by mixing phthalo green with alizarin crimson. This give a chromatic black and is the method that I have used for a long time now for my dark areas.
I use black mostly as a color killer, to dampen colors that have an excess of chroma and also to make expedient greys. For this job its hard to beat and in my opinion, it is an absolutely essential color for Tonalist painting.
My core pallet consists of the following colors: white, cadmium yellow, yellow ocher, burnt sienna, alizarin crimson, phthalo green, cobalt blue, and black. I could accomplish pretty much every painting that I do with this pallet if I had to, though I would certainly miss many of my secondary pigments very much.
I will discuss with you tomorrow, the colors I've added to this basic group of pigments and the reasons that I have included them on my current painting pallet.
Cheers,
M Francis McCarthy
Landscapepainter.co.nz
A bit about Moonlight over a Pond' by Lowell Birge Harrison; this is one of the paintings in this series of 100 days of Tonalism that I had to paint in a slightly different manner than the others.
First of all, I had to re tint my under drawing to a tealish tone, though a bit of the burnt sienna undertone was still peeking through. Then I built up my forms with several passes of transparent pigment. Only at the final stage of the painting did I use any opaque mixtures of paint.
To see more of my work, visit my site here
 |
| Painted after - Moonlight over a Pond by Lowell Birge Harrison, Study by M Francis McCarthy - Size 5x7, Oil on wood panel |
Today's study is of 'Moonlight over a Pond' by Lowell Birge Harrison.
Lowell Birge Harrison was a popular painter in his day and was also well known as a teacher. He wrote a book that is still in print about landscape painting. I personally found this book highly informative and helpful in regards to understanding the Tonal painting approach. I found some great information about Lowell Birge Harrison in my copy of A History of American Tonalism by David Cleveland and I've read it on today's videos narration so please check that out.
Continuing on with our current assay regarding my Tonalist painting process; today, we're going to discuss the progression of my color palette since I began painting, especially what I consider to be the essential colors.
As I stated in my previous blog post, I started out with a very limited color palette, consisting of cadmium yellow, alizarin crimson, ultramarine blue and titanium white. I started out with this limited color palette because it seemed to me to be the best way to learn what I could do with oil paints. By trying to mix my colors from as few pigments as possible.
This sort of logic comes easily to me because of my experience working for screen printing as an illustrator. Quite often in screenprinting you are severely limited as to how many colors can be used to print a design. This tends to force you to get the maximum use out of every color you have available to you.
After this minimal start, one of the first colors that I added to my pallet was yellow ocher. Yellow ocher is a very flexible and an appropriate color for painting landscapes. I found it useful if not absolutely vital. The next color I added would be burnt sienna, another earth color. After that I added viridian green. Viridian green is a very deep, somewhat dark green, I have since replaced viridian with Phthalo green. Phthalo green is more transparent, has a much stronger tinting strength, and also is darker than viridian. While I enjoyed using viridian for quite a while, I feel that it is a bit chalky so I do not miss it.
Moving on, I replaced ultramarine on my pallet with cobalt blue. To be honest I do not care for the ultramarine very much. Is quite popular because it has good tinting strength and is also a fairly cheap pigment. It has a bit of a purplish cast and a underlying murkiness that I find less than pleasant. Many painters love ultramarine but I was happy to see it go.
Most of the instruction materials that I engaged with while learning to paint, discouraged the use of black. The logic behind this is that new students of painting will try to use black to darken their colors or for painting their shadows instead of mixing new colors. This tends to give a cold and unpleasant effect to landscape paintings. A superior dark color can be easily obtained by mixing phthalo green with alizarin crimson. This give a chromatic black and is the method that I have used for a long time now for my dark areas.
I use black mostly as a color killer, to dampen colors that have an excess of chroma and also to make expedient greys. For this job its hard to beat and in my opinion, it is an absolutely essential color for Tonalist painting.
My core pallet consists of the following colors: white, cadmium yellow, yellow ocher, burnt sienna, alizarin crimson, phthalo green, cobalt blue, and black. I could accomplish pretty much every painting that I do with this pallet if I had to, though I would certainly miss many of my secondary pigments very much.
I will discuss with you tomorrow, the colors I've added to this basic group of pigments and the reasons that I have included them on my current painting pallet.
Cheers,
M Francis McCarthy
Landscapepainter.co.nz
A bit about Moonlight over a Pond' by Lowell Birge Harrison; this is one of the paintings in this series of 100 days of Tonalism that I had to paint in a slightly different manner than the others.
First of all, I had to re tint my under drawing to a tealish tone, though a bit of the burnt sienna undertone was still peeking through. Then I built up my forms with several passes of transparent pigment. Only at the final stage of the painting did I use any opaque mixtures of paint.
To see more of my work, visit my site here
 |
| Original painting, Moonlight over a Pond by Lowell Birge Harrison |