Dawn Meadow 8x8
Hello, and welcome to Tonalist painting by M Francis McCarthy.
Today's painting is 'Dawn Meadow' 8x8.
Our video features the progression of this painting from its early underpainting stages on up through the final finishing brushstrokes. Also featured is my usual rambling narration, so please check it out.
As many of you know, I've been away on holiday and just got back yesterday. I had an intention of keeping up this blog while on my holiday and for the most part I did alright. I found it was a bit more difficult to keep it up once I caught up with my family in California, but I am back now so fasten your seatbelts and here we go.
Today I like to talk about one of the color schemes I frequently use in landscape painting. I have several different basic color themes that I like to work with and the one I'm going to discuss with you today is the green and purple color scheme.
There are many color schemes that actually look natural and create pleasant paintings. Of all of these potential schemes, I would say I tend to lean on the green purple color scheme the most. Green and purple are not exactly complementary colors (purple is just a little further along than red on the color wheel) however purple is a near complement to green and therefore creates a touch of excitement. A painting that is mostly green with purple in the shadows and in some of the highlights is usually very attractive.
Much of the scenery that I come across and photograph, has uninspiring colors in it, especially when that scene has been photographed. As some of you know photography tends to eliminate many of the subtler colors that we perceive in nature and unless they are quite overt, a photograph will not capture them adequately. For this reason, I like to accentuate and manipulate colors in my photo reference prior to using that photo as painting material.
When prepping my reference photos in Photoshop one of my favorite things to do is to apply layers of gradient blends to the original scene using purples and browns over the already green landscape. This accentuates and modifies the existing colors into a more green/ purple color scheme. If you refer to the blog post featuring forest path (either the 5x7 or the 10x14), you will see a recent, good strong example of a green purple color scheme in action, but there are also many subtle ways that I use this dynamic all the time.
Some of the other color schemes I might employ would be pushing the landscapes colors towards rusts and orange tones or in the case of a night scene I might push the entire landscape into blue and blue-green.
Because the green purple color scheme feels so natural, many times that I use it, people are not even aware that I have been modifying and manipulating the original scenes colors because the overall effect is very natural and pleasing.
By the way, one of the great places that you can work purple into your color scheme is in the sky. Instead of painting gray clouds with nothing but black and white, many times I will inject quite a lot of purple into them. As purple is very flexible I can move it into reddish or bluish tones while still maintaining an overall feeling of gray. This is something that you can exploit quite a lot. Truth be told, I a seldom miss an opportunity to inject purple into my skies in some way, shape or form.
Another way that I get purple into the landscape is in the darkest colors that I mix for my landscape paintings. Instead of using a color like ivory black I prefer to make my darkest color using Pthalo green and alizarin Crimson. This gives me color that is actually very dark purple tone and is perceptually darker than black. As I stated in the past, one of the main reasons that I prefer to use this chromatic black instead of ivory black, is that ivory black has a very flat and dull feeling to it even when glazed, while my chromatic purple/ black mixture tends to vibrate more and also complements the greens and other colors in the landscape.
M Francis McCarthy
Landscapepainter.co.nz
A bit about 'Dawn Meadow' 8x8; Our last blog post features the 5x5 for this image and as I stated in the blog, this is a scene that I have painted quite a few times in different ways and formats. This is the second time I painted an 8x8 of it and I like this painting as well as the original 8x8 which I sold. The scene doesn't have a lot of actual strong elements in it but, compositionally, works very well for the sort of landscape that I like to do.
To see more of my work, visit my site here
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| Dawn Meadow by M Francis McCarthy, 8x8 Oil Painting on Wood Panel |
Today's painting is 'Dawn Meadow' 8x8.
Our video features the progression of this painting from its early underpainting stages on up through the final finishing brushstrokes. Also featured is my usual rambling narration, so please check it out.
As many of you know, I've been away on holiday and just got back yesterday. I had an intention of keeping up this blog while on my holiday and for the most part I did alright. I found it was a bit more difficult to keep it up once I caught up with my family in California, but I am back now so fasten your seatbelts and here we go.
Today I like to talk about one of the color schemes I frequently use in landscape painting. I have several different basic color themes that I like to work with and the one I'm going to discuss with you today is the green and purple color scheme.
There are many color schemes that actually look natural and create pleasant paintings. Of all of these potential schemes, I would say I tend to lean on the green purple color scheme the most. Green and purple are not exactly complementary colors (purple is just a little further along than red on the color wheel) however purple is a near complement to green and therefore creates a touch of excitement. A painting that is mostly green with purple in the shadows and in some of the highlights is usually very attractive.
Much of the scenery that I come across and photograph, has uninspiring colors in it, especially when that scene has been photographed. As some of you know photography tends to eliminate many of the subtler colors that we perceive in nature and unless they are quite overt, a photograph will not capture them adequately. For this reason, I like to accentuate and manipulate colors in my photo reference prior to using that photo as painting material.
When prepping my reference photos in Photoshop one of my favorite things to do is to apply layers of gradient blends to the original scene using purples and browns over the already green landscape. This accentuates and modifies the existing colors into a more green/ purple color scheme. If you refer to the blog post featuring forest path (either the 5x7 or the 10x14), you will see a recent, good strong example of a green purple color scheme in action, but there are also many subtle ways that I use this dynamic all the time.
Some of the other color schemes I might employ would be pushing the landscapes colors towards rusts and orange tones or in the case of a night scene I might push the entire landscape into blue and blue-green.
Because the green purple color scheme feels so natural, many times that I use it, people are not even aware that I have been modifying and manipulating the original scenes colors because the overall effect is very natural and pleasing.
By the way, one of the great places that you can work purple into your color scheme is in the sky. Instead of painting gray clouds with nothing but black and white, many times I will inject quite a lot of purple into them. As purple is very flexible I can move it into reddish or bluish tones while still maintaining an overall feeling of gray. This is something that you can exploit quite a lot. Truth be told, I a seldom miss an opportunity to inject purple into my skies in some way, shape or form.
Another way that I get purple into the landscape is in the darkest colors that I mix for my landscape paintings. Instead of using a color like ivory black I prefer to make my darkest color using Pthalo green and alizarin Crimson. This gives me color that is actually very dark purple tone and is perceptually darker than black. As I stated in the past, one of the main reasons that I prefer to use this chromatic black instead of ivory black, is that ivory black has a very flat and dull feeling to it even when glazed, while my chromatic purple/ black mixture tends to vibrate more and also complements the greens and other colors in the landscape.
M Francis McCarthy
Landscapepainter.co.nz
A bit about 'Dawn Meadow' 8x8; Our last blog post features the 5x5 for this image and as I stated in the blog, this is a scene that I have painted quite a few times in different ways and formats. This is the second time I painted an 8x8 of it and I like this painting as well as the original 8x8 which I sold. The scene doesn't have a lot of actual strong elements in it but, compositionally, works very well for the sort of landscape that I like to do.
To see more of my work, visit my site here
 |
| Dawn Meadow8x8 (Detail) |
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| Dawn Meadow8x8 (Detail 2) |