River Sunset 5x7
Hello, and welcome to Tonalist painting with M Francis McCarthy.
Today's painting is 'River Sunset' 5x7.
Our video features the progression of this painting from its early underpainting stages on up through the final finishing brushwork. Also featured is my usual rambling narration, so please check it out.
Yesterday we talked about tree shapes and their significance in landscape painting. Today, we are going to talk about the intermediate zone between where the trees end and the sky begins. Like yesterday's topic, I am pretty sure I have discussed this before, you are most welcome to dig into the pile of blogs here and see if you can find how redundant I am, if you like.
The tree edge intermediate zone is one of the most crucial do or die aspects of any painting. When it's done poorly your trees will look like cutouts against a light background. When it's overdone and over blended your trees will lack substance or a sense of stability.
There are several different strategies for this area of interaction between the trees and sky and I have tried all of them. In my early days as a painter, I would endeavor to use the edge of the brush to sort of splatter the tree edges against the sky. Back then, I was not as aware of photography's limitations in portraying nature accurately. Because the trees in my photo reference were silhouetted darkly against a bright sky, I would proceed to paint them the same way in my painting and just try to break up the edges. While there are times that this approach can work successfully, this can give the painting a false graphic sort of feeling.
Another approach (I see a lot of amateur artists do), is to smear the tree color into the sky color often with a fan brush. Although oil paint is very adept at this sort of smearing technique, to me it is always the sure sign of an amateur and comes off as greasy and fake looking. Also, this technique reminds me of Bob Ross and speed painting in a bad way.
The approach that I favor the most is to create an intermediate series of colors that can be used where the trees come into the sky. For example, if you had a green tree and a gray sky you could mix some of the gray sky mixture into your green and paint that. This will take an extra amount of time in mixing and planning, but it is time that is well spent if you want to get a convincing quality of air into your trees.
When I say convincing, I mean that it feels like the belongs with the sky and there's air as well. I am not always 100 percent successful at getting this effect across. All of the great landscape artists have wrangled with this aspect of landscape painting. Of them all, the one that was most adept at getting air into their trees was Camille Corot. I've had the good fortune of seeing Camille's paintings in real life and the way he accomplished his painting effects is by using intermediate colors but also, applying them with many delicate small brushstrokes.
Unfortunately working with small delicate brushstrokes is not a painting approach that gives me good results. Instead, I work mostly with color to address this challenge and I also attempt to get some diffusion and fracture in the brushwork so that there is no hard edge. Most the time this gives me a nice result but not always. This is something that I am always working on to improve.
M Francis McCarthy
Landscapepainter.co.nz
A bit about 'River Sunset' 5x7; I've painted this motif many times since taking the reference photo back in 2006. Each painting I have done using the same reference comes out very differently. The main reason I did it again recently, was that I was looking for some good reference material to use for some quick paintings before taking a holiday and I had this scene to hand. I had several unsuccessful paintings around that, I wanted to do new paintings on top of before I left.
'River Sunset' 5x7 is a sketch for the larger painting we will be discussing next week which was painted on top of an unsuccessful painting. I quite like this sketch. I am possibly happier with it than I am the larger version coming up.
To see more of my work, visit my site here
 |
| 'River Sunset' by M Francis McCarthy, 5x7 Oil Painting on Wood Panel |
Our video features the progression of this painting from its early underpainting stages on up through the final finishing brushwork. Also featured is my usual rambling narration, so please check it out.
Yesterday we talked about tree shapes and their significance in landscape painting. Today, we are going to talk about the intermediate zone between where the trees end and the sky begins. Like yesterday's topic, I am pretty sure I have discussed this before, you are most welcome to dig into the pile of blogs here and see if you can find how redundant I am, if you like.
The tree edge intermediate zone is one of the most crucial do or die aspects of any painting. When it's done poorly your trees will look like cutouts against a light background. When it's overdone and over blended your trees will lack substance or a sense of stability.
There are several different strategies for this area of interaction between the trees and sky and I have tried all of them. In my early days as a painter, I would endeavor to use the edge of the brush to sort of splatter the tree edges against the sky. Back then, I was not as aware of photography's limitations in portraying nature accurately. Because the trees in my photo reference were silhouetted darkly against a bright sky, I would proceed to paint them the same way in my painting and just try to break up the edges. While there are times that this approach can work successfully, this can give the painting a false graphic sort of feeling.
Another approach (I see a lot of amateur artists do), is to smear the tree color into the sky color often with a fan brush. Although oil paint is very adept at this sort of smearing technique, to me it is always the sure sign of an amateur and comes off as greasy and fake looking. Also, this technique reminds me of Bob Ross and speed painting in a bad way.
The approach that I favor the most is to create an intermediate series of colors that can be used where the trees come into the sky. For example, if you had a green tree and a gray sky you could mix some of the gray sky mixture into your green and paint that. This will take an extra amount of time in mixing and planning, but it is time that is well spent if you want to get a convincing quality of air into your trees.
When I say convincing, I mean that it feels like the belongs with the sky and there's air as well. I am not always 100 percent successful at getting this effect across. All of the great landscape artists have wrangled with this aspect of landscape painting. Of them all, the one that was most adept at getting air into their trees was Camille Corot. I've had the good fortune of seeing Camille's paintings in real life and the way he accomplished his painting effects is by using intermediate colors but also, applying them with many delicate small brushstrokes.
Unfortunately working with small delicate brushstrokes is not a painting approach that gives me good results. Instead, I work mostly with color to address this challenge and I also attempt to get some diffusion and fracture in the brushwork so that there is no hard edge. Most the time this gives me a nice result but not always. This is something that I am always working on to improve.
M Francis McCarthy
Landscapepainter.co.nz
A bit about 'River Sunset' 5x7; I've painted this motif many times since taking the reference photo back in 2006. Each painting I have done using the same reference comes out very differently. The main reason I did it again recently, was that I was looking for some good reference material to use for some quick paintings before taking a holiday and I had this scene to hand. I had several unsuccessful paintings around that, I wanted to do new paintings on top of before I left.
'River Sunset' 5x7 is a sketch for the larger painting we will be discussing next week which was painted on top of an unsuccessful painting. I quite like this sketch. I am possibly happier with it than I am the larger version coming up.
To see more of my work, visit my site here
 |
| River Sunset 5x7 (Detail) |
 |
| River Sunset 5x7 (Detail 2) |