'Golden Creek' 12x16
Hello and welcome to Tonalist painting with M Francis McCarthy.
Today's painting is 'Golden Creek 12x16.
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.
Today, I like to talk about painting clouds. I paint a lot of clouds, mostly successfully but occasionally I have some issues just like everybody else. I thought it might be helpful to outline some of the ways I approach painting skies and clouds.
If there is blue in the sky, I tend to paint that in first. The reason for this is, that the blue would always be behind any clouds or trees that were in front of it. I like to change up my blue in a few different ways. I use two different blue colors on my pallet, Cobalt blue (warm) and Pthalo blue (cool). I will generally use one blue in one section of the sky and the other blue elsewhere. One thing I almost always do is add a little bit of black to my blues so that the mixed color feels more natural. If you're using blue straight out of the tube mixed only with white, your sky will look overly synthetic and false.
Prior to starting my painting, I pre-mix some colors on my pallet for the sky, this would mean a dark and a light blue, some gray tones and a white. My mixed white is quite different from the white straight out of the tube. I tend to modify my white tone with raw umber and yellow ochre, as well as gray.
When it comes to grays, I tend to work with a middle gray premixed on my pallet that I modify as I am painting. One of the big secrets to getting interesting clouds is to juxtapose your cool grays against warm grays. I do this by mixing colors like violet or alizarin Crimson into my grays for the cooler tones. For the warmer tones, I will modify using colors like burnt sienna, yellow ochre or transparent earth yellow.
When painting clouds I usually have some sort of reference image, but I take a lot of liberties with the colors in the reference clouds. This is because the photograph only captures a limited spectrum of the potential grays that are possible to paint. Is important to inject a lot of interest wherever possible.
After I have laid in my sky blue color, I will almost always work with the darkest grays of the clouds next, gradually working my way through to the lighter grays and then into the off-white tones. This is a good place to note that regardless of how dark the cloud colors might be in your photo reference, it is always better to paint them in somewhat lighter than they appear there. If the dark tones in your clouds are too dark, it is distracting and does not convey an airy feeling, not to mention competing with the darks on the land.
This brings us to one of the greatest challenges with painting clouds. That would be the edges of the clouds. If you observe clouds in nature you will see that they are actually quite mysterious. The edges are always shifting and yet, can also seem quite defined and crisp. We know that clouds are full of air and water and even the most defined cloud edge in nature still feels light, natural and a part of the sky around it.
Trying to convey these edges with oil paint on a board is always going to be challenging. I have seen many amateurs make the mistake of using oil paint's ability to smear easily, to just smear the edges of the cloud into the blue sky around it. The problem with painting clouds in this way is that they feel greasy and unnatural.
What I prefer to do is start off by paying special attention to the values as I lay in my clouds, sort of like you would lay tiles into a mosaic. When it comes to the clouds edges, I rely on is the side of my brush to sort of jigger one color into the next creating a little bit of organic diffusion as I wiggle my brush. This is a technique that requires practice, but yields far better results than smearing the oil paint together.
I find some clouds more challenging to paint than others. I almost always have some difficulty with a sky that has white fluffy clouds against the mostly blue background. The part of this sort of sky that I find most challenging is those pesky edges as there is so much contrast between the bright white of the cloud and the more medium tone of the sky. I have painted this sort of thing successfully, but I find it more challenging than stormy skies.
Another thing I like to do with my skies is to interject a lot of color. For this reason, I enjoy painting sunset, twilight and occasionally dawn. This gives me the opportunity to bring in colors only seen at those times of day like pink, lavender, orange and deep purples.
The sky in a picture is always going to be the area of the painting that conveys the greatest amount of emotion. There have been some paintings where I have done very little land and quite a lot of sky because it is my favorite part of the landscape to paint.
M Francis McCarthy
Landscapepainter.co.nz
A bit about 'Golden Creek 12x16; this painting is more golden than the study. The scene is based on a reference photo I took while vacationing in England not too long ago. What's great about England is the countryside is varied and interesting with lots of different kinds of trees and rivers.
I like painting rivers because it gives us a break from the usual roads or paths. It's important to have something going on on the ground other than just some grass the trees sit in.
To see more of my work, visit my site here
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| 'Golden Creek' by M Francis McCarthy, 12x16 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.
Today, I like to talk about painting clouds. I paint a lot of clouds, mostly successfully but occasionally I have some issues just like everybody else. I thought it might be helpful to outline some of the ways I approach painting skies and clouds.
If there is blue in the sky, I tend to paint that in first. The reason for this is, that the blue would always be behind any clouds or trees that were in front of it. I like to change up my blue in a few different ways. I use two different blue colors on my pallet, Cobalt blue (warm) and Pthalo blue (cool). I will generally use one blue in one section of the sky and the other blue elsewhere. One thing I almost always do is add a little bit of black to my blues so that the mixed color feels more natural. If you're using blue straight out of the tube mixed only with white, your sky will look overly synthetic and false.
Prior to starting my painting, I pre-mix some colors on my pallet for the sky, this would mean a dark and a light blue, some gray tones and a white. My mixed white is quite different from the white straight out of the tube. I tend to modify my white tone with raw umber and yellow ochre, as well as gray.
When it comes to grays, I tend to work with a middle gray premixed on my pallet that I modify as I am painting. One of the big secrets to getting interesting clouds is to juxtapose your cool grays against warm grays. I do this by mixing colors like violet or alizarin Crimson into my grays for the cooler tones. For the warmer tones, I will modify using colors like burnt sienna, yellow ochre or transparent earth yellow.
When painting clouds I usually have some sort of reference image, but I take a lot of liberties with the colors in the reference clouds. This is because the photograph only captures a limited spectrum of the potential grays that are possible to paint. Is important to inject a lot of interest wherever possible.
After I have laid in my sky blue color, I will almost always work with the darkest grays of the clouds next, gradually working my way through to the lighter grays and then into the off-white tones. This is a good place to note that regardless of how dark the cloud colors might be in your photo reference, it is always better to paint them in somewhat lighter than they appear there. If the dark tones in your clouds are too dark, it is distracting and does not convey an airy feeling, not to mention competing with the darks on the land.
This brings us to one of the greatest challenges with painting clouds. That would be the edges of the clouds. If you observe clouds in nature you will see that they are actually quite mysterious. The edges are always shifting and yet, can also seem quite defined and crisp. We know that clouds are full of air and water and even the most defined cloud edge in nature still feels light, natural and a part of the sky around it.
Trying to convey these edges with oil paint on a board is always going to be challenging. I have seen many amateurs make the mistake of using oil paint's ability to smear easily, to just smear the edges of the cloud into the blue sky around it. The problem with painting clouds in this way is that they feel greasy and unnatural.
What I prefer to do is start off by paying special attention to the values as I lay in my clouds, sort of like you would lay tiles into a mosaic. When it comes to the clouds edges, I rely on is the side of my brush to sort of jigger one color into the next creating a little bit of organic diffusion as I wiggle my brush. This is a technique that requires practice, but yields far better results than smearing the oil paint together.
I find some clouds more challenging to paint than others. I almost always have some difficulty with a sky that has white fluffy clouds against the mostly blue background. The part of this sort of sky that I find most challenging is those pesky edges as there is so much contrast between the bright white of the cloud and the more medium tone of the sky. I have painted this sort of thing successfully, but I find it more challenging than stormy skies.
Another thing I like to do with my skies is to interject a lot of color. For this reason, I enjoy painting sunset, twilight and occasionally dawn. This gives me the opportunity to bring in colors only seen at those times of day like pink, lavender, orange and deep purples.
The sky in a picture is always going to be the area of the painting that conveys the greatest amount of emotion. There have been some paintings where I have done very little land and quite a lot of sky because it is my favorite part of the landscape to paint.
M Francis McCarthy
Landscapepainter.co.nz
A bit about 'Golden Creek 12x16; this painting is more golden than the study. The scene is based on a reference photo I took while vacationing in England not too long ago. What's great about England is the countryside is varied and interesting with lots of different kinds of trees and rivers.
I like painting rivers because it gives us a break from the usual roads or paths. It's important to have something going on on the ground other than just some grass the trees sit in.
To see more of my work, visit my site here
 |
| 'Golden Creek' by M Francis McCarthy, 12x16 (Detail) |
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| 'Golden Creek' by M Francis McCarthy, 12x16 (Detail 2) |