Breaking Through 6×8 – 15 Minute Painting Session
Today I’m bringing you a painting called Breaking Through, 6×8, which I completed last week. I really like this one, and I think you’ll enjoy seeing how it comes together.
Why the 6×8 Format Works
The 6×8 format is ideal for my painting channel setup. It’s small enough to sell reasonably, but large enough to allow room for creative exploration. What’s particularly cool is how it fits in the presentation layout—I can get the palette really big on camera. Since I record the palette at 1080 and the video at 4K, everything works out beautifully.
The Ground and Underpainting
I’m working on hardboard primed with three coats of house paint tinted to my favorite ground color: rich soil. I’ve done an easel talk about ground colors and how crucial that decision is. This rich soil color serves me for well over 95% of what I do. Occasionally I’ll use gray, but nothing beats this one.
For the underpainting, I tinted the color with a bit of madder, burnt sienna, burnt umber, and Mars black. I’ve been playing with this combination lately, and the burnt umber is really the main color underneath. I like it because it dries quickly, so if I come back the next day, it doesn’t matter—it’ll be fine. The Georgian paint I’m using is nice but quite transparent, so I juice it up. The cool thing about that is it gives me neat variations, and I think it’s always great to change things up.
The Reference and Its Power
This scene looks familiar because I’ve painted from this reference image many times before. But this time I went into a search engine and tried to find a new stream. In the past I’ve just had a puddle there, a bit of light, and it’s worked very well. It’s interesting that just about every painting I’ve done from this reference has been successful. That tells me something important: having good reference is vital.
A lot of painters can work from mediocre photos, but even if you’re a plein air painter, you want to find a good scene that’s inspiring. I’m glad I’m not a plein air painter—we’ve had some super changeable weather here—but there are some brave artists out there doing it successfully.
The Sky: Blue and Orange
You can see I love to bring in blue with the orange sky, and I think I really pulled it off here. The secret with those blues is to dial them way back. Use a lot of grey, a lot of umber in them. You don’t want those blues to be too striking or strident—that’ll start messing with people’s optic nerves because of the complementary thing going on. By tempering the blue, you get that dusky feel of twilight, which is what I think this painting pulls off really well.
This is a good example of what I call modern tonalism. I’m no expert on it, but I love it and have been trying to work in that mode. Lots of other artists are doing it too. I find it’s always best to just focus on what I’m doing, though it’s always amazing to see what people are creating out there.
The Process: Sky First, Then the Rest
Here’s how I work. I come in, set up the reference, do the underpainting, and try to get the sky done. Then I do a color pre-mix and go to lunch. When I come back, I come in dark with the landforms and build up to the lightest lights from the deepest darks. It’s not that difficult. Oil paint allows you to move back and forth between light and dark, but you always want to watch out for muddy paint. Because oil blends so easily, overworking it is one of the big problems you can have.
The idea is always to make your move, make your mark. If you need to adjust it slightly, go ahead. Then just leave it alone. It is the painting at that point. To get better and better, the thing to do is just do a lot more paintings. Usually when I come in the afternoon, I’m able to finish off a painting almost any size. The big ones sometimes require an additional morning—I’ve done some big coastal scenes where I’d do the sky and land one day, then bring in the ocean the next day.
The Greens: A Crucial Element
One of the things that makes this painting is the greens. The masters—Innis was a total master of bringing greens into a sunset. You can do your sunset thing by just tinting everything orange, and we’ve all seen that effect. But I think it’s really cool to bring in some greens. John Francis Murphy is another guy who was amazing at that. Both Innis and Murphy were incredible, and Murphy did it consistently in several of his best paintings.
They’re huge influences on me. I try to take things further through a combination of their influence, all the studies I’ve done, and creating interesting reference that may be a little gaudy or harsh but inspires nonetheless. When I share the reference image on Substack, you get a look at it in the color mixing session live, which also shows the full painting session.
The stream in this painting is really cool. When I’m doing reflections, I just try to get some in that looks nice. That green makes the painting. One of the artists at the art center where I have my studio came in and said, “Oh, that green—you’ve never done that before.” It’s pretty psychedelic, and it works really well. We temper it down a bit, and that’s a tip for you: there are lots of times you’re going to put down one stroke with a load of paint, and then later you wipe the brush and slightly adjust that stroke. Sometimes that’s necessary, but always do it with respect to the stroke process.
The Philosophy Behind the Work
I have an easel talk coming up about brush strokes and my whole philosophy about that, which is evolving but a lot of it is intuitive. It’s based on experience and thousands of micro decisions. That’s what’s great about painting. Painting is not for the faint of heart because you’ve got to make your decisions, make your mark, and move on.
To the degree you do that and practice with it, you build up a vast palette of techniques you can call upon to express yourself. It’s like music—you have to have facility with your instrument, and you build that up through experience and practice. With painting, you have a palette of colors, certain brushes you use, and you have to have a plan of attack. That’s one thing I’m always trying to teach, mostly by example. When you look at my painting process, you can see I always put things together a certain way.
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