Violet Woods 6×8 – Live Painting Session!
I painted Violet Woods back in 2019. Today we’re painting it again, and this time I want to explore something that fascinated me about the original: the use of violet in the underpainting, mixed into burnt umber and burnt sienna. It’s an approach that challenges the conventional wisdom about shadow color, and it opens up interesting possibilities for how we think about tonalist painting.
The Purple Question: When Shadows Aren’t Violet
Sometimes shadows are violet. You don’t want to make all your shadows violet all the time. Unless you want to. Unless you like doing that. And if you do, then do it. You’re the painter. It’s your magical world.
Purple is deeply related to brown, to every color, really. Mix red and green, you get brown. Mix purple and orange, you get brown. Even purple and yellow can give you brownish tones. These relationships matter more than following rules. When I’m building an underpainting with purple, I’m not trying to create realistic shadows. I’m creating a foundation that will vibrate with the colors I layer on top of it.
The key is understanding what purple does when it sits beneath other colors. It’s not about making shadows look purple. It’s about the vibrational quality that emerges when you glaze greens and earth tones over a purple base. That’s the real magic.
Drawing First: Composition and Avoiding Common Mistakes
Before I touch color, I need to get the drawing right. The horizon line goes lower, I don’t want the road to be too prominent. It’s not apparent in the reference anyway, so I’m not going to force it.
Here’s something important: I’m avoiding forks. You never want two branches coming off the same point. It reads wrong immediately. The reference has a tree shape right in the middle, but I’m not going to paint it. I’m going to break that up, create variation, keep the eye moving.
Roads throw me sometimes, but here’s the strategy: avoid parallels running straight up. You want to break things up. Don’t get too defined with shadows either. Keep it loose at this stage. The whole underpainting is about trying things out. That’s what it’s for. I’m not trying to finish anything. I’m establishing relationships and testing ideas.
I’m pretty happy with the drawing now. We’ll break for color mixing and come back to paint the whole thing in one session.
Color Mixing: Building a Cohesive Palette
The purple was prettier without the Mars Black, but you’re going to see very soon why value matters. I’m going to go a little darker now, and that’s where the real work begins.
For the grass, I’m mixing browns and Mars yellow. This is a color I mixed yesterday. I didn’t realize I didn’t have yellow ochre on hand, I need yellow ochre. Mars yellow doesn’t replace it. If I run out, I can add white and work around it, but I need yellow ochre right now. It’s essential for that particular quality.
For the sky, I’ve got two colors: a dark and a light. It’s going to be too facey without some umber to mellow it out. Too much chroma. I might even have to resort to some gray to really get the mellow tone. Remember, this is our dark color, so it’s in the shadows.
I want it unabashedly yellow. I’m probably going to have to add cadmium to get that. There we go. That greens up a bit, that’s okay, that’s why we’ve got our friend mixing red here. Cadmium red hue. That’s nice.
Don’t worry about your colors getting muddy. I mean, you don’t want to mix muddy colors obviously, and if it gets too muddy, ditch it. But you can have quite a few colors in your mixes. Early on I picked up the idea that you should have as few colors in your mixes as possible. That’s not wisdom. You can use those mixed colors for the next pass. They become part of your painting’s color story.
For a lighter color, I really want the yellow ochre front and forward. You can see that cadmium yellow has an impact. A little brighter. That’s a real tonalist trope: just make the sky yellow. Works great. We’re not messing with clouds or anything. There’s all that foliage coming. No reason to complicate it. There’s our sky. It’s all done.
The Darks: Building Depth with Purple and Black
Now for the darks. I want ivory black. Actually, I want Mars Black. I remember getting a tube of classical Mars Black. I think I just didn’t like it, so I resorted to Windsor Mars Black. At some point I should try that again. Things change. Reality is changeable.
A little more purple. Oftentimes this isn’t as dark as I might want to go, but I can always resort to the actual Mars Black if needed. That’s pretty good.
Now a purple. We’re going to have to wake you up, purple. So counterintuitively, you won’t see it in the reference, but you’re going to have to use a little bit of white just to get it in its identity. Otherwise you’ll just be spinning your wheels. You need that white to make the purple read as purple, not just as dark.
Let’s see what these two look like. Still fake-ass, right? Let’s see, a little in the out. Also, it’s pretty transparent, so we’re going to get in some less fake, more opaque. Still not a color like you’d expect to see in nature. That’s getting there. I think that’s pretty good. I don’t want to lose my purple too much.
Notice I didn’t go with the matte. I went with burnt sienna and burnt umber to bring in the redness. That’s the key, you’re not trying to make a perfect purple. You’re making a purple that will work with the rest of your palette.
Greens and the Foliage Problem
There’s a lot of green in this painting. It’s going to seem quite alien at first. I don’t really have to bring in purple. It can problem me because purple and burnt umber kind of sit next to each other. See what I’m saying? That’s pretty good.
As we’re moving into the light, there’s our dark green and there’s a spread. As we’re moving into the light, I’ll bring in some of this Mars yellow. That’s really good. Now we lost some of the green, which is fine. Actually, that works really well.
I’m going to push it a little bit. That’s what this permanent green light is for. See? No more green. It would be very hard to get that any other way. If you had phthalo on your palette, you could mix phthalo with yellow and get something very similar to permanent green light. That’s basically just a usable version of phthalo. Phthalo you can use, but you always have to modify it. Extra steps. That’s why phthalo is part of my painting process in the form of permanent green light.
It really hangs on your chroma there. A little black. I’ll change all that. That’s a dark grass tone. I don’t mind a bit of chroma in there. I want it definitely prettier than those ugly colors. You see that artifact-y, jaypeggy dark grass? That is nice.
Where we have green grass, we’re not doing green grass. It’s a little bit of gold. There’s a lot of green that’s a big part of cadmium yellow, so that did take away some of that red. Then we have green that’s really sneaking in some black. I’m sneaking even more Mike’s gray, which is just sneaking in the black in the form of black mixed with some white. That’s looking really good.
The Road and Payoff Colors
A couple colors for the road. We’re done with the greens. Nice grass color. The road. Do we use all the purple? That’s okay. I like the blocks. I prefer the Rowney because it’s a little more neutral. I could use the blocks all day though. I kind of have to adapt.
That’s a dark road color. Darker road color. I do like how there’s that pinky quality on the road there. I got to be careful with that because it doesn’t relate that well to the sky. We want everything congruent. Everything needs to feel like it belongs in the same world.
I want a little pop in there. I want a little orange here. We’re not going pinky. We’re going a little orangey. That’s a nice color. It looks almost like the grass color. We can do it. It’s a little pinky, but I think that’s a good payoff color. A little lighter. A little grayer. I just don’t want it too much like the grass. There we go.
Painting the Composition: Wet-Into-Wet and Expressive Marks
Back from lunch. I made a cup of tea and did a few things to the drawing. I want to open some things up. You see in the reference now, so much of it is about getting a fade back there. So I added a few more elements.
What came to me for the sky is this ear track. I think that’s going to be the way to go. That does seem quite chromatic. You can always kill some chroma with the wrong river. Nothing will kill it quicker than black, of course. I like that. It’s more chromatic than the reference. The ear track is giving me some nice corner action.
I want it to be kind of chunky. Chicklets, that’s another idea that was in my head when I was at home. If you cannot render it, you can be expressive. You can see the brush strokes. That’s going to be a big payoff. This is the difference between trying to render everything and allowing the painting to breathe.
Moving to the darks now, as opposed to tweaking some more of that stuff. Just keeps us flowing. That’s looking nice in the camera. I think we’re doing alright.
For the dark brush, I want something a bit… We have a lot of darks, but we don’t want to spend too much with the darkest dark. I want to move into the purples. I think we’re going to go with this. A little bit loose. It’s a Doss Bristol Filbert Zero. I don’t have a lot of these, but I want this kind of thing. It’s that kind of painting. A bit chunky. Not a lot of details.
The dark is not far from where we want it. I could just leave it, but I’m going to go a little darker. Also, I’m going to bring some more purple. We used a lot of purple. Like I said before, a bunch of times now, we can wake it up. We’ll wake it up with just a little bit of grey, which is the same as sneaking in some light. It works counter to the dark thing.
Purple stuff like that. If you don’t add a little bit of something light, it just… You almost really cross purposes. I’m really glad I added that purple in there. I think this is a lot of what’s going to tell the story.
That was just looking a little too solid. I don’t like that in my paintings. I don’t like any bit or passage to be too uniform. This is a whole color kind of thing. I’m not too far with that.
The Foliage: Brushwork and Wet-Into-Wet
I’m going to want a similar brush. In fact, I’m wondering if my go-to foliage is the way to go. This was talking to me earlier. This is a fairly new Robert Simmons II Signet series. Is this it? No, it’s a flat. I just recently got it over, but I think flats is where I want to be.
So we’ve got two things we’re going to do. We’re going to build on the purple, but we’re not going to go too far, because I want to get those greens in.
We got interrupted, but sometimes that’s a good thing. Because I was getting ready to go in with more purple, but I think green is better. Yeah. Damps of purple. I think this brush is exactly where I want to color here. Green. I’ll do two greens. Alright then. That’s pretty.
Yeah, green is what I call. I’m leaving her for some purple. And what’s nice is the, because the drawing’s not dry, it’s letting me work wet into wet, which is quite nice. That green’s nice. This flat’s doing a great job. That I want later. Nice. Really happy with that decision. Now the purple. Okay?
So never begrudge the interruptions. It’ll give you time to get out of your bed and get a message from your soul.
I want to wear purple, but I’ll never get it there without doing this. Make the purple. Mix it. See what I mean? You can keep throwing that dark in there, until the cows come home. But I really do want it more proper purple. Maybe I’ll red that up some more. That’s what I want.
Definitely like the side of a flat to do this grass. I will say the side of a flower does work pretty well too. Set that up for some lighter grass. We’ll get our root in. That’s nice. A little extra oil. I want to point out to you, even though I’m not painting that kind of thing, I had highlights and clouds in yesterday’s painting. And there’s things about yesterday’s painting I’m not in love with, but I think it’s a good painting. But one thing I did do right for almost the first time in my view was the cloud highlights and the secret was, um, extra oil.
Finishing Touches: Knowing When to Stop
A little bit of decorative strokes is nice, eh? Sometimes you got to talk to the tree. It’s just going to fight you. I just don’t want to know. It’s not in it. It did help a bit. Yeah, not going to win any awards for that tree, but we did break it out of popsicle-ness.
That’s a cheesy track, did you see me do it? Yeah, if I push it, that brush will reveal its inside color. Okay, now we got what we wanted to. Yeah, I’m pretty happy with that. We’ll do a little more smoothing out here and there.
Alright, so the best brush, we’ve been using that as our dedicated dark brush. That was our actual dedicated dark brush. Sometimes the best brush for a little bit of smoothing is your dedicated dark brush. Just looking for grabby spots. Of course we wanted a lot of those, but not everywhere.
Alright, we’re done.
Take care of yourself. Stay out of trouble. And fight the power.
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