Woodland Passage 5×10 – 15 minute Painting Demonstration!
This week’s painting is called Woodland Passage, a 5×10 inch oil on panel. The genesis was simple: I caught some B-roll in a video, liked the pattern of the trees, got rid of the people and the buildings, and went to work. I had to composite in the path and figure out what to do with the background, which turned out to be one of the more interesting problems in the painting.
Solving the Background
In a scene like this, your eye naturally wants to head for the lightest area. I tried putting some hills back there, didn’t work, wiped it off. What I settled on was modulating some tones in the back with patches of a gray-violet color. It’s a small innovation but I’m proud of the way it came out. The innovations come small and less frequent the longer you paint, and that’s okay. You keep with it.
The Yellow Sky and Complementary Color
This is a purple-yellow-green painting. The sky goes up yellow, not white, which would be too strong. I wanted it bright but middle-toned, and that’s pure tonalism to me. Those purplish-gray dabs in the background work beautifully with the yellow coming in beside them. Yellow-purple is almost always a forgiving complementary combination, worth keeping in your toolkit.
I also used a big brush periodically to knock the edges down a bit. If every stroke in a painting has a sharp edge, it gets off-putting. What I’m after is keeping the strokes but losing the most aggressive edges, especially before the final highlights go in, which will have strong edges by nature.
Turning Greens to Gold
The reference was green trees, green grass, green everything. I’m not painting that. Here’s the tip: if your reference has green trees and green grass, make those grasses gold or rust. In this painting the grass takes up nearly half the canvas, so getting that color shift right was critical. It gave me a big foreground I could actually work with.
A word on painting long grasses: indicate, don’t itemize. The moment you start putting in individual strokes for individual blades, you’re in trouble, especially over this much real estate. A little irregularity, some longer bits here and there, and let the viewer’s eye do the rest.
The Trees and the T-Square
I paint at a 26-degree angle, have for the last ten or eleven years, just for you. The downside is that spotting whether a vertical is truly vertical gets tricky. I got the painting home, looked at it on screen, and saw that two of the main trees were tilting quite a bit.
Next day I came back with the T-square and straightened a few of them up. Not all of them, you don’t want perfectly straight trees, that would be its own problem. But certain trees need to be straight, and it’s worth the extra session to get there. On bigger paintings especially, I’ll rule in a straight line or two during the drawing stage just to keep myself honest.
A Note on Difficult Paintings
This week I also had another painting that just wasn’t working, not a good one. Even for someone with as much experience as I have, it happens. I didn’t stomp it (though I may yet). I put it behind a frame piece and let it dry out of sight. That’s my advice: if something isn’t making you feel joy, don’t look at it. Put it away. You might pull it out later with fresh eyes and know exactly how to fix it. Or you’ll know it’s time for the curb.
Woodland Passage is in the members area now in 4K with no ads. Check out the live session for the full story of the painting. Until next time, take good care of yourself and everyone around you. Fight the power.
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M Francis McCarthy, Your Painter in Residence