Tutukaka Dawn 5×10 – 15 Min Painting Session
The painting I’m bringing you today is called Tutukaka Dawn. It’s a 5 by 10, and I painted this about a month ago.
We’re working on HDF hardboard primed with three coats of house paint, and we’re doing our underpainting color with some Burnt Number, looks like it’s got a little bit of Mars black in it.
The Genesis
The genesis behind this scene is that I’ve been sitting on this really cool bit of sky reference for probably 15 years or so, and I just wanted to frame it with something. About six months ago, I took a trip out to Tutukaka, which isn’t that far from here, it’s a beautiful beach. I got some dawn photos. The sky was perfectly clear that day, but I didn’t have the silhouette I had the light coming up behind these landforms. I thought, “I’ll get two birds with one stone. I’ll make a little Tutukaka painting and paint my sky.”
Adjusting the Reference
One of the things I did with the sky was minimize the large chunk of mustardy orangey color that was too large in the reference. There’s a lot of times where I’ll take pretty major steps to change the reference, if I see things that I don’t think are going to paint up well that I can adjust using digital means, I do it because I feel it’s important to give myself every single advantage that I can. Painting is already not easy to do.
You really just want to use the reference as something to refer to, not the Rosetta stone, not the thing that you’re going to cleave to 100 percent. The more inspiring the reference is, the better it looks, and the easier it’s going to be for you to make an excellent painting from it.
The Sky Composition
I’m really happy with this dramatic sky. If you’re going to do something like this with a super dramatic sky, you want the landforms to be supporting players. You don’t really want to have an overly dramatic sky with overly dramatic landforms, everything gets a bit maudlin, and I don’t think that works.
You can see me bringing in the orange, this is an orange-blue sky composition, and I love to do that. I put in more neutral tones that are warm, and then I come in either adjacent to them or on top. If you’re painting on top, that can be a little difficult. You want to make sure that you’ve got a little extra oil in your paint. There are times and places where you need to come in and put wet paint on top of wet paint, but you run the risk of things getting really messy and muddy and mucky. You want to have, you just want to be strategic. Line everything up and then work your way through it.
Sky and Water Relationships
The colors in the water are very close to the colors in the sky. It’s a smart idea to try and get some of that in at the same time. Sky and water in a painting like this are very related because the water is reflecting the colors in the sky. You can use the same exact colors if you want, but generally colors in reflections are a little bit darker.
Brightness Rule
Here’s a tip for you: you really don’t want anything in your painting to be brighter than the brightest thing in the sky. There could be exceptions to that, maybe if you’re painting people in the landscape, you might have a bride with a dress that’s lighter and brighter than the sky, but for the most part, you definitely want to avoid that.
Dark Clouds and Values
Another good tip: this reference had a very dark set of clouds in it, and you want to watch out for that. Don’t get too crazy with super dark clouds. The darkest things in the sky should be related to the darkest thing in your landscape, in this case, the ridge of hills.
The Water
I’m real happy with the way the water turned out, it’s got kind of a silver quality to it. I didn’t decide to get into a lot of white water here. I wanted a real calm sort of feeling. It really is a sky painting that is supported.
The Emotional Power of Skies
Painting skies is probably my favorite thing to do in painting. You can get so much emotion and feeling into the sky, especially when you have all these beautiful colors and shapes and drama. That last bit of red wasn’t so much in the reference, but it came to me as inspiration towards the end, and I think it’s a nice touch. In the reference, the silhouettes of those hills were pretty much just completely dark, but I brought in that bit of red anyway.
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M Francis McCarthy, Your Painter in Residence