Light Through the Trees – 15 Minute painting session!
Transcript and Key Insights
The painting I’m bringing you today is called Light Through the Trees. It’s a 5×7 painted last week, and I really like this painting. I hope you like watching me put it together.
This is the sped-up version of the live session, available in the Members area with a color-mixing portion where you can check out the reference, which is pretty close to the final painting. I put a lot of artistry into creating the reference and sat on it for quite a while.
Check out the Members area here on Substack for no ads, access to the color-mixing session, and the reference itself so big benefits for all are had. It’s a great way to support your painter-in-residence.
The live painting sessions are really where it’s at. I’ve been doing these shorter video sessions throughout the whole length of my YouTube channel, talking over the sped-up painting session. You can see it took me a little while to get myself combobulated in the video, but often I turn on the camera early otherwise I forget and end up missing things. I like to get you every part of it, especially with a painting like this where the drawing portion actually comes through the whole painting since it’s in those sort of brownish tones.
Composition: Strategic Branches and Negative Space
What is interesting about this painting is that these trees are obviously some sort of California oak, not your typical New Zealand trees. These are the kind of trees and scenery I grew up with, so it’s always going to feel more like home. Not that our landscape out here in New Zealand isn’t awesome, it really is, and I have painted lots of it.
The real mission here is handling the incredible complexity you get with oaks: a lot of squiggly little branches. You see me doing my underpainting. There was an upside-down heart-shaped diamond shape in the negative area between the tree branches that was catching my eye, and that’s what I adjusted. I have a real sensitivity to stuff like that which has been developed over years and years of painting. You learn that certain things will be traps for the eye, and much of painting composition is just making sure you can keep the viewer’s eye moving through the painting with nothing uncomfortable or places where they feel they can’t escape.
That upside-down diamond shape would have been one of those traps especially if I had left it. I might have stuck a branch in the middle to keep it from being a big empty negative shape. Lots of branches are expected in almost any scene like this, but it’s incumbent on you, the painter, to limit the quantity of branches in your painting. If you get too many or think you can just duplicate what is going on in the reference, it is going to be a fail. You have to be strategic with branches and strategic with your tree holes. Tree holes weren’t as big a deal here because of the open nature of the composition; I didn’t even count a lot of what would have been counted as tree holes.
The Underpainting and Color Strategy
Here we are doing the underpainting. I mixed it up with basically burnt umber but added some Mars Black, which will speed up the whole process since it’s already getting us a good ways toward our darks. I also added a little bit of Rose Madder because I just wanted to pretty it up and give us what I called in the live session a “super burnt umber.” It looks like burnt umber but prettier, darker, and richer. I like to have things attractive at every stage.
Some painters talk about the painting being in the “ugly stage,” but I try just not to have an ugly stage. I basically just keep on plugging away until the painting’s done. In the live session, this painting clocked in at just under two hours; it didn’t take that long, and that is how I like it to be honest. I like my paintings to go fairly quickly.
I just finished one today that is the exact opposite: probably a seven-hour session on a 7×12 inch canvas with a more painstaking coastal landscape approach. That has taken some time, and it has been a while since I’ve done that approach.
I way prefer the sort of painting we are doing here today, which is a tonal expression of a scene done in a fairly expedient manner. It is designed to be gestural and convey emotion, and that is my favorite thing to paint much more so than making sure I am getting actual aspects of specific landscapes exactly right. I never get anything exactly right anyway, but discernibly correct correctness is not as much of a factor here; I am just expressing myself.
Sky Strategy and Compositing
In the sky, I kept it kind of patchy and brushy, so there is a lot of broken brushwork there. In the reference, we did have this bit of cream up in the sky like that. Obviously, maybe not obvious to anyone except people who know the channel really well, but I composited a sky into the existing reference image.
Often when you take a photo like this, it is just blown out white. That is an opportunity to basically select the sky and pop another one in its place. This gives us what you want, more beauty. Watch out though: if you are replacing a blown-out sky, you will not have a lot of success replacing that with a super dark sky; you’ll end up with little halos around all the trees. I have done that though. There are techniques you can use in the computer to deal with it, and we did a pretty deep dive on messing with the reference in the last video so we won’t get too far into that here.
The main tree is on our right, then there are sort of two masses of trees, and what could be a bush on the left. On the other side of that path, which was in the reference, was another whole tree coming up. I didn’t paint it that way. I made a mental note I was going to paint it a different way and I talk about that in the live painting session: you want to make things understandable for your viewer. If you think you are going to get away with painting something unclear, and your justification is “well, it’s like that in the photo,” that is not going to work. You need to do something about it; you need to design your paintings. That is where artistic intervention is so important.
Designing for Clarity: Avoiding Ambiguity
I made that little area behind the tree kind of straight by my own idea I had and played it up to have a real highlight. However, in the thumbnail you’ll see it was corrected; I tilted it in my graphics program but the next day when I came into the studio, I got my t-square out and made sure it was a little straighter. You want to watch out for that, it is not exactly a horizon, but if you let it stay crooked, it might give people a feeling of unease when they look at it.
You really don’t need that in your painting unless that is your intention. If your intention is to make paintings that make people feel uncomfortable, I am not going to be much help. I definitely try to make them as easy to look at as possible. You gotta make sure little things like that are always correct.
Regarding the tree on the other side of the path: maybe someone could make that work if I was going to do it. I would have made it clear there was a real separation between that tree and our tree we are looking at on the right. In the reference, there really wasn’t that separation; there was just a whole other tree coming up.
Here is a good tip: in the reference image, if you got two trees that are right next to each other just paint them as one tree, don’t get fancy. It is automatic for me now to just adjust for this. You want to make things very clear; you don’t want to have questions viewers shouldn’t have.
The questions you do want people to ask are: “Oh, what time of day was this? Was it first thing in the morning or since the light sideways, maybe it’s a little later in the afternoon?” Those kinds of questions are fine. Even like “where’s this path go?” or “where’s the path head?”, those kinds of questions are great. The kinds of questions you don’t really want viewers making is: “What is that? Is that a tree? Is that a bush?”
Here is another tip: if you have checked out any of the live stuff, you would have heard it already, a tree without a trunk is a bush. I don’t care how big it is or what you thought you would try to do.
That’s it for today.
Take good care of yourself. Stay out of trouble. And fight the power.
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M Francis McCarthy, Your Painter in Residence