Jac’s 100 days of skies and trees

[Jack]

Day 60 24/09/2022

• I got outside to paint for a couple hours, and worked on it a little more when I got home.
• I also started a master study of ‘Bleak Day’ by T C Steele. I decided to use this master study to inform my outdoor painting, picking up on some of his design decisions that I could incorporate into my own piece. This master study is still a work-in-progress, as I’m doing my best (with a low resolution photo) to be as accurate to the original as I can.
• Unfortunately over the next few days I painted very little. A combination of bad sleep, a busy few days at work, and family commitments meant I struggled to find open blocks of time. That said, it was mostly low motivation and energy levels. From the 25-29 I probably did a few hours at most.

So here’s the outdoor sketch I started. I put it into #looking-for-crit channel and got a lot of great feedback.

1. Compositionally there is a lot of even spacing going on between the land shapes and sky, between the trees and open spaces. It reads very static.
2. It’s cramped, needs to breathe.
3. Avoid uniformity and generic shapes – needs to feel organic (background trees).
4. Edges are too consistently soft – need to put more thought into variety, especially around focal points.

My plan is to re-do this, with some of the advice in mind.

Practice Time: 2h 30

 

I have been doing a fair bit of reading over the week, if not much drawing/painting. So I’ve collected all of my notes here:

Alla Prima II

Edges

• Edges are borderlines between shapes, comprising at least 3 sides. Transitions describe one shapes relationship to its neighbour; hard, to soft, to lost.
• Edges in a subject are caused by (1) the shape of the subject, (2) changes to local values, (3) texture, (4) light, (5) atmosphere, (6) motion.
• Place the sharpest edge near the focal point of a painting. Remember it is impossible to focus on multiple things at once.
• Recap of 6 points of edges: inherent shape, local value/colour, texture, light, atmosphere, motion.
• Don’t overcomplicate the analysis – knowing an edge is hard or soft is more important than knowing why. Draw/paint what you see.
• Use squinting and comparison to determine edges. Just like value, ask yourself what edges are sharpest and which softest. Take note of what shapes simplify or combine. Soft edges will be the first to disappear.
• He also mentions the unique colour of “grass peculiar to the British isles” being a mixture of viridian, yellow ochre light, and white – with bits of cad yellow in places. Must try.
  edges within dark shapes tend to be softer than within light shapes.
• The size of a shape can affect the perception of its value; bigger shapes look darker than smaller shapes. Similarly for colour, big shapes will seem more saturated. Bigger shapes also tend to have softer edges

Kearns’ Blog

• How to handle critiquesYou are you. A painting is something you made. It is not you. A critique of your painting is not a critique of you.
• Tough critiques have their place in ateliers, among professionals, or students who want to take their drawing/painting up a notch.
• A teacher is a ‘downloader, not a cheerleader’. It’s up to the student to bring the motivation, and the teacher the information.
• Painting is hard and you have to be self-critical to improve and grow out of the easy habits you’ve developed. The hypersensitive tend to get stuck.
• When someone is giving you a critique, don’t interrupt them or try to explain away their opinion. Hear what they have to say.
• Similarly, if someone sees you out painting, don’t make excuses or try to apologise. Let the art stand on it’s own, good or bad. “Most of the time people are easily impressed and their opinion is meaningless anyway.”
• Design decisions around a painting of his:In order for something in a picture to light up, it is necessary to put in a dark against which your light can contrast.
• In order to appear very colored, an area has to be compared to a nearby area that is not.
• Counterchange – stacking value changes to show depth, plus, varying the light/dark of a shape as it goes in and out of the light/dark behind it. E.g. darkening a branch over a light sky, but then lightening it over a dark tree shadow.
• Connecting a big dark shape that spans the width of the picture, to contrast the illuminated background.
• Q&A
  • He talks about **red grounds and made some interesting points. That it ‘makes sense in the studio’, but outside it is a liability, ‘especially when low value’. This caught my attention, as this is what I’ve been doing of late (Transparent red oxide, dark as possible). And that it, like any system, can become formulaic.
    He doesn’t appear to be saying, ‘don’t do it’. Only suggesting it is one of many approaches, based on your subject. It appears he mostly paints an underpainting onto the white of the canvas – but I’ve struggled to get good results doing this…
• Compositional armatures:
  • Diagonal lines
  • Z curve
  • S curve
• Design
  • Design means human intent and decision-making. Nature may suggest a composition, but it is design that means manipulating the appearance before you. Nature won’t do the designing for you.
  • He compares the role of nature in picture making to house building; nature provides all the materials to build a house, it is up to the builder to select and modify them to make a house.
  • “Design is a tool to make it easier to get that emotion from you to the viewer. What you are feeling matters not at all in art, only what you express.”

Hawthorne On Painting

• I can’t remember where I picked up the recommendation to get this little book – Kearns maybe? – but get it I did.
• In the foreward, there’s a few details about how Hawthorne taught his classes:
• Students [of Hawthorne’s] were forced to concentrate on (to quote my father) “the mechanics of putting one spot of color next to another – the fundamental thing”
• Use of palette knifes to avoid students obsessing over detail
• Hawthorn suggests completing many studies, rather than few finished pieces, again, so they didn’t get tied to detail – a dozen in a single morning for critique
• “What people subconsciously are interested in is the expression of beauty, something that helps them through the humdrum day, something that shocks them out of themselves and something that makes them believe in the beauty and the glory of human existence.
• “You must feel the beauty of the thing before you start… Painters don’t reason, they do. The moment they reason they are lost – subconscious thoughts count”
• “The only way to learn to paint is by painting. To really study, you must start out with large tubes of paint and large palette and not stint in any way as far as materials go. If you look into the past of the successful painter you will find square miles of canvas behind him”

[Jack]

Day 61 01/10/2022

Okay, after a week of lethargy I am starting to feel my energy returning.

I’m going to stop taking notes in Notion as it’s discouraging me from posting here daily. I’m going to re-commit to post everything I do here everyday, even in-progress stuff.

I signed up for NMA’s coaching programme and this week I attended sessions with Kiley and Joshua. Today’s session with Joshua was particularly motivating, not just because he’s really holding students to account for their practice – but also seeing the quality of work produced by other students.

In terms of work:

• I started a second landscape painting based on my previous outdoor effort. This one is increasingly being derived from imagination, drifting further away from what I actually saw outdoors and incorporating feedback from critiques I received. There’s still a lot of work to do… but I like where it’s heading. I think it makes a stronger visual statement than the previous one.

• I’m continuing a master study ‘Bleak Day’ by T C Steele. I’m sure you can see a few of the design elements I “borrowed” in the above piece.

• I also continued an inking master study I started probably… 3 weeks ago. I can’t even remember who the original is – Ruisdael maybe?  I’ve almost dropped out of Into to Inking live class after my week of shame. I’m going to try and put some time into it tomorrow, see if I can get back on track.

I’ve got a few (too many?) books on the go at the moment. I want to spend less time reading the news (which I think is a real energy-sapper) and more time reading the many unread books I own.

 

Hawthorn on Painting

I was a bit naughty and skipped to the landscape chapter – but I will go back and read the chapters on other subject matter.

• “If you will only put a spot of color in the right relation to other spots, you will see how little drawing it takes to make form”. Hawthorne puts heavy emphasis on colour (including value?) over drawing to denote form.
• “We do well the things we see already painted in our mind’s eye – don’t do it until you see it or you are defeated before you begin”
• “Keep down reflected lights, so they won’t stick out of it”
• Don’t perceive of your painting as objects aside one another, but spots of color. Tilting your head might help.
• Hawthorne on process:
  • “Consider the big spot of the earth and the big spot of the sky – start your canvas by putting down a small spot of color for each… put the subject down in shadow first, then in sunlight”
  • “Separate into big passage of light and shade. Get the big simplicity of foreground in relation to the mass of sky”
  • “Always have something within about ten feet with which to compare the colour values of your distant objects”
  • “By having the big lines of the composition going out of the canvas, your imagination can wander beyond the edge. It will make it seem part of a large composition.

 

Practice Time: 4 hours – nice! more of this please.

[Jack]

Day 62 02/10/2022

To do list:

• Finished T C Steele master study. Well, there was plenty of refinement remaining but I think I learned a handful of interesting techniques/ideas.

• Worked a little more on the Pant-glas painting… can’t tell if I like it or totally hate it, whether it’s ‘too much’ or, in fact, way too little. Still a work in progress.

 

• “Finished” (read, gave up) on the the inking master study – very time consuming and with ink, sometimes it feels like the more you work on something the worse it turns out. The permanence of each mark means there’s no doing over until it looks good. Anyway, that’s my excuse. I think I need to do fewer mass-oriented ink studies, more line.

Alla Prima II 

Still on edges:

• A soft edge between two contrasting values diminishes the value difference between them vs a hard edge.
• Due to light diffraction, where light bends slightly at an objects edge, hard-edged objects can appear darker than the same valued soft-edge object (E.g. a vase vs a piece of wood). Light essentially spills around the edges, the amount is determined by the objects size and curvature.
• Two shapes of the same value; the bigger one will appear darker than the smaller.
• There are three main techniques to achieve different edges; blending, painting incremental colours, or both.

Practice Time: 3h

[Jack]

Day 63 03/10/2022

Damn. Pressed something and the page refreshed, erasing notes. Annoying. Temptation is to use Notion again, but then I just forget to add it to the forum. You can’t win.

• I worked for an hour or so on my Pant-glas painting. It still has another few hours in it, I reckon. I’m unsure if this is what I will submit to a local art show.

• I also started on an assignment for Introduction to Portrait Painting, but will finish that off tomorrow. I cheated a bit by giving myself more time and doing an underdrawing in charcoal.
• I also read a bunch of Kearn’s Blog and Alla Prima II on edges, but those notes are gone now.

  Practice Time: 2h

[seren]

These are so good and inspiring. Thank you for sharing your process

[Jack]

Too kind Seren! I hope to see your work soon, here or on Discord 🙂

[Jack]

Day 64 05/10/2022

• Worked on an assignment for Introduction to Portrait Painting.

• 30 minutes putting some touches on Pant-glas. I think I’m calling it ‘done’…. for now.

• 30 minutes making some changes to an old painting. I think I’m going to submit these two to a local art show. I’m a little embarassed doing so, not feeling that they’re good enough, but it is just a student exhibit.

• Started drawing a skull, will finish tomorrow.

Alla Prima II

Finally finished the chapter on Edges:

• To create fresh looking edges on a dry painting try dry brushing or scumblnig. Dry brushing is using a loaded brush to drag pigment across the surface. Scumbling is the same but using lightly loaded to scrub paint thinly across a surface.
• To rework dried paintings, you can ‘oil out’ or apply retouch varnish to wet the surface and work back into.
• Consider peripheral vision and reserving your hardest edges for the focal point – draw hard edges near the boundaries of your vision with less conspicuousness.
• If you want a confident hard edge, load a brush or palette knife and do it in one. If it isn’t right, scrape it back and try again. Don’t tinker with it.
• Paint is easier to control in moderate to thin (but not thinned with medium) layers. Save heavy applications of paint until the end.

Practice Time: 3h

[Jack]

Day xx 06/10/2022

• I finished up a skull I was drawing. Felt a bit rusty… must draw more – I plan to, especially casts over winter.

• I also completed another assignment from Introduction to Portrait Painting. I got so carried away doing it that I forgot about the time constraints, so I spent an hour on it.

• I spent just 30 minutes on a De Gheyn tree master study… not enough to count this as a real contributing day to the challenge. I’ll hopefully work on it tomorrow.

 

Hawthorne on Painting

This book is really growing on me. It’s so succinct, every sentence could be quoted. It’s essentially already in note form, no guff. But this means I can only read a page or two before it becomes too much to take in at once. Some notes:

• Try to group your lights and darks into masses. Simplify for strong visual statements. “Only the owner of a house counts the windows” (avoid spotty details destroying your big masses).
• To make highlights pop, the canvas must be keyed enough for contrast to exist. Pigment can’t match the value or colour range of nature, so you need to drop your values to get the relationships right.
• Remember that you are depicting light falling upon the subject, not the subject itself – do not say “and this is a window, and this is a branch, and this is a fence, etc”.
• Trees!
  • Take note of the colour of foliage against the sky and try to arrange an interesting pattern as nature does.
  • Trees ought to be more silhouetted against the sky. Pay close attention to the shapes of sky holes, and ensuring there is light and dark in the mass without losing the silhouette.
  • On a grey day, the light has a way of being a rim around things.
  • Don’t get too distracted by the detail of foliage such that it breaks the silhouette and the mass up.
  • Think of trees in terms of planes. You can’t depict each individual leaf, so focus on the big notes. Don’t paint “a tree”, but the spots of colour that make up a tree, and the relationship between spots.
  • Anchor trees to the ground with shadow. Consider the ‘hole’ the tree makes in the ground [not sure I get this last point].
  • Aerial perspective is more important than linear drawing.
  • Look for the patterns that light causes, and the way differing light effects change it.
  • On a grey day there is less difference in colour and more emphasis on the different between light to the dark – with closer value groupings. Stronger silhouettes than on a sunny day.

Practice Time: 2h 30m

[Jack]

Due to work and family commitments I only had 45 minutes to draw/paint on 07/10/2022

 

Day 65 08/10/2022

• I worked on a portrait sketch for Introduction to Portrait Painting.

• I’ve started another master study by T C Steele. I’ve started using liquin original – I’m hoping it’ll allow me to work in layers more rapidly.

• Upon Joshua’s advice, I’ve started on Beginner’s Guide to Drawing. My goal is to add 30-60mins to my daily practice to try and make this in addition to my current practice, rather than replacing it. Today I spent 30 mins on value swatches.
• I also worked for 30 mins on a De Gheyn master study. Hopefully finish it tomorrow.

 

Coaching Session w/Joshua

As we’re looking to track our weekly effort as part of the coaching session, I thought (if I remember) it worth tallying up the previous week’s effort (Sat-Fri): 14.5 hours of practice. Not very much when it comes down to it 🙁

• Consider taking Villpu’s figure drawing courses to add gesture to landscapes
• Think about utilising the value of the paper more, not feeling the need to cover the entire surface.
• Take beginners guide to drawing – learn value design

 

Hawthorn on Painting

• “You did the scene instead of working at a problem. There isn’t room in your consciousness for more than one sentiment about a thing. Tell that one”.
• “Let your idea be not that you are doing a portrait of that place but of that time of day”
• “Look at nature and try to visualise – see it on your canvas before you begin”
• “Do the essential thing and don’t consider the rest”
• “Don’t reason – by reason I mean don’t say that I must have a cool light over this, for it gets a light from the sky…. be a vital painter or they will take you to be academic”. Yep. Guilty of this.
• The sky is the lightest mass in a painting, except surfaces directly reflecting the sun. Reflections from the sky will be cool in colour; reflections from the sun will be warm.
• Skies
  • Keep skies unified, “don’t feel you must get vibration in a sky – see what kind of blue it is and keep it clean”.
  • Paint skies more heavily so canvas won’t show through
  • Don’t reduce the sky to a formula. It is never twice the same colour.
  • Compare distant values/shadows to ones in the foreground, you’ll see distant dark values aren’t so dark by comparison. Everything must relate. Don’t look too long at one spot, keep your eye going over the whole.

Practice Time: 4h

[Jack]

Day 66 09/10/2022

• I got outside for 2.5 hours to start a landscape – I will continue to work on it in the week.

• I spent a fair bit of time on the fourth portrait assignment for Introduction to Portrait Painting. I really struggled with this one and eventually just timboxed the exercise so I could move on.

• I did a bit of reading, Alla Prima II and Hawthorne on Painting.

Hawthorne on painting

• “Don’t try to make pretty pictures – paint for fun and for practice, not for exhibition. We are going to take home ability and knowledge, not finished canvases. “
• “Do the big salient things and the little things take care of themselves.”
• Group your shadows and lights, maintain the unity of the masses, don’t break them up with variety to the point that they’re patchy; think in patterns.
• “It is not the sentimental viewpoint by the earnest seeking to see beauty – in the relation of one tone against another- which expresses truth – the right attitude. If you’re a thoughtful humble student of nature, you’ll have something to say – you don’t have to tell a story. You can’t add a thing by thinking – what you are will come out”.
• “Open your eyes wide and dive the thing into fewer general spots”.

Alla Prima II

• Colour
  • Pigment particles are microscopic size substances that absorb certain wavelengths of light and reflect others.
  • There is a lack of pigmentation in some substances, causing them to take on the colour of other sources: glass, water, clouds, atmosphere etc.
  • Relativity: the same colour can appear differently under varying conditions.
    • The influence of surrounding colour. e.g. white will look brighter next to black versus grey.
    • Ambient light illuminating a subject.

       

Practice Time: 5 hours …nice

[Jack]

Day 66 10/10/2022

• I spent a bit of time on Beginner’s Guide to Drawing value swatches, watching along with the exercise.

• Then I worked some more on the T C Steele master study. These things are a bit time consuming – and you have to know when you’ve wrung most of the juice – but I’m liking how it’s going thus far.

Alla Prima II

• Selecting pigments is about ‘our own personal visual experience of the world’, not replicating the unattainable brilliance or intensity of nature.
• There is no one set of rules or system for colour, but there are many misconceptions:
  • Cooler colours do not always recede and warm colours advance. Sometimes it’s the reverse.
  • The idea that some colour combinations inherently clash and can’t look pleasing next to each other.
  • The idea of colour being ‘neutralised’ by mixing it with it’s complement. It doesn’t become neutral, it’s just a different colour.
  • Avoid schemes or schematic ways of harmonising colours.
  • Nature does not need to be changed to be compositionally acceptable. Schmid says to look within yourself to ask what drew you the subject and why, rather than change what’s before you.
  • There are no beautiful or ugly colours. These are social conventions.

 

Practice Time: 3h

[Daniel Daigle]

nice work Jac

 

[Jack]

Thanks Daniel, appreciate the encouragement!

[Jack]

Day 67 11/10/2022

Okay, writing this up a few days after-the-fact. Let me think… timer says I did 3 hours work, but for the life of me can’t remember what. I think I worked on the T C Steele master study, my outdoor painting from the weekend, and a brief 30 minutes on a de gheyn study which has been dragging on for ages. Oh, and I also spent an hour on a second BGD assignment.

I read some Kearns

• He describes how he paints masses of jumbled foliage.Focus on four values: shadow note, dark accents within shadow, leaf colour and highlights.
  • The leaf colour would itself be comprised of several colour notes: warmer less green, yellower, etc.
  • The colour of the foliage was kept totally separate from the background. These were mixed with different pigment.
• He lists 10 books to read, I’ve read some of these but not all.Carlson’s Guide to Landscape Painting (Carlson)
  • Composition to Outdoor Painting (Payne)
  • The Human Figure (Vanderpoel)
  • Sargent (Carter Ratcliff)
  • Gruppe on Painting.
  • Edward Seago
  • The Boston Painters / Twilight of Painting (R H Ives Gammell)
  • Keys to Successful Colour by Foster Caddell
  • The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe
  • Everything I Know About Painting (Richard Schmid)

Practice Time: 3h

I didn’t do any practice on the 12/10/2022 due to attending a funeral.

 

 

[Jack]

Day 68 13/10/2022

• I’m calling my T C Steele master study Pleasant Run ‘done’ for now. One thing that always strikes me about master studies how they appear so simple at first, but when you start looking at them stroke-by-stroke, they’re incredibly complex. It goes to show how simple design works as a scaffold for technique.

• I worked some more on my own landscape from the weekend – a spot I intentionally chose as I could borrow some of the learnings from the master study. I felt like I spent an hour making this worse. Happens sometimes.

I read some Kearns.

• One subject in a scene must predominate. It should be really clear what the subject is. Other elements in the painting must be subordinated to it.
• Value contrasts can help one particular part of the painting predominate. Same for colour, some parts saturated, some dull.
• Some parts of a painting can be left vague or mysterious, but the important ‘lines’ need to be spoken clearly.
• Don’t divide the canvas equally between land/sky.
• Don’t produce muzak painting – designed for uninteresting background music stuck on medium, it never ‘jumps’ out or gets quiet.
• A painting should have counter change (value stacking).

Practice Time: 2h

[Author]

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