This was a painting I made from a picture my pal Jessie from Anchorage, Alaska, took. One day, she was sitting in her shop eating a sammich, and noticed the light had changed dramatically. Running outside, she snapped this picture at 1:00 pm. It is the most amazing sunlight I’ve ever seen.

Stages of development

Source Image

Pencil Sketches

I first made some pencil sketches of the photo in order to arrange the composition details, get the shapes and values.

Draft paintings

I made several different draft paintings to try things out.

This one was my first attempt based on the sketches. The sky is far far too pale, and the trees are too prominant. From this attempt, I decided to drop the tree on the right, make the two middle trees much smaller and lower the horizon even more. As you’ll see, this painting was somewhat “rescued” when I learned about pouring paint.

This was my third practice painting, another failure, I call this “Jupiter Attacks!”. I’m getting closer, but still not at all happy with the sky.

Back to making small practice runs at the sky. In order:

• Top right: using prang and tube colours, trying different washes and glazes. This is still not working at all.
• Top left: a bit reminiscent of Jupiter Attacks, but using different colours. Still not getting the glow, washes or glazes to look right
• Bottom right: this is getting better.

• Started with a wet-on-wet dropping in aerolian yellow in a few strategic spots to get a glowy underpainting. let dry completely.
• with very wet brush, added red-orange from prang set to certain spots
• again very wet, and very dilute violet from prang set, added in some of the purple sky wash areas. Let dry.
• glazing more of the red-orange, blending dilute, wet brush
• glazing more of the violet, again blending dilute, wet brush
• let dry
• wetting paper a bit in spots, drop on red-orange, letting it run and blend a bit
• again wetting paper, drop on violet, letting it run and blend

This was fun — learning to pour paint onto the paper — literally pouring. This is the first painting attempt above somewhat redeemed. The colours are much more vibrant and indicative of the original. The tree on the right is still a standout — later I removed quite a bit of paint from it and it matched the other trees. The tree on the left is actually looking pretty good — but still not what I want. The foreground is supposed to be in mostly silhouette and much darker in value, but not the green of the tree on the right.

Notes from class:

Today in class, I took the first draft of the alaskan sunlight, the one where the sky is way too light and the trees too prominent and used a technique called “pouring” to try to recover something from the painting which I didn’t much like.

OH MY GOSH!! This was such a fun process, and watching the paint flow and move around was just amazing.

Steps:

1. Completely wet the paper, back and front (I might not have gotten it wet enough).
2. Lay the paper on a *wet* board — I didn’t have a board, so we cut apart an old cardboard box and I used to as a backing surface. NOTE: I did not wet the cardboard, but I *should* have!
3. Mix the paints you are going to pour in a *white* cup. I dragged pigment out of the prang box: red orange in one cup, to which I added some aeriolin yellow. (This was a mistake!). In another cup, I took the violet out of the prang set as well, and mixed it with red orange (Also a mistake!).
4. I poured the red-orange+aeriolin onto the sky portion of the paper and let it just explode, tipping the paper back and forth to get it to flow where I wanted. I tipped it so the excess ran off.
5. Next, I poured the violet onto the areas of the sky where I wanted them to go.

Here’s where I made the mistake: the aureolin yellow did not blend well where the violet went, making it more dull and grey than I wanted (compliments go towards black). Instead, what I will do is use the plain prang red for one wash, and the prang red-violet for the over wash instead. Initially, I think I’ll still do an under painting with some wet-on-wet aeriolin in spots where I want things to glow. Then let it dry and do the other glazing.

To correct this version, I sprayed the paper so it was soaked again, then spread on some permanent alizarin crimson on where the reddish parts should be, and straight violet out of the prang set, putting in heavy amounts of pigment in each. (This is because it will dry lighter).

This was SO AMAZING to watch what the paint did!!

As the washed were drying, I used a “thristy brush” to mop out some of the paint in the middle tree and the tree on the left.

To balance this a bit more, the tree on the right really needs to fade out a lot more.

The main interest of this should definitely be the sky!

Not done — still work in progress — but this was OH SO MUCH FUN!!

Final version, stages:

This is actually the second stage of my final version. The first stage I forgot to take a picture of, was a wet-on-wet underpainting of aureolin yellow in a few select swaths. This one adds in the prang red-violet and prang violet as glazes to start getting the sky and snow colours the way I want them.

Notes from class:

Starting on the final version. For this, I started with a wet-on-wet underpainting of aureolin yellow in a few spaces to get the glow from the sky. When that dried, I soaked the paper, front and back (under light running water — I’d rather have used a tray with a bath to keep the pressure of the water off the paint, but didn’t have such available).

Then, as the paper started to dry down a little, I poured in some mixed red and red-violet from the prang set, and then poured in some straight violet to get the various colours. Pouring is a blast — I love the way the paint flows around and off the paper. I did this a couple more times to get the depth and intensity the way I wanted it. I also applied more direct wet brush violet into the left hand area where the tree is going to be.

I was really pleased with the way this ended up.

 

 

This is a close up of the sky portion of the stage 2 work in progress. You can see the blending going on with the glazing. The yellow is coming through as a glow which is what I was hoping for.

This is stage 4 — I’ve added some deep violet to the sky, this still needs to be softened, but it is definitely in the values I want. Following this is more pouring.

While I was waiting for the main painting to dry (things were getting very wet!) I was just sort of sitting around, and my teacher told me to practice on the foreground, so the swatches above are my practice pieces. You can see I’ve abandoned the right-most tree. The colour is a mixture of phthalo green and perm elizeran crimson (sp?) which are compliments. Even though near black, I did keep it a touch in the green.

I actually love these swatches even as stand-alone little pieces. Making trees is really rather fun!

 And the result:

This is almost complete. I put this up for critique, and the one suggestion was to add some shadow beneath the two smaller trees to ground them to picture, which I did as you can see in the final scan.

Gallery of all pictures of Alaskan Sunlight