Sun on the Marsh, 20″ x 16″, UART 320

Initial underpainting

Early stage

Revised underpainting

Initial “completion”

Hello Friends. It’s election day and we are all nervous. I’ve been reading hopeful stories of possible new members of Congress, but on the whole, I’m trying to focus on something else. Over the weekend I did a large happy painting, and yesterday I did a demo. I’m sharing the demo with you first.  This one was a challenge as the background was basically black with very lacy leaves and white trees. Quite exotic!

I decided to use a Ludwig “eggplant” pastel for the dark background. It’s much richer and darker than any hard pastel and I wanted to leave parts of it showing through.  I used regular hard pastels for the rest of the very abstract underpainting–just shapes.

I used a series of Giraults to lightly lay in the trees and foliage over the dark background.  I used a dark brown, warm green, and some of the eggplant for the water.  For the green pond scum in the middle, my initial thought was to do a “Tony Allain” swoosh of saturated color. But when I did it, it really was NOT GOOD!  So I brushed it off, put in some Girault and later added two values of Blue Earth greens on top.

I decided that the initial pink in the bottom was terrible!  So I added more brown to it and more alcohol and liked the color much better.  Then I added the grasses on top and the vertical pieces, using both the sides of Giraults and some sort Blue Earth to make interesting marks.  My class wanted more dark in the foreground, which was very light in the photo, so I decided to add an indication of leaves against the grasses.  I liked this as the bottom left corner now picks up the colors in the top.

This was a fun painting to do as it took some thinking about how to do it.  I discussed strokes with my class and this painting had a wide variety of them.  I’ll be doing another demo tomorrow, probably of the same area.  For those in the DC area, this is the McKee-Beschers reserve on River Road in Poolesville, past Seneca.  It’s a lovely area to walk, but in the fall you hear the pop of guns all over!  A little disconcerting.