Moving forward

Before I could really tackle the foreground on my Pescallo painting-in-progress, I needed to establish the background water. It shimmers with a pale sparkling light in the distance, the color becoming deeper and more varied in contrast as it moves in waves toward the viewer.

Lest I got too caught up in the romance of Italy or the gentle waves of Lake Como, my husband brings me back to reality with a screeching halt and a critique of my painting. His opinion is to flip the direction of the boat so that it leads into the painting rather than out. I have to agree with him here, so being the always obedient wife (ha ha) I do as I'm told.

Next, I really need to address what is happening on the pier so that I can paint the reflections in the foreground water. I paint the tires that hang along the pier and serve as a rustic contrast to the elegant beauty of the backdrop. This epitomizes Pescallo to me; it is rustic but beautiful, quaint but elegant, sleepy but exciting, all at the same time. The tires are in higher contrast on the sunny side and in low contrast in the shadows.

Black is not black and white is never white. By this I mean that I don't use a tube black to paint black-colored objects, or a straight out of the tube white for most white-colored objects. This would create very flat, dead color. Instead, I mix my "blacks" with my darkest translucent colors on my palette, ultramarine blue and alizarin crimson, and just the tiniest bit of cad. orange or yellow to neutralize some of that purple undertone.

Flowers and flowering vines grow out of every crack and cranny around these parts, and I paint those in delicately so as not to overpower. The showy flowers will be the geraniums and bougainvillea to come.

School is back in session, which means that our babysitter has become a lot less available now that she's returned to college classes. It also means I will have less time to paint over the next two weeks until my daughter returns to preschool. I didn't get the time to paint outside last week, but my goal is to finish this studio piece with one more session tomorrow, so that I can still fit in a plein air session by week's end. I'm close...wish me luck!

Pescallo cafe demo updated

Ever tried painting on four hours of sleep? It ain't pretty! In fact, doing anything on "sleep fumes" (as I call it) is a bit like running through wet cement. That's how it's been lately for me as my insomnia issue has again reared its ugly head. And it's why I typically have avoided doing a full-fledged painting demonstration recently. Nevertheless, I have progressed a bit with the Pescallo painting, and I'll continue to share my process for it despite the break in continuity. When I last left off, I had a good deal of the background mapped out. Now I am tackling the foreground.

Even though I felt as if I had a pretty good compositional plan going in, I continue to tweak elements of the composition as I go along. For instance, I decided to extend the tip of the closest mountain off further to the right, so that it wasn't in danger of butting up against the foreground verticals. I also wondered if the boat was too large in the original drawing for where I had placed it in the picture plane. So I've experimented with reducing it slightly below.

Mainly though I've been working out the shadows and highlights of the foreground café and the pier. I need to get those pier elements in place before I can address the foreground water and any reflections down there.

I hope I can wrap this up in another session or two, depending on how much time I can carve out to do it. I'll continue to post my updates and painting notes as I go. Thanks for tuning in!

Another garden plein air

Here is this week's plein air effort, once again at the botanical gardens:

It's incomplete as I started late and had to close shop before the two-hour mark. It was a beautiful morning, but the light quickly shifted from sun to overcast clouds, making my previously well delineated, high contrast subject suddenly a muddled mass of leaves and confusion.

Or maybe it was just my mind that was muddled? Every so often the light would peek back out, but not quite often enough to provide the kind of clarity I needed. In any case, this is as far as I got before I had to call it quits and pay the babysitter.

I painted this general location some time ago, though the arrangement (and light) was different. I had planned on painting another setting, but a large group was visiting the gardens this morning and had taken over my spot, foiling my plans.

Being short on time I decided to take another stab at this scene. I'm not sure if I will finish this piece. I may just treat it as an artifact of the morning's experience to learn from as I look forward to the next outing.

Pescallo cafe painting demo (cont'd)

Here's a little more progress on the Pescallo painting I started in my last post.  I'm trying to write this as a demo of sorts, which means that with my  time constraints it is taking longer for me to post than I'd like. But noting ventured nothing gained, and I'm now ready to talk about some color! My palette for this painting is as follows: titanium white cadmium yellow light cadmium orange cadmium red alizarin crimson ultramarine blue sevres blue (Rembrandt- it's like a cerulean but more intense) burnt sienna gold ochre

This is a bit more expanded than the single primary I have experimented with a lot in the past, but with limited time in the studio now, it is helpful to have a few more "convenience" colors in my arsenal. With the tonal drawing laid to canvas as my guide, I begin by blocking in my color, starting with the sky and mountains. I start with very general shapes at first and then work to refine them as I move along. For the sky I am using combinations of sevres and ultramarine and white, and for the clouds, touches of cadmium orange and red, plus white. The mountains are basically varying degrees of cadmium orange and ultramarine blue.

Since so much of the background peeks through what I will have going on in the fore, I decide to work out the background first, fleshing out the highlights of the mountains. The greens of the mountains are very grayed down- just the slightest amount of cad yellow light is used, in combination with the blues. I also add a little alizarin crimson to neutralize it further.

I decide to soften the sky a bit to make the background stay back and be less busy. Then I start to lay in a first pass at the water. I use a slightly darker variation of the blues from the sky for the distant water, using less white as I move forward. I also add in some cadmium orange to the blues as the water edges closer to the pier and foreground. This won't be the final word on the water, but I have gotten rid of that white canvas and have enough of the background tones to start laying in the foreground. Next I will begin work on establishing the shadows and highlights of the pier.

Quite a lot still to go, but things are starting to take shape. But as they say, the devil's in the details.

Pescallo Cafe (in progress)

Call us crazy, but we are seriously entertaining the idea of returning to Italy next year-- with a toddler along for the ride. I am not really certain where we will go or how this will work with me painting, us touring, and one of us being only 3 1/2, but the fact that we are seriously talking about it seems fairly miraculous in and of itself. Every time I go through my photos and sketches of past travels, I end up wanting to return to this region or that region, and I am no closer to settling on a destination than when we started talking about this trip last winter. And then there are the places we haven't even gotten to yet. Each part of Italy seems to have its own alluring qualities, unique to themselves but quintessentially Italian.

Lake Como remains near the top of my list (so far) in terms of sheer beauty and aesthetic pleasure. It's not heavily endowed with art history or artifacts, (compared to, say, Rome, Florence, or Venice) but what it lacks in museums it makes up for in natural beauty and storybook enchantment.

This is a quick sketch of a composition I have been playing around with for a little while. It is of a little cafe set upon a pier in Pescallo. Not a great photo, but hopefully you get the general idea.

This was drawn to scale on my sketchpad so that when I "scale up" that there will not be a great distortion when I put it to canvas. There will still be some adjustments along the way, but by remaining in the same format, there shouldn't be any major surprises.

Here is the line composition drawn out in oil (burnt sienna) on canvas. I do some toning here to work out a value pattern, but it's not a 100% tonal drawing-- just enough to cement my concept in my mind and get me excited about the piece.

Stay tuned for more to come soon as the painting progresses.