Buiilding a Painting

A few weeks back the Des Moines Rotary Club invited me to host a fellowship of a dozen or so members, providing a brief talk about painting. The suggestion was that maybe a demonstration would be fun. But unlike that famous television painter who did a fairly large oil in an hour's time, I knew I couldn't paint that fast. Instead, via Zoom, we spent time on how an oil painting is made, using a slide show of one of my recent landscapes. 

The basic steps I use in making oil paintings are pretty straightforward. Much of the time I begin on a toned surface--mostly a very thin wash of earth red--then lay in the basic shapes of the composition. Whether still life, landscape, portrait or otherwise, these are the bones of the painting. The biggest shapes (in this case, sky, water, and trees) are next. These broad shapes are blocked in with color, varying where possible, but mostly just to get the areas filled.

Next come refinement of color and addition of darks to begin showing the light of the scene and the shadows. In the step photo below I've added greens to show distant foliage but used oranges yellows for the trees on the left, which have mostly dropped their leaves. The reflections and shadows are darkest in the left-center, next to the brightest yellow patch. The sky and water look too patchy at this stage and the trees have yet to take on bulk and shape.

In the final stages, smaller and smaller details begin to make their way into the painting. It's important to me to avoid picky details in every section, though, and I concentrate on putting any tiny details near the center of visual interest. It's critical to avoid overworking at this point. Smoothing the sky makes it more distant and smoothing the water shows the viewer show still the surface happens to be. The seemingly sharp reflections of the yellow grasses add to the illusion of stillness. The tree branches are unfinished and the distant treeline needs some attention.

In the final version, "November Morning" shows very still waters in late fall--the trees are mostly bare. Throughout this particular work a part of my focus has been to suggest and not pick out tiny details. In the yellow grasses, most of the brush strokes are fairly large but along the top surface of the grasses I added a few tiny spots of yellow. In the far trees I scumbled some dull greens into the tops to emulate the confluence of branches and left other small patches dull red-orange suggesting filtering light.

"November Morning," oil on canvas, 2021