Storm over Estuary, Lewis and Clark National Park, Oregon -- 30 Paintings in 30 Days Challenge, Round 3, Day 7

Storm over Estuary, Lewis and Clark National Park, Oregon,  

Watercolor on Fabriano Artistico #140 Cold Press Paper, 6"h x 6"w, 2014 #7

Bid at My DPW Auction (Starting Bid $25) 

I have forgotten how difficult it is to paint big sky paintings -- and how little control you have of the outcome. Paint clouds wet in wet means that you are totally at the mercy of the paper and water. I had three wipe-outs (wash-outs to be exact) for this one and yesterday's painting each, because the cloud simply did not come out to be interesting shapes with enough value change in them when dried. I have resorted a simplest palette of only two colors: Payne's Gray and Quinacridone Burnt Sienna to capture this scene from a reference photo I've taken along the Lewis and Clark trail in coastal Oregon. When painting it I remembered so vividly of the big sky, open water, and evergreen trees standing on the edge of the estuaries. I took the road trip during Christmas-New Year break, and when I arrived at the national park that chilly winter afternoon, there is not a soul to be found around. There are some places on this earth that truly allows one's soul to quiet down, take the rhythm of the flowing water and the roaming wind. The coast of Oregon (which is deliberately kept to be public land by the state law) is definitely one of them. Theme for this week: "Sky".

In the mean time, if you have an image of a beautiful landscape, or a flower you like, or anything you might want to see painted, please email them to me at arena.shawn@gmail.com. I will paint them and post them here. From every 10 paintings I make from them, there would be a random drawing, and the lucky winner get to take a original back home for free! Interested? Then send me your photo!

You can now buy high quality Giclee prints of many of my sold paintings, both on paper and canvas, as well as some note cards with my paintings here:

Storm Over Estuary (DPW Sky Challenge)

This is a little test of landscape I've posted on my facebook page (with a terrible image taken by the iphone camera in a hurry just after I finished it) and I never got around to share on my blog, or upload to my Daily Paintworks Page. The painting was done completely wet in wet, as a test of the Fabriano Blocco per Artisti paper I recently purchased. The surface of this paper is more similar to the laid instead of woven patterns (which is the most prominent surface pattern of contemporary watercolor paper), The lovely laid pattern gives it a very antique look, as this is the surface pattern of most of the paper in the age of Cotman or Turner. Layer on this paper, or repeated wetting, has proven to be extremely difficult. Like all Fabriano paper I have tried, it lifts like crazy. But the granulating colors separate and diffuse beautifully on it, and created this glowing orange (of Burnt Sienna) along the horizon and in the light passage in the land -- a river channel reflecting the setting sun. (The photo here, unfortunately, does not show the subtle, low saturation color in the original painting.) I am submitting it to this weeks DPW challenge -- paint a sky. John Sell Cotman has said "a sky a day" is a great exercise in watercolor painting, since it is always there for you to observe. This one is painted looking at the lovely back waters of San Carlos.

Storm over Estuary, 

Watercolor on Fabriano Blocco Per Artisti140# Cold Press Paper,5"h x 7"w, 2012 #51

Sold!

Work in Progress: New Plein Air Pieces

Lately I've been pondering the question why I have not painted more landscape paintings -- I really love landscapes and they've been my initial motivation to become a painter, but I have only occasionally dabbled on some small landscapes here and there. Why? After much reflection I've concluded that landscape for me are much less literal, and more poetic; a whole lot has to go into the initial preparation stage -- dissecting the reference image (or the sweeping vista in front of me), deciding the mood I want to convey and the color scheme that can evoke such mood the best, doing small value sketches to choose which elements in the reference materials to include, and which ones to exclude. Also, a good landscape painting requires much more abstraction, utilizing simplified shapes to suggest objects, and pay a lot of attention to the actual mark-making process so that each individual mark on paper creates the illusion that it's representing something in the actual landscape. A good landscape is seldom a truthful copy of the reference material or the real vista in front of the artist's eye, but a rearranged, abstracted combination of value and color shapes that comes from within the artist's mind, guided by a good sense of design. It is in my mind one of the hardest genres of representational art and actually the closest to abstract works. I've been, subconsciously, quite intimidated by the process.

Since the best way to overcome fear is practice, I decide to work on landscape painting everyday from this point on -- this does not mean I will be able to finish a piece a day, and I can imagine there will be many throw-aways. But I will keep at it until I feel more comfortable for the entire process. I will probably do some studies of master artists' works, some plein-air exercises, and some practice projects from good how-to books, as well as work on some larger pieces from my own reference materials. Some days I may only be able to complete a few sketches or composition studies, other days I may be able to finish a couple of small works -- but I will share my successes and failures here, as well as what I have learned from them.

So here they are -- the first exercises, both started en plein air but would get finished in the studio. The first one is a river estuary view along Carmel Beach, where I am exploring the possibility of not painting any actual "objects", but just utilizing mark making to hint the undergrowth, river and sand beach. The focus is creating interesting color-variations and surface textures using various brush-marks. I did this one in a workshop with the wonderful artist Dale Laitinen, who is a master of abstracting shapes and create surface interest using brush-marks. I decided to study his work closely to add a weapon or two into my arsenal...

Carmel River Estuary,  Watercolor on Arches 140# Rough Paper , 7"h x 10"w, WIP 1

The second one is a near dusk view of headlands and rocky shorelines near Drake's Beach, in Point Reyes National Seashore. My focus is to use cool, low-key colors to hint the chilly, foggy atmosphere in the evening, and practice wet-in-wet in different stages. Again, I try to use brush-marks to hint the texture on the headland and rocks, as well as the undergrowth on the beach, instead of delineating everything I see while standing there. I did not get to finish it before dark, so the rest of the image will come from my imagination in the studio. Let's see how it goes! I will update tomorrow...

Dusk at Drake's Beach, Point Reyes,

  Watercolor on Arches 140# Rough Paper , 6"h x 8"w, WIP 1