Castle painting update (excerpt from 1000 Markets blog)

This morning I shut my puter off and settled down to a 3 hour painting session. Keeping in mind that this is basically an underpainting, I'm really satisfied with today's progress. The roof for the coach house was mostly done yesterday but it seemed to be floating in all that white canvas, so first order of business was to get the correct values painted around it. 

One of the harder things to learn as a painter was how to get the correct values in color. Red, for example, seems bright but it really is a very dark color, especially if it is set next to a light color like yellow. For years I had a hard time with greens...there are a lot of green shades and they lean towards one of the primary colors, either red, blue or yellow. Put the wrong shade in the wrong place and it totally throws off the perspective.

When painting trees you don't really just lay a shape down, you break it into dark, mid and light tones and then go back with a highlight to pick out a few bright spots. If you look at trees in a painting up close, you are just going to see blobs of color with no rhyme or reason, it's not until you stand back that it all melds together. Brighter greens, with more yellows and oranges will come forward, cooler greens with more blue will recede. They get hazier in the distance also. 

The part that I've actually had the most fun with is the coach house roof. Except for the bridge house roof, all the roof tops are a slate gray color. Yet, there is no true gray whatsoever in this roof. A true gray is just a mixture of black and white. But gray can be any color that has been toned down to be a neutral color. You can tone down colors with a complementary color (green with red, violet with yellow, orange with blue) or you can add a slight touch of black to it.

The roof is mostly a grayed blue and mauve, with white added to one of those colors for highlights. It's fun to paint with colors for gray, it seems to be so much more alive than a dead flat gray. 

I'll be doing a lot more to the bridge house later, for now I have the values close enough to paint around it. It needs some detail work (and brick straightening lol) but if I try to do too much now it may be overly detailed and become the focal point instead of the figure on the bike.

I won't get back to this until Tuesday, but plan to carry the painting to the right now. Sorry for all the skewed perspective on this photo but I was trying to grab a picture before the light changed, a storm is heading in :)

Check out the beaded lily to see the series she has started; she asked several artists from The Wearable Art Market to put together something that featured our hands and today she started with mine :) Hope you enjoy it! 

Sue
http://www.1000markets.com/shops/ninedragons