Irish Autumn Light

A small painting, 8″x9″, quickly painted with large brushes, numbers 5, 8 and 12, long bristle filberts. The colours, Burnt Sienna, Yellow Ochre and Cobalt Blue are the basic red, yellow and blue. Extras are Chrome Green Light and Raw Umber. Black and white are also used, of course. The video of the painting process will be posted next time. The painting time was less than an hour so the time lapse will not be too compressed.

I followed my usual procedure by painting the sky to completion and treating all elements of the distant landscape above the horizon line as part of the sky, using ‘sky colours’. These colours contain a lot of white which should not be introduced into the mid and foreground paint mixes until much later in the painting process. Shadows, shadows and more shadows. Then mid tones and finally highlight colours.

You will notice that the trees are going over the edge of the painting. This is difficult to achieve if the painting stops abruptly at a sharp edge, as with a stretched canvas. Having a strip of masking tape onto which the painting overflows helps prevent the subconscious tendency to ‘terminate’ the painting before the actual edge. When the tape is removed the clean straight edge cuts off any ‘fuzzy’ or faded out bits which can ruin the finished look of the painting. If, like many painters, you have a number of paintings ‘in storage’ which probably will never be framed but you like showing, the clean white edge almost acts as a frame and gives a ‘finish’ to the painting.

I am preparing the time lapse video for the next posting and it will show the process especially the use of ‘large’ brushes to achieve apparent details, especially in the trees.