The Stages Of A Painting- Part 2

Welcome!

Thanks for checking back. In my last post we left off on the importance of lighting, and how establishing the light source will help guide you through the rest of the painting.

That's where we are going to pick back up in phase 2. Here you will see that I have finished the sky, added a lighthouse, and I have also begun to develop the seawater.

Follow along as I break it all down for you, as I will show you how I achieved the glows from the sky casting upon the side of the lighthouse. I'll also show you a trick I used to make the lighthouse look straight and balanced, and how I have begun to pick up the colors of the sky in the water.

My sky is mostly finished, it flows smoothly behind the lighthouse, and I used some of the same colors from the sky in both the lighthouse and the water to create elements of glow and reflection in the painting. 

For the sky, remember how I had determined my light source (or the position of the sun) to be BELOW the horizon, just after the sun had set?

Well, once you have the light source set in place, the lightest and brightest colors are always going to be closest to the sun. The farther you get away from the sun, the darker and more muted the colors will be. And, the darker your dark colors are, the brighter your light colors will look. This dramatic contrast is what provides the appearance of "light," in any painting!

The sky is mostly finished, with brightest colors closest to where the sun has just set. 

I worked on the transition from bright light to darkest dark first, dragging little hints of each layer into the next, to suggest little glimmers of light trying to hang on as long as possible.

For acrylic paint, the key is to keep working while the paint is wet, but since it dries so fast that can be tricky. You can use an additive to keep the paint open longer (paint thinner type products specifically for acrylic), and I did a tiny bit of that at first. However, the majority of the time, all I do is keep my brush damp! I always have a little spray bottle next to me while I'm painting, and as soon as the paint stops flowing on the canvas the way I want, I give my brush a little spritz of plain water and keep on working. Just damp though! If you get the brush too wet it may cause dripping down the canvas.

After the sky was dry I went in and added some clouds. I will do a special tutorial on clouds in another post, but the biggest thing to remember is that you want your brush strokes to always wisp in an upward direction. If you do downward strokes your clouds will look they are raining or even falling down toward the earth rather than floating up and away.

Little paint on the brush with circular, upward strokes helps clouds to look weightless and puffy. 

Also, I hardly have any paint on the brush at a time. I load a small amount of paint on the very tips of the brush and then drag the paint around on the canvas until it runs out. This leaves the ends of my brush strokes looking frayed and somewhat transparent, making the clouds look light and airy...like they're floating!

I like to use a round brush for this, and I especially like brushes with shaggy (or irregular) ends for clouds because they do the wispy work for me.

The shagged bristles make this brush perfect for wispy clouds! 

This brush is great for circular strokes, smudging, and blending. 

Again, you want to remember that the lightest and brightest colors are closest to the sun, even with clouds! So in this painting, you'll see that the ends of the clouds that are closest to the area where the sun has set are brighter. I used more whites and yellows on the underside of those clouds. As the clouds get farther away from the light they transition from pinks and reds to darker purples. The tops of the clouds are darker as well, which helps give them shape and dimension.

If you're trying clouds for the first time, OR if you have struggled with clouds before, start with 1 or 2 little cloud puffs at a time and stagger them a bit. I always get up and walk away from my canvas every now and then. Even if it's just a second or two; when I come back to it my eyes are refreshed and I see it differently.

Looking at it from a distance also helps with where to place each cloud. Perspectively, clouds that are closer to the viewer are going to be larger and farther toward the top of the canvas. Smaller clouds will appear farther off in the distance, and the farther away they are the less detailed they need to be.

Moving on to the lighthouse.

Man-made structures in painting can pose a lot of challenges, because there are more architectural aspects to think about. In a regular landscape, NOTHING is straight in nature (or at least very few things are)! So, my grass doesn't have to be straight, my tree trunks don't have to be straight, and even animals don't need to have perfectly straight lines for the most part. With a building, however, not only does it have to look straight, it also has to look balanced; like it won't fall over (unless you're painting the leaning tower of Pisa).

So, especially when we're talking about a lighthouse, a tall, straight, pole-like structure...it needs to look straight and well balanced. A simple trick I used to achieve this was the use of a weighted string, which I lightly tacked to the back of the canvas with a thumb tack. My string was weighted with a key chain, but you could use just about anything.

A weighted string hung from the back of the canvas is a great guide toward making a structure look straight and balanced.

As I let the string hang straight down my canvas, I made faint dash marks down what would be the center of my lighthouse. This helped me make sure my lighthouse is pointing straight up toward the sky and avoid it leaning too far one way or the other.

Next, I swung the string to one side until I liked the angle. Holding the string there from the bottom, I did another dash line to establish the side of the lighthouse; using the string as my guide to keep my angle straight. I swung the string over to the other side and did the same thing, making sure both sides looked about the same distance from the center line.

Getting straight, even angles. 

From here I carefully added the the features of the top and bottom of the lighthouse, and filled the whole thing in with dark blue (the same blue I used in the blues and purples of the sky).

Blue is a cool color, ideal for use in shadows.

The same techniques I used to create the transitions in the sky were used to give the lighthouse dimension.

I added a stripe of red down the right side, and then I went over the whole thing with white. Just like I did with the sky, I kept my brush damp and had very little paint on the brush at a time. This allowed each layer of red or white to be slightly transparent enough to pick up the blue underneath (the blue is important for the shadows), while also blending together to get the pinks. Once I had it blended the way I wanted, I added a blue stripe down the center and blended that in as well.

The red under the white is what creates the pink "glow" from the sky. 

The body of the lighthouse is mostly a cylinder shape, and in this case, the center of it is farthest from the light. Therefore, the rounded sides of the lighthouse will pick up some hints of light, whereas the back of the lighthouse is deepest in shadow.

The deepest shadow is at the center, OR back of the lighthouse.

For the features at the top of the lighthouse, since the viewpoint is from the bottom looking up, each platform has a slight up-curve (very slight) to it, to indicate the roundness of the structure. For instance, if you take an empty toilet paper/paper towel roll and look up the side of it from the bottom, the top will look rounded instead of flat across. Same concept here.

Now to add the black stripes. Again, the structure is a round structure, so the stripes will also suggest going around, like a ribbon. They are subtly rounded and then come to a fine point up the side, hinting that the stripe continues beyond what the eye can see.

Lighthouse mostly finished. 

At this point, my lighthouse is a prominent feature of my painting. I can always go back to it and add more little highlights later, but for the most part it is done for now. It looks balanced, and I have successfully suggested an evening glow.

It's time to start developing the sea, and again, I'm going to keep using the same colors from the sky.

First I will pull in dark blues from the sides and let the paint run out as it reaches toward the middle, where the light is. You can add the light colors first, but I feel like they get lost once you start adding in the dark, so I prefer to start with my darks.

Next I'll pull in some red and blend it in with the blue to make a dark purple. Staggering the lines and making them a little wavy helps to suggest the natural flow of water.

Starting with the dark colors will help keep the highlights from getting lost.

Ocean water ebbs, flows and swirls at random, in no particular pattern. Starting the waves in different places and making them different shapes helps mimic this. 

Next I'm going to lightly add in my whites and yellows toward the middle, where the water is picking up the remnants of sunlight.

Adding in highlights from the light in the sky. 

Rather than using straight lines, I'm making criss-cross like strokes with my brush to mimic choppy ocean water. I exaggerated this in one of the photos below so you can see the idea. I will do this over and over, doing lots of layers of darks and lights overlapping each other until I am happy with something that looks like an ocean.

Exaggerated criss-cross brush strokes. This is how I create the texture of little breaker waves. 

Same thing as with the sky, the brightest highlights will be closest to the source of light, and everything gets darker as it gets farther out. Also, the waves will be bigger, with bigger and wider brush strokes, as you get closer to the viewer (toward the bottom of the canvas). Likewise, they will get smaller, with thinner and shorter brush strokes as they go farther off into the distance.

Developing the waves and reflecting the colors of the sky. 

Thanks for reading!

Stay tuned for my next post! In Part 3, I will go into more detail about the water, and you'll start seeing me add in the foreground and tie everything together.

Please let me know how you are liking these tutorials, and feel free to ask questions if you have them. You can either leave a comment below, OR email me at: Jen@jelartcreations.com


Stages of a Painting- Part 3