Canyon de Chelly

1.70 Canyon de Chelly

Grand Canyon

1.60 Grand Canyon. Painting progression. Finally! I am able to use shadows in a way that creates a sense of scale and three dimensional space. I really enjoy the Grand Canyon at sunset as a subject. If you squint at it, the shady areas go black and the areas still lit by the setting sun seem to be floating, detached.

I took a much more realistic approach to the clouds this time, which was a lot of fun but seems to be from a different painting than the shadow and stone. I first tried to complete this painting with a more limited palette but was not satisfied and had to go back, adding color and detail. I like to avoid detail and will try to limit the amount included next time I choose this subject.

Goosenecks of the San Juan

1.51 Goosenecks of the San Juan. Painting progression. After finishing the last painting, I decided that I'd like to do more paintings that did not show the sky. The landscape of the southwest does not offer many clues to the scale of what you are looking at. All the normal objects that one would use for size comparison are few and far between: trees, animals, houses. One way that you do realize the size of what you're looking at is the way that distant objects seem to fade into the haze. Their colors become less vibrant and their shadows lose contrast. Sometimes things seem to be so far away that the sun has already set on them while you're still watching the sunset at your current location. That was the look that I was trying to convey in this painting.
For some reason I didn't use any solid colors in this painting and instead found that I liked the look of wavering streaks of color. This was due to the appearance of the cliffs that I was trying to depict. They weren't clean hewn walls of stone but rather slowly crumbled slopes. All sizes and colors of rock were mixed in along these slopes with hints of the underlying stratification peeking through. I tried to counter the messy look of the rock with clean and definite shadows.

Canyon de Chelly

1.50 Canyon de Chelly. This one is interesting to me. I often find that paintings that I really like don't look as interesting when I view them on the computer screen after photographing them. Conversely I find that paintings I dislike often look better on the screen than they do in person. This one falls into the latter category. Its still by no means one of my favorites but there are certain failed effects that I was trying to create that look a little more believable now. The first (and the whole reason that I attempted this painting in the first place) is the look of the dry riverbed. Its should appear to be streaked with ruts from where the last trickles of water ran before the flow ceased altogether. I was also trying to give a hint of this texture even in the area that is in shadow. I used a couple different shades of brown with a retardant to slow the drying of the paint. I kept laying each shade on top of the other, drawing the brush through the whole course of the riverbed each time. I tried to change the path slightly each time so that the ruts would cross over one another.
One particular detail that I'm very disappointed in are the low shrubs in front of the canyon wall in the right middle of the painting. In a book the reader's interest is held by the author's skill in picking out important details and calling attention to things that the reader may not have noticed if he or she were observing the same event. This doesn't mean giving every detail right down to the amount of rust on the nails in the floorboards; it means picking out the details that provide some insight into the essence of the scene and then finding a way to concisely describe them. These shrubs to me were a key to this scene. The shadows that they cast on the canyon wall gives the viewer a strong sense of where the sun is: just over their left shoulder. It also shows that the horizon is clear and subtly reminds the viewer that the canyon walls are really huge. I failed to depict these shadows. I painted them onto the wall before painting the shrubs but then covered them up when I painted the shrubs.
Seeing an object cast an accurate shadow in a painting is something that is very important to me and it is not so difficult when that object is a large boulder. I must get better at depicting more delicate objects like shrubs though...

White House Ruins IV

1.48 White House Ruins IV

Grand Canyon

1.46 Grand Canyon. Painting progression. I'm going to keep focusing on these dark scenes in an effort to find an interesting way to show shadows like these. There are only a few small places in this painting where the lighted areas truly convince the viewer that the dark areas are anything other than a patch of black paint. My goal is to make a painting with only small patches of color that still looks as full as a well lit landscape.

Mummy Cave

1.45 Mummy Cave, Canyon de Chelly. Going forward, I would like to focus more on how shadows can be used to convey the shape of an object. In this painting I tried to use shadows alone to show the form of the Anasazi dwelling. The cliff face and the structure are almost of a uniform color such that without the shadows, the structure would be very well camouflaged against the cliff. I still put some contrast between the colors but may try to use even less contrast in the future.

The other thing that I like about shadows is that they can imply the presence of things that are outside the frame. In this case, the shadow engulfing the house suggests that there is a large escarpment just to the right of our view.

Horseshoe Bend

1.44 Horseshoe Bend. Painting progression. This painting was started before two most recently posted ones. I'm almost never able to return to a painting that I've spend a long time away from to finish it. This one was so close though, with only 30 minutes of work left so I buckled down and did it this morning. I was trying to imply extreme distance with the shift to a greyish purple in the far background. As I had imagined it before I started, I would have liked to make the transition from purple to red more subtle. Instead I cheated and hid the intermediate ground behind swollen rocks. I didn't mean to do this and from up close when the paint was wet it looked more blended. I'll have to try this again. I also tried to show sand in the shallow water near the river bank with a wash of the color I was using for the bank. I wanted this to fade into the blue but instead it stops abruptly making it look more like a reflection. Maybe if I try this while the blue of the river is still wet it may fade in more convincingly. I'm not sure why I've been stuck on paintings with water lately but it is nice to be able to inject a little more color.

Spider Rock

1.43 Spider Rock. Hmm, more finger painting. I pretty much did this whole painting by hand (literally) before going back and repainting some sections with the brush. All the shadows were done with a brush. I kind of like the contrast of the sharp edged shadows with the unpredictable coloration that comes from applying paint with my fingers. This also helped me with a common problem I encounter when I'm painting a canyon. I always struggle to find the right balance between emptiness and little details in the land that runs off to the horizon. The random application of color followed by rubbing and scraping to reshape that color gave an interesting wavy quality to that part of the painting that I like more than anything going on in the foreground.

White House Ruins III

1.42 White House Ruins III. So I dropped the brush while working on this painting and it left a black streak down the middle of the canvas. I quickly tried to wipe as much of the paint off as I could with my hand. Seeing that this only smudged the paint I reached down and grabbed some yellow, brown and white on my fingertips and started rubbing the paint into the canvas trying to blend this blemished area back into the background. 30 minutes later I had redone most of the color in the painting using my fingertips and the palm of my hand. I then started grabbing handfuls of black paint and scratching the shadows into the color.

With a brush is it difficult to create a natural looking mass of color without some pattern emerging due to the shape of the brush used. Fingers are infinitely variable and much easier to manipulate at different angles than a brush.

This subject is one that I've revisited twice now. Each time I've painted this scene it has come out very differently than the other paintings that have been working on immediately before. I think it is because the canyon wall is very open to interpretation. As long as the titular ruins are recognizable, the rest can be abstract. I don't think I'm going to toss out my brushes and devote myself to finger painting, but this was a fun unexpected detour.

River Bend

1.40, River Bend. Painting progression. It's been months since I've painted anything, with a new job sucking up much of my time and even more of my motivation. Having a two week shutdown has given me a chance to dive back into painting. I unintentionally picked a subject very different from what I normally paint with mixed results. Yes, its still a desert landscape but it is aerial and the features are on a completely different order of magnitude than what I usually paint.

I start out every painting with the intention of creating something simple and abstract and then slowly drift towards a clear representation as I obsess over details in the scene. I get caught up in painting shadows and add highlights where I think the stone looks too flat. Painting a scene from such a distance gave me a good opportunity to avoid intricate detail. However, each time I stepped away from the painting, I wasn't satisfied and went back to add in more details until I got stuck somewhere in between, unable to add any more detail and well past the simplicity I was striving for.

Another challenge for me was the perspective; although the sun is elsewhere it could be called "sun's eye" perspective. Shadows are much different from a perspective on the ground. From the ground, they are clues to the shape of an object. From this height they are merely clues to the position of the object with respect to other massive objects. I really struggled conveying this.
Also for some reason I chose a really massive canvas for this, and used big brushes which always tough for me because I like to focus on detail. I'm already well into another similar painting, trying to apply what I learned here...

Sunrise Arch

Painting 1.37 Sunrise Arch. I realize this looks almost identical to the last painting I posted. This one sat on the easel for a long time while I was distracted by work, travel and home repairs. The longer it sat there, the more I scrutinized bits of it until I ended up having to repaint most of it to correct little errors that I noticed. I finally got back on track this week and generated some positive momentum with some changes in the positions of some shadows. With my interest in the painting rekindled after 2 months away I knocked the rest out quickly.

Another trend that I've been noticing is that I usually like the right sides of my paintings more than the left. I wonder if I spend more time on the right side because it is easier for me to work on, being right handed. I often procrastinate filling in the left side to the point that I lose track of the overall shape of stone I was trying to convey. I try not to just paint the shadows as if they are dark patterns on the stone, but as clues to the viewer about the form of the stone.

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Kanab Canyon

Painting 1.33 Kanab Canyon. This is based on a drawing from General Wesley Powell's "The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons" I may have to update this picture later because I never really finished the painting. I left it sitting too long after finishing the rocks in the foreground and wasn't able to finish the shadows on the background rocks and the water. When I've let something sit to long before getting back to it, its usually easier to just start a new painting than to try to get back into the mindset of the previous one. Looking at it now, the unrealistic lighting and coloring on the water make it look like an abstract shape imposed on the rocks rather than a shallow river at the bottom of a deep canyon. The shadows in the far background seem like they've melted into the highlights which may make those rocks look farther away. If I had a plan for how I was going to handle these things, it is long forgotten. This is why it's important to maintain a good work ethic!

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The Big Eye

Painting 1.19 The Big Eye, Arizona. This is a remake of a painting that I attempted some time between 1.12 and 1.17. I wanted to accentuate the contrast of the darkened rock wall to the light shining through the arch and catching little bits and pieces of the sandstone floor in the foreground. The mistake that I made with the original was that I didn't focus on what I was interested in, the eye itself, and tried to include too much of the wall in shadow. At the time I was frustrated with my recent paintings and tried to recreate the feel of the painting I did of the white house ruins in canyon de chelly (1.3). This meant trying to add all kinds of exaggerated shadows and details to the dark portion of the wall which really just distracted from what the focus should have been, the eye. I also tried including some more noticeable highlights in this painting to really give the impression of light flowing through the arch.

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Hope Arch

Painting 1.12 Hope Arch, Arizona. This was the last painting that I finished for a long time. After I finished it I was very happy with it at first, but the more that I looked at it, the more the exaggerated differences in color between the strata began to bother me. Not only that, but the divisions between the strata were looking kind of arbitrary. I always paint the full shape of the subject in black on top of the sky before beginning to fill in the color. I kept a small sliver of black showing through between strata to accentuate the division. As water soaks through the sandstone and reaches a junction between strata it will often be easier to flow out through the sides of the rock than to continue downward, this results in some amount of pitting visible at the surface between layers. So I felt that these black borders should be some shade of the color which they border to reflect the fact that they are just shadows caused by the weathering of the rock. The next 5 paintings would be a frustrating transition to an alternate portrayal of sandstone.

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The White House Ruins

Painting 1.3, The white house ruins, an ancestral puebloan cliff dwelling in Canyon de Chelly National Monument. I really loved how there appeared to be a seam in the rock wall leading down to where these structures were built. Unfortunately I didn't have time to hike all the way down to the base of the cliff. These cliffs are excellent displays of streaky coating on sandstone known as desert varnish. I'm still trying to figure out a way to depict it in a painting, because it is truly one of the defining features of the landscape.

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