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Hi Friends!

 

My hope is that this and any following blogs will help, inspire, and even comfort other artists, and perhaps be interesting to others as well.

 

I tend to make most of my mistakes when I’m impatient about getting started on a new painting, and skip preparatory steps like a value map, and notan check (interlocking forms), and occasionally a small color study.

 

In the painting of the black bear, my inspiration was the setting containing a log tangle my wife and I found on a hiking trip along a river in northern Minnesota.  The result in the first attempt looks heavy and dark, and lacks depth.  I kept adding cool notes in the background and several warm glazes to the foreground, then added the warm autumn leaves to try and bring it forward.  It wasn’t enough.  So it sat in storage with other frustrating paintings for nearly a year.  When I got it out again, it was easier to see that though there were strong elements, the overall design was weak.

 

 

As you can see in the image, I completely repainted the background using a cool grey for the sky and mixing that grey with every other color for harmony.  I added the large, warm, dark stump in the foreground, for several reasons: it anchors the entire composition, it gives me a warm solid mass that brings the foreground forward toward the viewer, it’s relative size gives the impression of perspective, and finally, it’s dark shape echoes the shape of the bear.  The background cool grey and the warm dark of the bear also provides riveting contrast for the focal point.  Finally, I used the brightest, most chromatic greens of the moss closer to the bear as focal point, and dulled them slightly as they gradated away from the bear.  As I’m sure most of you know, bright tones (chroma is about intensity) tend to jump forward, while dull tones recede into the distance.  There are a few tricks and exceptions to this rule, but basically, I find it’s a very useful rule to follow.

 

 

And by the way, though I have painted in watercolor and worked in colored pencil, being able to “save” a piece of artwork like this is one of the reasons I love working in oils, though probably one can do much the same with acrylics.

 

Any questions or comments (or disagreements!), let me know.  I look forward to sharing comments and perspectives with you!

 

Mark

 

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