The Outside Shore
Demonstration - Around The Bend
Defining Shapes
During the course of building my palette, I had also begun fine-tuning the
large shapes of my initial block-in, and in the course of laying in color I also
had started to break them down into smaller shapes. Once I have my palette
mostly determined, I turn my attention almost completely to this process of
breaking down shapes. Up until now, the painting should be pleasing to me on an
abstract level, but the scene I am painting will not necessarily be
recognizable. Now I began to think about making things look like they are
supposed to in terms of the shapes.
 For
instance, notice in this picture how the light colored shaped to the upper right
of the painting is starting to transform itself into a small tree, how I am
beginning to develop the foreground hillside to the right, how the background
clump of trees to the center right is taking shape, and how the colors in the
water are arranging themselves into light and dark areas that are closer to
corresponding to what I was seeing.
I should mention that by this time, the shadows and the light and the river
had completely changed, and indeed, by the time I finished, the light would be
gone completely as the sun was hidden by another group of trees to my right. As
I worked on the shape of the light and shadow areas of the foreground hillside
to the left in the painting, I used the sketch primarily to guide me, all the
while realizing that I was exaggerating the height of the hillside and hoping it
would not bother me in the finished painting.
In some cases, it is not the shapes themselves I was concerned with, but
rather their textures, and their edges. For example, the light areas of
background foliage remained essentially the same shapes during this phase, but I
worked on the texture of the tapestry of colors within them, and also on the
texture of the edges between the lighter and darker foliage areas. This is
especially noticeable if you consider the small sunlit tree to the left middle
ground as part of this light area of foliage. However, at this point in the
painting I was more concerned with getting the big shapes the way I wanted them
than breaking them down much further.
During the course of defining these shapes, I added a couple of more sticks
to my working palette, but I continued to limit myself to these colors. By the
end of the painting, there were fifteen colors (including black and white) in my
working palette.
I tend to work one one area of a painting at a time, but I move from area to
area long before any given area is finished. After around twenty minutes, I had
worked on every area of this painting to some degree, and I reached a point
where the painting was starting to come together. I still planned to make
another pass or two over it refining the shapes further, but I was now satisfied
that the painting worked not only on an abstract level, but as a representation
of what I was seeing.
So far I had been working rather quickly, attacking the paper with pastel
almost without pausing. In fact it had been only a little over a half hour since
I started and the painting was already very similar at first glance to how the
completed painting looks. From here on out, however, I slowed down and stopped
often to see how the last series of strokes was working and to see what needed
my attention next.
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