The Outside Shore
Demonstration - Around The Bend
Pulling The Painting Together
By this point, I had more or less finished working on some areas of the
painting, and my goal became to bring the less completed areas to the same level
of finish.
 I went for
more for of the rippled effect in the foreground water, with more obvious
touches of sunlight using the light yellow I had used in the sunlit foreground
grass. I had added white to my palette and used it where necessary as well.
I began obsessing about capturing the feeling of light, and went over the
painting adjusting value and color in order to do this. Of course, the light I
was seeing by then was considerably different than the light I started with - an
hour had passed since I set up my easel - so I used my sketch as well. I
darkened some shadow areas, particularly along the left bank of the river. In
some cases, I liked the light I was seeing enough to risk adding elements to the
painting that were not there originally. For example, there was very little
sunlight left on the scene, but a branch hanging down from the main cluster of
trees on top of the hillside was being brightly lit and was in fact the most
prominent sunlit area in the scene, and I elected to add that to my painting.
After about twenty-five minutes in this stage, I reached a point where I
start thinking of the painting as essentially completed, and as you can see, I
added my signature. I like to do this early enough in a painting to judge it as
part of the composition, and in fact I usually do it sooner than I did here. I
then stepped back to look at the painting for a while again.
| |
|
