Painting Workshop: Day 1: Thumbnail B

Due to time constraints, I was not able to finish the second thumbnail. In this situation, I was working on the grassy area in front of the area defined in Thumbnail A.

The hardest part of this was to create flat ground. Since there is no sky or mountain, the atmospheric effect is not as noticeable. However, notice that there a "splotch" on the left side of the painting? This was done by Jack Winslow. Rather than looking at each portion of the landscape individually, I needed to look at the pieces in relation to each other. So, to create a ground surface that "flattened", I needed to pay attention to the fact that the ground got "greyer" as you receded into the distance.

The points that I learned: 1) The treeline in the back of the painting needs to be a LOT greyer/cooler than any other portion of the painting. This will help push it to the background. A perfect mixture would be the lilac/blue-grey mixture done in Thumbnail A.

2) The colors closer to the viewer will typically be richer and the darks darker. In addition, there will be more detail. This is not always true, but seems to be true most of the time.

3) A trick to see relative atmospheric effects. Take a standard grey viewfinder and open it up to show just a slit. Since you have taken the actual objects out of the equation, it's easy to see the effect of the atmosphere on each part of the picture plane.