Painting Workshop: Day 4: After the rain

After the rain. During my painting workshop, it finally stopped raining, but the cloudy/damp weather was still here to stay. So, the next thumbnail (4 x 5) that I worked on was the drive into Cambridge, Vermont.

As you can see the background mountain is totally occluded due to the cloudy weather. There is the standard progression of light to dark (from rear to front) with the center tree (in the foreground) being the darkest. I also altered my standards for doing grass to show the variations in the grass.

When doing this painting, there are two parts that I was not doing correctly. The first part was the shadows of the background trees. To give the trees some texture, I applied the shadows as dots. As Karen pointed out, the dots were too distracting. Therefore, she took my brush and smoothed out the entire dark section. This linked the darks into a continuous path.

For the foreground, Jack noticed that there isn't a lot of texture. You need to add some texture to the foreground so that the viewer gets the feel that he is standing at the scene. So, he added some grass and bushes. In that situation, Jack painted the sides of the bushes first, then did the shadows, and finally added the top planes (highlights). This helped give the painting some depth.