Another New Beginning

Untitled , 12x24 oil on panel (in progress)

     I mentioned a couple of posts back that I was eager to start work on this studio painting. The inspiration and study for it is "Sunlit Snow", the little 6x8 painting from the post before last. Instead of looking at the farmhouse this view pans to the left of it. The storage barn on the far right is the one you are used to seeing in "The Farmhouse" series. I find the 6x8 inch format too small to also include the gazebo that you will see develop here.
      I had wanted to start the painting over the last weekend but we had dark, gray, rainy weather both days so I contented myself with prep work. This painting needs to be painted in the bright winter sunlight that I enjoy in my studio. Today fit the bill. I didn't take the time to photograph this in stages so the image above is where I stopped work for the day. I used the same peachy pink under painting as in the small study and took a standard approach of sketching in the scene with a brush and then establishing the lights and darks. I used a mix of ultramarine blue and red oxide for that. The next step was the sky and deciding where the brightest areas of the painting would be. I used # 12 and # 10 bristle brushes to start. When I resume work I will be using slightly smaller brushes.
      I had a lot of colors on my palette. When painting snow or anything white I use yellows, pinks, lavenders and blues with just a few strokes of pure titanium white here and there. At the end this will look like a blue and white painting just as the snowy day looked like a blue and white day. Painting white in sunlight and shadow is fun and interesting. You can't achieve the brilliance of snow by representing it with just white paint mixed with black for the shadowed parts. I know some of my readers are just beginning to paint and painting white objects by using color as I have described above is a good exercise.

      I will not be working on this painting long so I have already begun drawing my next one. It will be another cityscape "Leaving Philly" and I will show you a sketch in my next post.