Tag: park

On February 11th, 2018 I completed the first painting in my newest series! This acrylic painting on canvas was based on a reference photo provided by my friend Melissa Horton. It is 4 feet wide and 3 feet tall and depicts the Shafer Canyon Overlook in Canyonlands National Park, Utah.

This brand new series will consist of 12 large landscapes no smaller than 48″x36″. Each one will be a landscape based on a real location. Before beginning this project, I asked for people to submit their photographs of beautiful, natural scenery from around the world. I received a high number of great submissions to choose from.

For the first painting in this series, I chose a photo of Canyonlands National Park. I felt driven to paint something challenging, something I hadn’t ever done before, and this canyon inspired me! It provided me with new obstacles to overcome and a great learning experience. I had never really painted rocks or mountains in much detail before so figuring out how to paint that sort of texture was new territory for me. I ended up using angled brushes since they felt most comfortable for creating all the edges on the cliffs. After all that work, I can finally say that I’m now comfortable painting rocky terrain.

Another challenge I faced while working on this was figuring out how to balance the colors. My palette contained Pthalo Blue, Ultramarine Blue, Titanium White, Payne’s Gray, Burnt Umber, Burnt Sienna, Hooker’s Green Hue, Cadmium Deep Yellow, and Diox Purple. I typically work with a very limited palette of only 3 colors at a time, such as in my Mood Series, so balancing a large, vividly colorful landscape made for some great visual exercise.

I enjoy searching for colors that are hidden in the shadows because finding and using them is how to create real depth in an image. 

The most tedious part of this painting by far was the shrubs. Unlike the cliffs, which were created with swift horizontal and vertical brushstrokes, the shrubs are composed of hundreds of tiny splotches in varying shades of Hooker’s Green as well as Payne’s Gray. Once all those tiny splotches were finally in place, I dry-brushed a thin layer of deep yellow over the shrubs to brighten them up and balance them into the painting.

I am very happy with how this painting turned out and I feel that it set the bar high for the whole series. I’ve now begun working on the second landscape in this collection, a forest path in Juneau, Alaska based on a photo provided by my friend Sarah. I chose the photo for this landscape because of how small those tall trees made me feel just by looking at them and I want to capture that! Here is the underpainting:

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