Pt. Reyes in Oil

Oil on canvas, 16 x 20″
Click here to see enlarged view

Yippee! I finally got back to oil painting and I think that everything I’ve learned in acrylic and gouache and from reading books on landscape and seeing other people’s instructional photos and videos on the web and especially the great advice I’ve gotten from other art bloggers finally clicked. I was actually able to capture just what I wanted to in this painting, which is a rare gift!

I just wish I could tell whether the images look right on the screen. I still haven’t quite gotten my monitor calibration dialed in. In the painting the distant hills and mountains look a little misty–like there’s lots of atmosphere/fog between them and the viewer, subduing the colors. The blue peeking through the clouds is ultramarine not cyan like it appears on my monitor. But this afternoon I wanted to paint, not futz around with computers. I did enough of that last weekend!

Here are the things I’ve learned about oil painting that I applied:

• I limited my palette
• toned the canvas with a wash of acrylic yellow ochre
• painted the sky white and then blended in the blues
• blocked in the darkest darks, the mid-value big shapes, and then did the next smaller shapes and then added details.
• I made sure to wipe my brush if it picked up some of the wrong neighboring color before applying more paint
• I didn’t let myself get lazy about mixing colors from whatever was left on the palette instead of adding the missing color in fresh paint
• And I stopped before I overworked it and didn’t get hung up in details

And here are the people who I pestered for oil painting advice (which they generously gave me) that finally sunk in:

• Nel Jansen
• Dee Farnsworth
• Kris Shanks
• Nancy van Blaricom

I did the painting from this photo I took on a hike in Pt. Reyes to the ocean. I painted it this afternoon in about four hours (including cleaning up), trying to pretend that I was painting plein air: