Playing with Greens

So I've bought too many paint colors (shocking), and that's just the recent binge of Charvin Fine Oils. I wanted to do something easy tonight, as it's been a long week and I'm not sure I have the brainpower left to think too much.

I decided to play around with a simple panoramic landscape across some sunlit fields to the trees and hills beyond. The main goal would be to work with a few of the greens I have purchased to get used to them.

First step as usual was to do a sketch in thinned burnt sienna, on a 6 by 12 inch canvas panel.

Panoramic Sketch

I used a limited palette of colors, and got a first layer of paint down in about 30 minutes. I am happy with the background and the atmospheric perspective of the different layers of hills, receding more to a grayish blue-green the further back you go. I'm also pretty happy with the mid-ground and foreground fields. They will need a minimal amount of touching up, but I think they are more or less done. The trees in the mid-ground are the area that needs some additional work. I need to work with the greens in the different clumps of trees to make sure that they give a proper feel for those that are closer and those that are further away. This is much-needed practice on value and color saturation. The sky will also need some cleanup in places where the burnt sienna sketch muddied the lower sky.

Stage 1 (yellowish artificial light photo)

Per my prior post on painting in layers, I have every intention that this will just be the first stage, and after this has a few days to dry, I will go back and look at this with a fresh eye, adding and changing as needed.

The limited number of colors I chose to work with are shown below. Excluding the ever-present titanium white and burnt sienna, there are 6 additional colors: cerulean blue hue, sap green, celadon green deep, cinnabar green light, burnt umber and french yellow primary. I wanted to see what I could do with a standard dark green and then a darker olive and a lighter olive. Yes, you can mix all this, but....you'd have to be better than I am at mixing colors. So far.

8 Charvin Fine Oils colors

I am absolutely loving these 150ml tubes of Charvin paint. I love the kinda-thick but still creamy texture of the paint, and the larger tubes make me less hesitant to put out bigger blobs of paint on my palette. That being said, the small amounts of paint used on this 6 by 12 panel are such that I could probably paint 100 paintings of this size with these tubes. I might run low on the titanium white, but then again I might not.

I also had my first experience with using Mimik Hog bristle brushes on this painting, and loved them as well. Firm enough, but still flexible and with good bounce (for lack of a better term). They held the paint and moved it very well. I think I might have a new favorite brush.

Lastly, I made a few final tweaks to the Farm Road painting from a couple weeks back, after it was dry. This consisted of adding wire to the fence line and cleaning up the area around the tree trunk. As I look at it, the prominent tree still needs some work, as it looks too flat now.

Farm Road, final touch ups

A little more painting, a little more progress.