Tonight I’m trying something a bit different than my norm. I re-worked my Greenbank landscape in studio with a completely different start to a painting then I have ever done.
So I brought my original photos from Greenbank farm into Photoshop and spent some time picking out a smaller area with the most interest. I also adjusted some of the landscape features, basically I moved the mountains around to where I wanted them.
Here you can see how I’m cropping. I mask out all but a small section of the landscape and move the masked area around until I find an area that interests me. But it doesn’t end there…
This is the final cropped and rotated composition that I formulated. I decided to go with a vertical layout as it improved the horizontal ideas of the design further. The white dot in the top left is just me testing my highest possible values, that is not the sun.
After figuring out my composition I carefully went through each major layer of the landscape and turned them all into single color cutout. I wanted to see this composition in its most simple design so I could get a better idea if it worked on a simplistic level as well as a detailed level. I was so happy with the design that I decided to start that painting this way, laying in the most simple shapes with areas of single color.
Sully didn’t think painting was challenging enough so wanted to help by supervising and swishing his tail dangerously close to the piles of paint.
After painting the basic shapes, I started putting in finishing details, starting with the sky, then the mountains and working my way forward in the picture plane. At the end of the session I think I have completed a very nice painting. I did well with the design but I still lack a lot of experience with how to render trees correctly, the edges are very difficult to get right.