Since time was crunched and life getting in the way, I decided that I wanted to continue my emphasis on mixing greens. It is spring--seems everything is green. All would be fine if there was one value of green to mix, but there isn't. Green can be on the blue side, yellow side, and even have some red in there. Trying to decide the primary you are seeing if difficult and then mixing the greens are just as difficult. I tend to make my greens too intense. Since green never goes away in a landscape painting, I decided it would be time well spent to study this color a bit further.
I looked through my reference material, since time wasn't going to permit me to paint outside this week. I had a rather large pre-stretched canvas that was just calling my name to be painted on. I found a photo of the Giverny Gardens. Could we get anymore greens in one photograph? It's of the lily pond. Brush in hand and with great concentration on the shadow and light areas, I put in the foundation of the painting. Here's it is with a little work done on the lily pads in the foreground.
I always tend to forget that trees have open areas where you can see through them, so I tended to keep those spaces larger than usual. This particular painting will be an interesting pursuit. The reflections in the pond will be a challenge--especially since they are green as well. Here is a close up of the area I started working on earlier in the week.
In your assessment of your work, it is good to not only see what you don't like about the painting you are working but more importantly what you do like. Just like life, focussing on the negative can make it worse. So reward yourself with a little positive feedback. Ask yourself what you do like.
So far, I like the composition that I grabbed out of this photo. It's a smaller area of the photograph, focusing on the lily pads and the reflections. It's a high concentration of greens with a large spectrum of greens at that. Remembering that red is greens complement color and studying the photograph, there is some red--all the way to a red-purple present in some of the lily pads. I like the contrast between the two and it's something I'm going to explore on the second patch of lily pads I begin to paint next. I also like the idea of taking the greens all the way through the spectrum of blue-greens to yellow-greens. That will allow for a larger range of highlights/light areas that will also work with a large range of reds--into the oranges.
Here's where I ended up after some intense study and painting. This is in no way finished, but will give you idea of where I'm going with this. OH--and it's time to mix more greens, pushing myself to really open up the range of greens...my values are a bit too intense still and I want them to be softer. I'll be giving that a try here on the second batch of lily pads.
At first when I put in the pond and it's reflections to the right of the foreground lily pads, my edges were way to sharp. They were fighting for attention. Good thing I have a mop! I used the mop brush to blend gently the edges away--careful to not over blend. Again, the area is not completely done and to my liking, but it is much better than where it was just a few minutes before I blended them.
Stay tuned as I work to finish this painting over the coming weeks. If time and weather permit, I'll get outside to paint. But if not, I'll be working in my studio on the one thing I know will help me when I am outside. That is how to quickly mix the green I'm seeing. It isn't easy mixing green....(but you can't get that song out of your head now!) ;-)
Cheers,
Linda
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