A photographer friend, Dana Smith challenged me to paint his beautiful photo of a stream in Oklahoma. There are several challenges this presents, so I may end up doing this several times before I get it right.
First I sketched a general drawing of the rocks and stream. I was tempted to mask out a lot, but decided on a different approach. I spattered some miskit into the background, and only put miskit on the hard whitesof the white water.
I painted the rocks first, using warm colors and scratching out some highlights with a credit card edge (you can also use a palette knife.) I also painted in some of the rocks all along the edge of the stream, which helped me find my way through the painting.
I put in a wash using French ultramarine blue and adding permanent rose to the water. In some of the darkest areas I added indanthrone. While waiting for it to dry, I put in a wash for the background, using new gamboge, quin gold, quin burnt orange, and some cerulean. I had my board tilted upside
down so that the paint could run vertically. I lightly salted to get some texture for the trees.
This looks pretty pale so far. I then removed the miskit from the water. I worked on darkening the shadows of the rocks.
For the water I tried to observe the direction of some of the waves, and began to layer in some of them using French ultramarine in some, pthalo in others. For some of the darkest water at the edges, I added some burnt umber to the ultramarine and some indanthrone. It's nearly impossible to paint in every wave, but do enough to show the direction the water is flowing. The waves farther up the river will be smaller, closer together, until they disappear.
The final step for the waveswas to lift and soften some of them if the miskit created too many hard edges.
I started a little on the background, laying in some vague distant bushes and trees, and finding where I want my middle ground to be. I painted in a little more of the shore on the right side. More about the background later.
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