Creating a mood

Before returning to Florida, Sarah and I spent a few weeks in our Flat Rock, North Carolina studio after returning from filming new episodes of our PBS television series "Painting and Travel" in Montana and Wyoming. It had been a wet summer in the North Carolina mountains and the greenery was quite intense. I tried to get the feel of that dampness in this new painting.
Roger



I started with a 16x20" Masonite board and sketched the house in charcoal.



Then I began to lay in the large shapes and dark values and also added a warm sky with very little color to represent the overcast quality of the day.



More colors were added to begin the block in of the house and roof with a combination of warm and cool colors to give a subtle indication of where the light was coming from.



Here I began to refine the painting and tighten up the details in the trees by adding negative areas. There was little detail in the grassy areas and I wanted to leave that portion simple so as to bring more attention to the small details in the house. I used my Tri-Art acrylic paints from the Jack Richeson Company. I believe a combination of Chromium Oxide green and various warm colors like burnt sienna and reds were used to get the darker grass colors. Then a bit of Cadmium yellow light was used in the grass to get a warmer patch of diffused sunlight in the finished piece. The acrylics have a great advantage of being to scumble over areas of dry paint as opposed to oils where those colors would mix.



This is the reference photo I used for the painting taken on my iPhone.


Here's the finished painting.