painting from light to dark

Since I've moved indoors for the winter, painting-wise, I thought I'd share some work-in-progress photographs of a recent studio painting. 

For a long time I always started a painting with the darkest of darks, and then often struggled to keep my lighter colors clean as  I worked around the darks I'd already laid in.  In the past year or two I've loosened up a bit from my usual routine and now often begin to paint with the lightest colors first.  Which, in much of my recent work, show the most ephemeral and fleeting aspect of the landscape at hand, so it's a good thing to indicate on canvas immediately, since it will change very quickly.  Light on the water and cloud forms in particular, but also simply color.

This week I started a painting of the view down the hill from our house, from the dormer window in my attic studio.  I've painted many variations of this view and it always feels new, because of those ephemeral elements.  In this particular painting, I was anxious about being able to portray the colors of that day's sunrise, so I began with them:

I paint on white gesso to which I've added a bit of black acrylic paint.  This gives me a warm neutral gray to begin with.  So the only paint you see here is the pink-peach-orange I've mixed and laid in, roughly around where the clouds and landforms are going to go.  Often when I paint I begin with the thing I'm fearful about - just get right to it and tackle the hard thing first - then if the painting feels good from the start the rest flows easily (on good days).  Once I mixed the sky colors and painted them in, I worked on the clouds: 

The gray oil paint is darker and a bit warmer than the gray of the gesso.  This is an 18 x 24" canvas, on the easel I've had since I was an undergraduate art student.  One of my favorite sizes to paint on, and my favorite easel too.  Still working from light to dark, I put in the far horizons next:

I love trying to figure out what color those subtle blues are.  In the early morning they are soft and dark.   But the landforms in the foreground are almost black, and I want them to be really dark so they will anchor the painting and keep it from feeling too soft and floating away.  This is Fort Point, in the lower middle, and in the lower right corner, part of Cape Jellison here in Stockton Springs:

My underpainting is done with burnt sienna.  Even if I'm going to cover almost all of it up eventually, it still gives those rich hints of deep earthy red that are so apparent in the landscape.  More darks next - almost finished:

As I try to bring this painting to completion I start looking around for any little thing that's bugging me, and I make tiny adjustments accordingly.  Often these sniglets are nearly invisible, but to me they mean the difference between a painting that's resolved and one that isn't.  In this case I finished getting some really dark darks into the lower right corner, almost blue-black, and I made some corrections to the shorelines, and added some gray to the water in the foreground, to bring some of the cloud color down into the rest of the painting: 

Done.  Dawn view to Fort Point, Stockton Springs, Maine.  Here is a tidier, cropped version of the finished painting:

And one more photo, of my palette halfway through - delicious beautiful paint, I love it so:

On the palette was titanium white, cadmium yellow medium, burnt sienna, quinacridone red, ultramarine blue, payne's gray, and mars black.  I almost never use black straight from the tube - in fact for years it was never on my palette at all - but lately I've really liked the soft gray it makes when mixed with white and a bit of something else, so here it is.

Plein air painting in the warmth and comfort of my own studio - the best of both worlds.   Thanks for reading.