This one is a little better. The water is a bit over worked, and the cracks are darker than I like. The trees… mmmm not sure. I do like the clump of grass in the lower right though.
I think I unlocked a bit of understanding on the rippled water. I was afraid of painting them when the paper is too damp, because the pigment feathers when you do. But you can easily fix the feathering with a dry brush going in the direction of the ripples. This is something Ron demonstrates, but I haven’t seen it work until today. Because I was afraid of the paper being too wet, I let it get too dry when I put down the ripples. This caused hard edges on the ripples which were distracting. Because I followed my rules and used a strongly staining pigment, I couldn’t soften the edges later, so I had to put down another layer on top, and feather that layer manually. I got a bit aggressive after putting down those and tried to really pull some of the pigment off by washing with clean water, and even using a rag to try to pull some pigment away. It ended up not completely ruining the painting – but I got very close to giving up on it again. I decided to just live with it, and hoped that painting the reflections would cover up some of those mistakes. It turned out to work ok. I had to saturate the reflection more than I wanted, but that seems ok because the water is more saturated as well. In the end, I think it turned out ok.
The sky I like again, and it took almost no effort or time. Maybe I’m finally getting a feel for skies.
The distant trees I like as well – though the reflection ended up getting overworked as I added that second layer of ripples.
The rocks I think are toned well. I like the light colors shining out from the shadows, but the shadows themselves are a bit of a hodgepodge. Because the shadows are coming from cliffs that are off the paper, it is hard for me to really know what their structure should be, so I just tried to pretty closely follow the lines in the sample painting. I think I did an ok job, but the contrasting dark cracks end up feeling cartoonish to me.
I don’t have a whole lot to say other than I found that perinone orange looks frighteningly garish against indie blue when it’s wet. But as it dries if it mingles with wet indie blue as it dries, it tones down a lot into a respectable warm brown. You can see this in the warm tones on the distant trees.
When I finished the painting (or got as close as I could to Ron’s painting, I found the cliffs to be much too flat for my liking. So I went in and added some more shadows to try to give some mass to the rocks on the cliffs. I also added some grasses on the cliffs with indie blue.
The sky and water are indie blue and phthalo blue.
The cliffs are indie blue and perinone orange at the rear. The near cliffs are new gamboge and quin purple. The shadows are phthalo blue and a convenience purple from French U.M. and cad red. The reflection is mostly sap green, with some convenience blue for shadows.