Landscape/Plein Air Painting Lessons

"Aspen Grove Study_01"

By Jim Thomas

The exciting "raw nerves" part of the painting, blocking in the first primitive shapes. This is why I call this "discovery." It requires nerve, and discretion. It is easy to over do. It is tempting to try and make these lines look like trees too soon.

I mixed some gray color using white, raw umber and a little black. The small picture, upper left, shows my very first stroke, a sightly off-center thin line which will become a tree later on. Right now all it is is a design element, breaking up the flat surface. I deliberately made sure that each panel had one tree that touched the top and the bottom. This makes sure that each panel has some element with a foreground.

06/12/03...

My first step in this session was to paint a basic dark strip through the background of the picture. This band of color represent what will eventually become the distant void of the forest. Some hint of distant trees, stumps and more may be apparent and I develop it later. It is undefined right now but necessary so I have something to paint over later. For this I used olive green right out of the tube

From there, using some of the left over paint - the olive green, I added some yellow ochre and a little Naples yellow to create this next darker tone, which I painted in as the forest ground. This color is not critical, only necessarily somewhat dark as it will serve only to be visible beneath the future grass and texture. Ninety per cent of our goal right now is to paint out the background color. It falsely affects what we now see

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