We're at the cell phone waiting lot at New Jersey Newark airport
and since we're going to be here for half an hour so, I want to do a painting of the control tower
which we have a great view of right here at the cell phone lot. A few days ago i did a
blue sky gradation standard sort of blue sky using casein paint on this watercolor paper.
The first step is to do a careful pencil drawing to work out the basic placement of everything
and that casein under layer won't reactivate even if i put wet layers on top of it.
This method of painting a sky gradation first and painting the clouds over the
dry paint was something that was done by the Hudson River School painters
and a lot of painters before the impressionist era and it's very
adaptable to working in water media but you could also do the same thing in oil
i try to leave some areas of open blue sky and to keep the clouds in perspective as they go back
and the basic idea i want to get across and this is the idea of painting background to foreground
this is one of the simplest and oldest principles of landscape painting the
idea is that you start with whatever's farthest away and you paint the layers as you get closer
so the farthest away thing would be the blue sky then the clouds
and then really the next thing should be the tower because that's behind these
trees so i'll do the tower next
and it's a tan color in shadow so kind of a warm gray
and you'll notice that i painted that those clouds over the edge of the tower
so that as i paint the details of the tower i can overlap the strokes
put in these little antennas with a pencil
the paint is dry enough now this gouache is dry enough that i can draw on it with a pencil
and then use a very small fine pointed sable brush to correct these lines
okay working my way forward from the sky to the clouds to the tower to the trees
on the left i can paint these trees on the right and then the fence now this seems to be some kind
of highly secure parking lot just beyond the cell phone lot which has a guard booth and
barbed wire fence and a concrete divider around it and there's a set of lights above the parking area
that just barely overlap the tower now as i paint forward from the trees i'm doing
the chain link fence and i don't want to paint all those individual wires so i'm just painting
the tree color a little bit lighter and grayer to suggest the effect of looking at those chain links
And then the final thing would be the concrete barrier with the stripes
and then there's the final painting. So... background to foreground: old tip
in landscape painting.
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and there's another related video on the lower left and a playlist with more gouache paintings.