In this video I'm going to paint this picture for you. It's a sun
rising over a derelict furniture warehouse in eastern Long Island,
so i want to try to use this underpainting as a way of setting up this lens flare idea.
I'll make the lights lighter than the base color and the darks darker let's
try to stay in the same warm key
the underpainting or priming color is done in casein an old-fashioned paint which
doesn't reactivate when it's re-wet so that casein priming will be a good base
layer for the watercolor and gouache painting i'll do over it i'm using
Zinc white, Azo yellow, pyrrol red, transparent orange iron oxide, prussian blue, cobalt teal,
and a little bit of ultramarine blue. Now i start to mix a tint of white with the yellow
to make that sky color a little bit lighter than it is in the priming
my inspiration for this effect of light and color are the photographs you find on
instagram of the lens flare effects where the light eats through the dark forms in the scene
and sets up a series of circles that are arranged on a diagonal axis from the light source
I'll start with a sky first and put some warm color approaching the white where the
sun is behind the tower trying to keep it all wet together while i do this gradient
And now i can start to put in the roof of the tower it's fairly light because it's close to the
supposed sunlight source that's hidden right behind that tower
That aggressively bright sunlight and the bright sky eats through all the forms including
the utility pole that is in the sky next to the tower that dull
orange on the tower is close to the color remaining from the priming nearby
i'm trying to hold this mental image as i look at the scene i'm getting
form ideas from looking at the scene here but i'm changing the color according to this
memory i have of an effect i've seen on photographs
I take a break and go across the street to get a closer look at the architecture of this Greenport
auditorium from the 1890s before the age of movies, but now of course stores furniture but
at one time this must have been the entrance so these lathe turned sunburst motifs under the tower
fish scale shingles.
It's been a furniture store a pretty long time
now i'm mixing a darker color as i get lower down and farther away from the sunlight effect
this will be some trees over on the right and i'm using sepia transparent orange iron oxide
and even a little blue as i get farther away from the light
it'll eventually get close to black farther away
but i'm dealing with these weird colors using a flat synthetic brush
even though those are green leaves i'm painting them red because they're near that hot sky
i like to have some really fine details in there like these
window cross bars for that i use a very thin synthetic pointed brush
there's some light reflected off that vertical window picking up the light of the sky
and i start using some cool colors to paint the cars down here on the street
the cars are near black or navy and the vertical planes are close to black but anywhere that the
planes face upward toward the sky it'll be picking up the light values of the sky
so i save some white for the window which is reflecting the sky in the distance
and switching to a light orange color for the objects against the sky these little insulators
are on the end of the wires i look at where the wire is coming from and where it's going
use a long haired rigger brush.Riggers are good for thin line work
and then that long flat for painting in some of the far street details
so here's the final result trying to get that idea of the lens flare moving through all the forms
both light and dark well i've brought the painting home i'm looking at it it's all that orange color
and the orange and the sky it's all sort of monochromatic and i want to get some
color movement so i've got some ultramarine blue some sepia and some magenta a cool red
and i want to mix a dark color and do something that you're not supposed to do with gouache
and that's glaze over it with a wet wash i know what's going to happen it's going to
melt all the color below but i don't care i just want to try something crazy here
so i'm going to mix a dark color kind of toward the violet range and as long as i
put the color down don't fool with it too much it should stay there so it settles into the pits
i can't go back and scrub this i got to lay it down one time and leave it sort of beating
up in a weird way but i gotta leave it and let's let it get nice and dark over here
these far trees sort of dripping down there in the middle
it's okay i can try to fix that i want to lighten it up as it gets toward the top of that tower
so i'll use a thin air wash mostly water a thin amount of pigment
so normally you can't get away with glazing and gouache because the gum arabic binder
is so unstable and that would be even true if i was working on paper but because i have the
casein priming that offers less grip for the layer
of gouache so it dissolves very very easily it's very fragile
how about if i introduce some crosswalk paint in a cool gray as a contrast to all the warms up above
it should be in perspective going back
now i want to make the sky lighter too it's
too orangey and if i can take some this is casein paint i'll mix a tint of blue
and make it sort of semi-transparent a little bit milky
mix a little yellow as i get closer to the sun
but this way the sky isn't so orange on the outside areas
the idea is i want to save the brighter orange colors for the vicinity of the sun
i can paint fairly loosely over that utility pole because i can always come back and paint the pole
over the sky so i'll just loosely paint over this not worry about about the edges too much
a little bit of white a little bit of blue
and i don't need to be very precise here i can paint over the tops of the trees
because i can come back later and paint the foliage back over the dry sky paint
this is something that you get used to doing when you work a lot in opaque
water media is painting across edges
the french had an idea called the Theory of Sacrifices in the 19th century the idea is
you have to sacrifice information or detail in order to get a larger moody statement
as one writer put it nature instills sentiments in the spectator through
the selective sacrifice of details in order to improve the overall effect
so what i'm sacrificing here are the smaller details of the windows and the architectural
details of the building instead to get the big silhouette with just a hint of smaller detail
classic example of this theory of sacrifices would be the Song of the Lark by Jules Breton.
and here's where the sun will be it'll actually burn through the color of the
wires too this should be some of the hottest color the brightest orange
and the edge could even be fairly soft because you know how bright it is when you look at
the sun and it's just emerging from behind the building it almost hurts to look at it
you can even soften that edge rub it a little bit
and when that dries i can come back with some pastel and make it even lighter here i've got an
in-brush gradient meaning i've got colors that are different on one side of the brush than another
it's sort of white on the right and orange on the left if you want to learn more
about in-brush gradients or gradients in general i'll put a link in the upper right
it'll take you to the DVD and the download for my new video on gradients.
Now let's go over and paint some more wires and clutter in the right hand side as we look down
the street there's a lot of street furniture as they call it a lot of cables wires leaves trees
all breaking into the sky and overlapping the bright glow of the sky in the distance
and now that i've got the sky laid down i can come back in and put in those wires
I'm drawing that long line with a rigger brush the long haired brush it's mentioned in the
description below
Now put your headphones on because i want to experiment with something here there
are two microphones capturing the contact noises you should hear this on the right
and then i'll do something in the center
this is Carb-o-thello pastel. Qould you like to hear a whole video that's just
ASMR noises just the sound of painting and no talking? Let me know in the comments
so now we have that violet color dropping down as a contrast with the bright yellowish orange
and hopefully that makes a little bit more of a
a movement of color that's more interesting this is a Carb-o-thello pencil
a little highlight along that wire
and some light on the street
some blue pastel gouache has enough of a matte surface that you can use
soft pastels or hard pastels to get interesting effects
including these circular ghosting artifacts of the lens flare
which line up along this diagonal to the point of the sunlight just behind the tower these are often
seen as circular shapes against the dark background sometimes they're polygonal
and the more elements a lens has the more of these ghosting artifacts will appear
and they happen because of internal reflections within the lens elements now you might ask why
put this into a painting because our eyes don't exactly see it that way just playing
just trying out this visual look that we accept as photographic
and doing it as an observational sketch
and if there's one takeaway from this video it's that
a sketchbook can be a place for trying out crazy combinations of colors
combinations of paints and light effects that you want to explore. It's just a playground for ideas
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