(staccato drum beats)
(building drums)
(bird calls)
We’ve pulled our bikes over
on Spring Farm Road, a gravel road
leading up over a hill.
And I wanna get the bicycles
into the sketch, since it's part
of the storytelling.
I use a graphite pencil to draw the shapes
of the road back in perspective.
(birds chirping)
I’ve just a few colors of watercolor
and gouache.
White, yellow ochre
and then a scarlet pyrrol, cerulean.
(bristles rustling)
Now I’m placing some of the tones
of the road and the dead grass
on the hillside
using this big flat brush.
I want to just have the large, flat shapes
laid down, and then I can add
some of the textures
in the smaller details later.
(bristles softly scratching)
Now, the cerulean and the scarlet pyrrol
will make not exactly a violet, but
at least a fairly dark gray
and I can use the edge of this flat brush
to draw the trunks of the trees,
which are backlit on the side of the road.
Just drop them in like big rectangles.
'Course I’ll add the branches later, but
I can just do the basic trunk
of the tree now.
There’s also a dark gully
way over on the right, behind this post.
And it has light branches
against the dark.
(soft rustling)
(bristles scraping)
Here we go,
yeah, light lines for the branches.
Now while I have that gray on the brush
and it's drying on the bristles
of the brush, I can dry-brush it
across the sky
to get that feeling of light branches.
Also on the road, there’s a lot of texture
on this gravel road.
And across the road there’s some
cast shadows from those trees
and the cast shadows help
give space and distance to the road.
Actually, there's a couple trees
growing next to each other.
People have been jogging by
and walking by.
Be nice to have a figure on the road
to help give scale to the distance.
At this point there's so much detail
in these delicate branches,
I can’t get it all in.
But I want to get the bicycles
more or less at least suggested
so I show the handlebars and the wheels.
(birds chirping)
The sign directing people to
walk to the left.
And for these branches I just use
a long, fibered round brush and
kind of jiggle it around to get a tangle
of small branches.
(delicate piano crescendo)
To me, any painting of a road
suggests a journey.
The painting takes us from
the familiar foreground,
from the places we can see
to the places we can’t see.
(heartfelt chords building)
(piano fades)
Hi, hope you enjoyed,
there’s lots more videos
at any of these buttons, and
this is just a sample of a longer form
DVD or download that you can get
at those buttons that say
Kunaki or Gumroad in the "about" section.
Thanks for coming by!
(machinery clanking)