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Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Croagh Patrick -- Paintings of Ireland

Croagh Patrick -- Finished Painting.
First step, I drew out the image, using a small paint brush and raw umber paint. Next step, I put in a sky of cerulean blue and white using large brushes. I can refine this later using smaller brushes, but for now it is fine. I mixed a variety of off-greens and semi-neutrals using ultramarine blue, cadmium yellow, and permanent mauve with lemon yellow. I also created dark browns using orange and ultramarine blue. I didn't use greens straight from the tube as I can vary the green colours easily by varying the proportions of the mixes. It makes for more varied colours, if I need them.
I created light grays in a bit of an unusual way but it worked out nicely. I mixed viridian green with permanent rose. I got a dark almost purple black and I used this on outlining the rocks. I mixed white with this to get a light gray for the side of the mountain. I didn't use any black in the painting. I might have used a little paynes grey in extreme dark areas.

Continuing on the rocks using the white grey colours.
It may look like there isn't so much happening at this stage but I have been working on the rocks to make them appear more natural and graduate the shadows from dark to lighter as they get further away. Also I have begun to green up the mountain using my ultramarine blue with cadmium yellow mix.
A lot of refining is going on at this stage - I have worked on smoothing out the sky brushstrokes and I have been going over the whole picture with alterations here and there to create a balanced look. What I actually do is a kind of instinctive thing, so difficult to describe, but it's mostly tweaking of colours and tones to make the sense of distance more apparent. Finally I put in the figures and signed the painting. The finished image is up the top of this post. Enjoy!

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