Landscape Painting--Improving color harmony (day 3)

"Goshen Field Study #2", Oil on Panel, 7x12 inches
Jerry Lebo, 2007

"Bad artist copy. Great artist steal."

Pablo Picasso

Okay, it is day three of using myself as the guinea pig. Two days ago I posted the below landscape study--and set about trying to find ways to improve it. I started with taking a look at composition--and yesterday worked through of review of tones and tonal range.

Day three started with high hopes. I had promised we would look at color today, so I woke up early this morning with my paints and easel ready to go out for some field painting. Unfortunately, it was raining and cloudy. My plan had been to go out and show you how to prepared a color harmony study out in the field--but the clouds put an end to that. Not to worry, I have another approach that you may find useful. Steal them.

I should give Scott Christensen some credit for the approach I am about to describe--since he gave me the idea in his DVD where he steals a color harmony from one of his own studies and puts it in another composition. I have put a twist on this approach. My thinking was, why steal from yourself--when you can steal from someone who is a better painter? I am not talking about stealing someone elses painting or even copying something they have painted--I am talking about taking the basic color scheme from one painting and using it in your own. Let me show you what I mean.

First, you need a painting that is worth stealing from. In this case, the painting I chose is by Dennis Miller Bunker, a friend of John Singer Sargent and student of William Merritt Chase. I didn't know much about his work until I saw a painting of his at the National Museum of American Art several months ago as part of the "Masterworks from the American Art Forum Collection". The show closed at the end of July, but I managed to get a electronic picture from the Internet that is available for educational purposes.

"Pines beyond the Fence", oil on canvas, 28 ¾ x 21 ¼ inches.
Dennis Miller Bunker, 1886, Private Collection

The reason I chose this picture is that it reminds me of a hot summer day in Maryland. The foreground is very similar to the fields around my house, since we have been having a dry spell--and I like the way there is a solid color harmony throughout the painting. I can imagine going out and finding this view in my neighborhood. So let's steal the color harmony and see if it will work for our study.The first thing you need to know is what to steal. As J.F. Carlson says in his book, "Every good picture is fundamentally an arrangement of three or four large masses--a design of differing masses or large blocks of color--light, dark, and half dark or half light." So what does this mean for us? Basically, we only need to find the larger blocks of color--determine the three main variations within these blocks, and see how to adapt these to our own painting. In the case of my Goshen Field Study, I need the following: (i) light, dark, and half light of the foreground tree; (ii) light, dark, and half light of the background trees; (iii) colors of the sky and farthest tree/mountains; and (iv) light, dark, and half light of the ground plane. So let's get these from Bunker's painting.

I mentioned the other day, I just bought a HPA510 photosmart printer which prints pretty accurate colors right out of the box. So I took Bunker's painting into Photoshop on my computer and sampled (using the eye dropper tool) various points in the painting to get a sense of the color. I essentially took 10 color samples as follows: (i) highlight of the right hand pine (foreground tree) and the mid-tone; (ii) the highlight of the left hand tree (background tree) and its mid-tone; (iii) two points in the sky (high and low) and the mountain on the left (peeking through); and (iii) three points in the ground plane--foreground warm color, dark, and color farthest back as it meets the trees. I took each of the sampled colors and printed them out on my printer on a 4x6 photo paper. Here is a picture of what it looked like.

I taped these around a print out of bunkers painting in front of my easel, for easy reference. You will see the two on the right are the highlight and mid tone of the right hand tree. On the left closest to the painting are the background tree highlight and mid tone. The ground plane colors are at the bottom.

I then took around 15-20 mins. mixing each of these colors from my usual palette of Sap green, ultramarine blue, cad. red, and light yellow--plus titanium white. Here is a shot of the palette I was using for the ground plane and tree colors (I had another palette set up for the sky and mountain colors).

Once I had the colors mixed, it was time to start painting. I ended up doing two paintings from this palette. The first was a copy of my previous study in the new colors. The second was a new painting, which I will post tomorrow.

So can using "borrowed" color harmonies improve you painting. You be the judge, here is the previous study and new painting side-by side.

Here is where we left it yesterday.

And here it is with the new color harmony, thanks to Dennis Miller Bunker.

What do you think? Send me your comments. I will post the other painting I did from this palette tomorrow--which I think turned out even better--since I was not constrained by my previous study and was able to play with the composition a bit.

Until then, all the best. Sixtyminuteartist.