Heart Land of America: A Mid-West Landscape
Collection of Harry Kuper Jr.
Step 1: I laid out the drawing and dropped in some paint for the sky. For my reference I am using a photograph taken in Clinton County Illinois. Joe loves to take photographs for me and he captured some very beautiful midwest scenes while we visited my family. For the drawing I break up the photograph by drawing the lines vertically, horizontally and diagonally.
Step 2: I applied friskett, using a toothpick, to the areas Where I wanted to preserve the white of the paper.
Step 3: I did my main washes and worked on the sky a bit more. I threw color on the fields and worked around the painting.
Step 4: I added the tree line, worked on the sky, the foreground and the fields in the middle.
Step 5: Finally I added the house and barn details, adjusted the values and added the foreground before removing the frisket of the tall grass.
This painting is the first in a series of the midwest.
Nice. I miss frisket even though it smells like fish. LOL
I love how you did the sky.
Do you paint going section by section?
Frisket does stink!
The sky is my favorite part, thank you.
I do and I don’t work section by section. This painting happened to have two main sections where the colors of each did not mix together so I did not throw down lots of colors all over the place like I would in a portrait or still life. I wanted the sky to remain pure blue and white. Otherwise I normally throw down all my colors and let them do what they do. Once that dries then I work around the painting, when a section gets too wet I move until it dries. I work very wet so I have to be careful with how much I work an area before it becomes a mess. I also work in layers. Take my self-portrait, I did not make the background that dark right away. I laid down one layer, getting as dark as I could, then while that dried I moved on to the face, when that was too wet, the hair, etc. Then either back to the face or the background, whichever, part needed more attention.
How do you work?