Painting process | December Dusk, Cornishtown
I was visiting family in Northern Victoria just before Christmas. I’ve long admired this majestic gum tree across from their place. I’d toyed with the idea of painting it for ages, but I couldn’t quite get it right.
At dusk it was finally cool enough to venture outside. I went for a lazy after-dinner walk down the dirt road past this paddock. A distant bushfire had turned the sky hazy and the colours vivid. The contrast of gold against the blue shadows was stunning. I climbed into the long grass to get a shot of this view. I knew I was finally going to paint it.
I wanted this painting to capture the golden light of an Aussie summer and how the heat dials up the colours.
Click the image above to watch the full time-lapse of this painting.
Preliminary sketches and studies
I started by experimenting with where to place the horizon line and how much land to include versus sky. I designed the composition so the lines of the grass and the arrangement of the straw bales radiate from the tree. I moved the three prominent stalks in the foreground so that they pointed to the tree in the background.
I went with the higher horizon line to create depth and draw the eye into the distance using the dark foreground grasses.
I separated the layers of grass into abstract shapes with distinct values. In these sketches, I experimented with different ratios for the final painting.
Next, I worked on how light and dark these shapes should be relative to each other. The first study gives a dark, almost stormy feel, while the second comes closer to the still dusk feeling I was after.
Finally, I painted this loose colour study. I used this study as my reference for the first few layers of the final piece.
The painting process
I drew the scene onto the canvas using thin layers of burnt sienna. I kept the abstract shapes from my sketches to map out the grasses as they recede through shadow and light.
This was the first layer of paint, completely blocked in. I was already happy with the vibrancy of the colours and the convincing light.
I didn’t add much more paint to the sky, and I left the orange underpainting to glow through.
The grasses are built up from many layered dashes of paint. I painted wet into wet, which helped to meld them together with soft edges. I wanted to avoid crisply painted individual blades of grass.
I built up the darks in the foreground to enhance the sense of depth in the painting and to break up the wall of grass into more natural clumps.
I struggled for a long time to get the closest straw bale to read as three dimensional. It’s such an odd shape, and without careful observation the eye can be easily misled. It took me many iterations to get it right.
I brought sky holes into the canopy and added variation of colour and texture into the field shadows. I refined the shapes of the distant straw bales so the perspective reads correctly. I brought purple shadows down into the foreground grasses so they relate to the rest of the field.
Finished!
"December Dusk, Cornishtown"
80 × 60cm, oil on linen
I loved building up the texture in this painting and really having fun with the colours. It was a joy from start to finish.
Details
Here, you can see the unexpected colours in the tree including purples, oranges and deep blues reflected from the sky. The sky is painted quite thinly so the orange underpainting shows through, which creates a glow in the light. I softened the edge of the hill against the sky for atmosphere.
There are so many bold colours in these grasses. The more I looked, the more I found. It was such a fun treasure hunt for me. Combining them in a way that still reads as a realistic paddock feels like magic. I hope to do more and more of this in my future work.
The grasses almost look like a bushfire themselves! The purple shadows really set off the yellow. I didn't paint each stalk but placed short brushstrokes of colour to create the illusion of volume and texture.
This painting is part of my new collection, which I will release on my website on 7 May.
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