Painting process | Just Off Tom Roberts Road
My painting shows the harsh sunlight and untidy bush near Corowa, NSW, where Tom Roberts painted Shearing the Rams. I visited in January as a kind of artist pilgrimage. The original shearing shed burned down long ago, but a replica now stands nearby. This stretch of bush is rich in the history of Australian painting, and visiting it inspired me to paint this piece.
In my painting, two figures walk towards the shed. They are intentionally ambiguous, standing in for the settlers, artists, and others who have moved through this bush before me.
I wanted this painting to feel intriguing, and almost mysterious as you come up with your own story of where the two figures are going and why. I wanted to capture the intense heat of the day, the crisp crackling grasses underfoot and the dry summer wind in the trees.
Preparatory sketches
I start with small thumbnail sketches to mainly explore composition and values. Here, I’m working out where the highlights, midtones and darkest values are. Unusually, the blue sky is darker than the sunlit ground which has been messing with my brain!
In this sketch, I am working with the golden ratio to place the objects within my scene and design a compelling composition. I moved the figures around and added the hut in, which in real life was actually elsewhere. I’m also designing how I lead the viewer’s eyes from the figures to the hut within the painting, by strategically placing the trees and shadows.
This is a larger sketch bringing together my ideas for the painting. I’m not worrying about detail or colour here, but making sure that the piece works in simple black and white.
Looking back at this sketch now, I’m loving the rapidness of the mark-making and I’d like to take this feeling into my future paintings.
Here is a monochrome value study sketch for my painting. There’s no technical reason for the blue versus brown choices but to emphasise the different planes of the ground and trees.
This is a colour study I did to explore colour choices for the final painting. This painting gives me the opportunity to make mistakes, reflect and adjust for the final piece. I went for a cool green leaning blue sky which gives the entire painting an eerie feel that I ended up correcting for the final piece where I used a more purple leaning blue for the sky (I added some red, but the blue is still cool).
Preparing the canvas
The next step is preparing my canvas for the final painting. The yellow one is for this painting. I chose a warm, bright yellow to enhance the harsh, intense feeling of the Australian sun. The colours in the painting will have a lot of cool tones so this background creates an unifying feeling of glowing warmth through the painting and a nice warm/cool contrast that I wanted to play with. Working on a mid-value background helps me to correctly judge darks and lights. Before the coloured ground I added 3 coats of gesso to make the canvas more robust and create movement through texture.
The Painting
This is the under-painting. The gridlines that I’ve drawn are along the golden ratio and help me place the elements within the composition. I’ve started defining darks and lights here, instead of getting into detail.
Now I’ve started adding colour very slowly and precisely based on my studies. I’ve purposely left the yellow background showing through the blue sky if you look closely, and I maintain this for the final piece.
This is the completed first layer of the painting. I’ve blocked in the colours, but much more variation is now needed.
I then started painting detail and texture in the foreground. I kept this suggesed instead of meticulously detailed, so if you look close-up it’s a jumble of brushstrokes but from a distance it looks like bark, sticks and grass.
I’ve worked my way across the front of the canvas adding variation in the shadows and sunlit areas. I enjoyed adding texture to those untidy Aussie gums and capturing the harsh summer sunlight.
Now I’ve moved to the mid-ground, working on adding trees, branches and capturing the sun hitting them.
Here I’ve started bringing dark greens into the treetops to create depth.
I’ve continued to add definition to the leaves, adjust the horizon line and adjusted the shape of the hut.
And finally I’ve had the guts to tackle the two figures and start modelling the sun hitting their hats and shirts. I wanted the white shirt to look like it’s slightly transparent and billowing off hit back slightly. They’re meant to be intriguing and make you wondering who they are and where they’re heading.
Here I’ve done a second pass of the foreground, with even more texture added particularly to the left hand foreground tree’s bark. I’ve layered paint to create movement and depth in the leaves.
I’ve added detail where I want the viewer to look. I’ve spent time making sure the tree trunks along the line to the hut feel grounded and the shadows believable. I’ve added a sense of the vertical timber on the hut and then faded the detail out in the background.
And finally, it’s signed and finished! Some subtle definition added to the figures and hut as a last touch.
The finished painting
Big thanks to my husband and father-in-law for being my unwitting models!
"Just Off Tom Roberts Road", 76x61cm, oil on canvas.
Here’s a close-up detail of the two figures. You can also see how I’ve built up the texture in the ground to look like the mess of sticks, grass and bark of the bush floor.
A detail shot of the base of the foreground gum tree. While the painting looks very detailed from a distance, close-up it’s actually layers of brushstrokes and texture.
This is a close-up of the hut amongst the trees. Painting the hut was a push and pull of how much detail to include, and how much to leave to the imagination.
My messy, messy palette for this painting!
My palette for the first layer!
This painting was so much fun to create. I loved intentionally designing the composition, including a sense of story in it and challenging myself to create the illusion of detail without getting bogged down in it.
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