Painting process | Summer Sunset in the Vineyards, Adelaide Hills

This is the process for my painting of a golden summer sunset in the Adelaide Hills wine country. It was the red barn that first caught my eye and compelled me to paint this scene. But, what made it really special (other than being night two of my honeymoon!) was that low, hot, golden light filtering across the fields and vines.

I wanted my painting to feel warm and inviting, like you’re having a glass of something wonderful on the veranda while watching the colours change on the hills. I also wanted the red barn to act as a beacon for your attention, pulling your eye into the distance.

Preliminary sketches and studies

This was a very tricky panoramic shape that took a fair bit of trial and error to get the composition to work. The slope of the top of the foreground vineyards, posts and gate point towards the red barn and the trees frame the picture to keep your eye within.

I wanted the barn and its orange paddock to be the lightest part of the painting after the sky, to draw us to look at it specifically. Distilling such as vast scene down into five values (shades of black and white) is quite a mental challenge. The foreground and most of the vineyards and hills are dark and in shadow to create contrast and emphasise where the sun hits. I don’t want the foreground to distract.

Here’s a little colour study I did, giving each value a colour while maintaining the light-to-dark hierarchy. A brightly lit red barn is tough to paint - too much white and it’s too pink, but too much yellow and it’s an odd orange.

The painting process

I chose to tone the canvas in a sunny warm yellow to embed the entire painting with that sunset glow. In this photo you can see my drawing and how I’ve mapped out the big dark shapes that I had planned in the sketches.

This is the first layer finished. I used my studies as references to choose the colours. It looked pretty crazy until I added the dark greens! Here the foreground brown isn’t quite dark enough, which I adjust later.

Here you can see I’ve started adding variation within those big blocks of colour, and resolving how they interact. I’ve started placing the rows of vines and highlights on the trees to distinguish them from each other.

At this point I’ve started working on the background hills, indicating trees without creating too much detail so it still feels distant. I kept these parts very loose and actually didn’t retouch the left side.

I started adding in the foreground posts, which all ended up being in the wrong place and had to be repainted!

Here you can see how much work I’ve done in the foreground, adding texture to the grasses and definition to the vines. This took three more goes to get right.

I layered variations of greens in little blobs of paint to create the illusion of the sun filtering through the rows of vines in the illuminated part of the vineyard. This was a ‘trust the process’ moment where I followed my intuition to suggest form without painting it literally.

After avoiding it, I finally turned my attention to the red barn. For such a large painting, this was actually a bit tricky to paint with such tiny detail. I had to come back again once it dried to refine the shape. I was happy with the colour I ended up using for a ‘lit-up red’ - it’s not too pink, not too orange and I think it reads as red in sunlight.

I also added highlights to the tree trunks and tops, bringing the light through the painting.

Finished!

“Summer Sunset in the Vineyards, Adelaide Hills”

152 x 76cm, oil on canvas.

This is the biggest painting I’ve ever painted! I’m feeling very at home painting big and I’m excited to keep at it.

In the final touches I worked on the darks in the trees, adding highlights to the vines for texture and refining the barn. I also knocked back the intensity of the orange in the sky so it didn’t compete with the orange fields.

Details

Here you can see the detail on the two gum trees, and the yellows, pinks and oranges in the leaves and purple-pink trunks. The background distant hills are painted very loosely to suggest detail.

I really enjoyed layering the dark and light greens to create texture and suggest form in the vines. The foreground demanded detail but it needed to be subtle so as not to draw attention. There are actually so many shades of green, blue and purple in the posts which really surprised me.

And here you can see the barn, in its glowing rainbow field. In the foreground, I only hinted at the wire for the fence.

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