Articles

This one was done several months ago.  The focus of this painting was to practice blending in two separate photo references, the mountain and the Army vehicles.  Up to this point most of my paintings had been modifications to various single photo references, primarily in the "Military Aviation" section of this website.  Also, I do not have much experience with landscapes.  If I wanted to get better I would go outside and practice, but life gets busy and I usually don't get around to painting until about 1-2 hours before I hit the bed in the evening.  So photo references are my fallback.  

1.  Started by tracing the vehicles from a photo reference on a made-up hill, moving the farther vehicle down to show some distance and movement over the top of the hill.  The mountain reference was a small piece from a larger photo.  

2.  Next, I filled in areas of darker value with burnt umber to have something other than the white canvas showing through the painting.

3.  I filled in some initial shadow tones since most of the painting is in shadow with the light coming from behind and to the side of the mountain and vehicles.

4.  The challenging part was the value range and differences between the light and shadow of the mountain.  The value range is small since it's affected by atmospheric effects and the sun low on the horizon.  The snow in the shadow has titanium white, cerulean blue, and phthalo blue.  The snow in the light sunlight is titanium white with a touch of orange and alizarin crimson.  The other value challenge was trying to make the background sky lighter than the mountain snow shadows but darker than the mountain snow light areas.  The colors used were titanium white, cerulean blue, and orange.  The vehicles and hill have the largest value range, darkest darks and lightest lights since they are in the foreground.

5.  Added details into the vehicles, hillside, and lightened up the fog bank.  The hillside is completely made up.  Looking at some references of light hitting hills on the internet gave me all I needed to throw some paint down on the hillside to show where the light was coming from. 

Overall this one was interesting to do.  It posed some good challenges with value and color.