Sky Land COLOR

Advanced Drawing and Painting

"Each of these luminous and mysterious images of trees against sky, field, and river evoke a subtle variation of light and atmosphere. The arrangement of the trees - whether standing in solitude or in pairs or in large groupings seem at once inevitable and yet surprising, formal yet accidental. All of these paintings are comprised from memory, imagination and thumbnail sketches from my beautiful basement studio in my home in Connecticut. I work on wood board, paper and canvas using several layers of gesso before priming the surface with cadmium red base, a quick sketch using charcoal is used to lay out the design then the paint is applied. I work in layers using thinned down oil color, building on these layers with glazing techniques the colors are adjusted and brought up to completion before final coats of varnish are applied. Light has come to play an important part, and when I look back over this body of work, I feel it speaks about spiritual places, places that contain a quiet inner light, radiating an ethereal whisper, the places we see every day."

- William McCarthy

See more works by William McCarthy 

Your next assignment is to create an acrylic landscape that experiments with the layering of color to create a luminous atmosphere.   William McCarthy takes photographs and draws thumbnail sketches of landscapes that have an appealing composition or beautiful lighting.  He then goes back to the studio and creates a landscape that may or may not be representational.  Some artists would prefer only to paint outside looking at the natural world and how the sun affects it, there are many ways to create a landscape or seascape. You can be inspired by a sunset, but not want to duplicate it.  There is no right or wrong way to approach drawing a natural setting it would be ideal to pause the perfect sunset so you can paint what you are seeing, but you can't.  
For this project focus on:

• ·         Creating a composition that has at least 60 percent sky so the horizon line falls below the center of your piece.  This will allow you to focus on creating an interesting sky and you can layer colors in larger areas.

• ·         Choose a color scheme that includes tints with accents of other more intense colors.

• ·         Search for a landscape or seascape that inspires you, but that you aren’t “copying”.  You can use a photograph you or someone you know took.   You wont be duplicating them, but observing the colors, shapes, texture of the sky.  You can also combine images from a variety of photographs to create the one you like.  

• ·         Abstract if you like.  This painting could be a very abstract one with barely any details if you choose, but you need to have a beginning reference.  

Vocabulary List & Assignment