Light Amongst the Clouds
September, 2024 (original sketch) - March 28,2025 (finished painting)
Watercolor sketches are almost always my starting point for an oil painting.
For this piece, I decided to go with a 11”x14” birch panel. It was an unfinished panel, so I had to throw some layers of gesso on first. Once the gesso was dry, I started with a rough sketch.
Next I threw on some basic color, keeping everything very loose and brush-y. I start out very fast and loose so that I don’t lose the original energy and keep things expressive as I refine things throughout the process. It also helps me to not be too precious with the piece.
At this point, I’m trying to figure out how to express the forms of all the various subjects and starting to introduce variation in color. I think this phase is always where I start questioning if I even know how to paint. The early middle stages end up looking like a kid’s 4th grade art project (at least for me).
At this stage, I’m adding more color variation in and just generally refining what I’ve already blocked in.
Late middle phase muddiness. Always happens for me working alla prima (my palette is an absolute mess of colors and ancient dried paint). I like when it gets muddy and dark because you can start introducing saturated highlights back in and they start to really pop.
And the saturated highlights for the win. They really work to pull the subject (the top of the island) forward from the background. Introduced cool blues and warm greys to the rocky underside of the island with big brushy strokes to better express the form of the shadow shapes. Also I thing that adding in the other floating bits of floating rock really helped this composition make more sense and added that initial energy back into the painting.
The final steps are always fun. Finally decided exactly where the light is motivated from (upper left) which let me add in the final shadow shapes and highlights. Spent probably an entire hour just smearing paint around while I figured out what I wanted the sky-ship to look like. Towards the end of that process I pulled out my palette knife and just scraped away what I’d been doing and within 10 minutes I had the finished ship. Never be afraid to erase, scrape away, or paint over.
