Second Beach, Newport by Worthington Whittridge: Session 5
:: my setup in the gallery ::
At the end of the last session, I had left off finishing the bottom left-hand side of the sky. This is because I like to work on important edges with everything being wet, and the edge between the sky and rocks and hills are VERY important edges. The edges of the hills and the large central rock vary in quality, some are soft, some hard, and some were laid down with pigment and medium that eventually lends a bit of transparency to the edges after the painting is fully cured.
Even though I knew most of my attention for this session would need to focus on how the sky meets the land, I spent the first hour of the day, going back and refining the large cloud masses first.
Once I felt the values and cloud formations were close enough in the upper sky, I began the task of working on the lower left-hand clouds and how the landscape connects with the sky.
As clouds recede in the distance, the whites actually get warmer in color where when land recedes the landscape gets bluer, so a lot of warm yellows were used for this portion of the sky. And for this painting I have been using a lot of yellow ochre, Old Holland's Gamboge Lake Extra, and Venetian Red. Colors that are not regularly on my studio palette, but colors I have really been enjoying with this painting.
The sky got to where I wanted it to be for the time being, so I began to move forward with the middle field landscape. Working the large central rock and the adjacent slope and the hills.
The day was almost over when I realized that the central rock was too big and a bit too dark in value.... errrr, I hate it when I realize a mistake like this, and I only have a few moments to fix it before the end of the day and the time to start packing up is looming over me.
So in the last fifteen minutes, I scrapped down the top part of the central rock, blocked in the corrected mass, and lightened the value some and reworked the clouds some where they "touch" the rock.
For the next session, hopefully the central rock will look correct enough, that way I will not feel the need to work in that area of the painting, because I want to move onto the water and beach areas. I would like to get the entire painting covered with this first "refined" layer, because I know this painting will require another layer of refinement.
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Second Beach, Newport by Worthington Whittridge: Session 1
Second Beach, Newport by Worthington Whittridge: Session 2