Painting Snow Hoodoos

Snow Hoodoos Near Balu Pass

    This is the second painting, just finished, from our Canadian backcountry travels, featuring one of my favorite things - hoodoos. Some of you may know hoodoos from the deserts and 'badlands' of our western states but snow can also make more temporary hoodoos.   
   Alberta has famous hoodoos out in the dry prairies near Drumheller. Travel west through the mountains, past the front ranges and into British Columbia where the snow is usually deep, to find snow hoodoos. I have seen hoodoos in Banff National Park, near the town of Banff, but deeper into British Columbia hoodoos are bigger and more easily found. They form over trees or rock and often have a mushroom shape where protected from wind.
   'Snow Hoodoos Near Balu Pass' takes us into the Rogers Pass backcountry. Rogers Pass area in the Selkirk mountains is well known to Canadian skiers for steep, avalanche filled valleys, spectacular scenery and challenging skiing.Snow here can be several meters deep and the sheltered valleys allow hoodoos to form.
   These hoodoos formed over rock outcroppings. They are 6-8 feet wide (2-3meters). Sometimes there is enough space under one to stand up inside it. Carefully!
   Beyond the hoodoos and out of sight in the painting is Balu Pass, a lovely open ridge surrounded by higher peaks with lots of open space for an afternoon of telemarking.

   This painting was started by doing a color palette to decide the basic range of colors and values.
Ken DeWaard , I'm thinking about values!

 
   Values from dark to light were made for three blues; cerulean, cobalt and ultramarine. Then I made samples of these colors with black added.

   Early stage of the painting I try to get the basic shapes and values. Still not very efficient with that so often redo it several times.

   What seems like a simple, one color snowfield quickly turns into a complex mix of shapes and values. Trying to keep it simple here but those details creep in all too soon. At this point I forgot about taking pictures for a while. I'll try to get more of each stage of development on another painting. This has been changed and changed again, before ending up as below. My photos don't show the values completely.

   

Deep snow, higher altitude and dry clear air can cause snow to intensify colors and seem luminous. The photo does not quite capture that so I'll keep trying to get better pictures.

 
 Now I'm doing sketches for figures, and thinking about where they will be placed in the scene. One of the pleasures of these paintings is the figures in them are my friends. This painting features Bob and Fritz. I make sketches of skiers in different positions, using a photo reference for how their clothes or packs look. My photos taken while negotiating trails and carrying a heavy pack are quickly snapped and oriented on the large expanse of scenery so figures tend to be small, dark and indistinct against the brilliant white surroundings and don't offer much information for later use.
   Once the figures are in the scene they bring perspective and scale to the long range view and the painting is finished. For now. It goes into hiding for a couple weeks, then I'll look at it again and check for anything that needs adjusting.
 

Snow Hoodoos Near Balu Pass 20"x16"

   Thanks for checking in. I appreciate comments! If you like this blog, please share with your friends and on FaceBook or other social media. Then, go outside and enjoy the day.

   

 

 

 

Sunrise On the Trail to Bow Hut

 

   This painting was a lot of fun! It's been many, many years since I've painted a wall sized mural and since starting to paint a couple years ago, have been using canvases no larger than 9x12 inches.  This 48x36" canvas was given to me by a friend. There are a lot of unused art supplies in people's closets, and I am the fortunate beneficiary this time.

   After preparing the surface, it was ready to become my first large painting. Time to paint!

   For many years we did extensive back country skiing in Canada. Everywhere we went offered spectacular scenery and lighting. Trying to get photos of the gorgeous light and colors wasn't possible with cold hands and a very basic camera and I always wanted to paint what I saw. The scene on this blog's home page is my first mountain painting (8x22") but the big canvas inspired me to do another backcountry scene.

   I started by making color samples and value studies.

   The photo reference was one hazy mass of vague shapes due to the glare from the low morning sun. Many ski trips found us far from the road by the time sunlight reached the valleys. This was a beautiful time to be in the trackless snow fields under towering peaks.

   There are numerous problems with the above value study; primarily the light is coming from all over the place! Hmmmm....should have looked a bit more closely before putting all that paint on....

 A few more value sketches were done then I just jumped in and laid out the idea on the big canvas.

      Building values.....

     I don't like the direction this is going. At this point I painted over much of it and made it much lighter in value, and changed the light to come from the left side of the picture. The sun is still behind the mountain, the night's clouds are breaking up and floating away in the warming (relatively speaking) air and each angle of slope reflects a different amount of light.

  

    This is starting to work better but it's a long way from finished. I've saved adding the people into the scene until now. There were seven of us on this trip but that was too many for this picture; but since everyone is bundled up and unrecognizable, we can each imagine we are there in the picture.

   By this time life got a bit complicated due to the need to wear a Big Black Boot for 6 weeks.

Suddenly I was very appreciative of Frieda Kahlo's  challenges, and her courage and commitment to her art.

   Oops, there are some awkward things going on with the clothes and positions of people, not apparent in this dark and blurry photo so this is still very much a work in progress. Shadows, clouds, people...all need some adjustments. Keep working!

   This painting took about two weeks to do. At this time it's 'finished'. The quotes mean it gets put away for a while, then taken out to review. Anything that shows up then gets fixed, or if it's the best I can do at this time, it's really done.

   Thanks for checking on this blog; Please share and let me know what you think.

Suitcase Art

  Disappointments can lead to some good things, so when my long planned trip to Arizona was cancelled the most symbolic object of the trip suddenly became an art project. Made in the 1940's, a dirty old suitcase, long stored in damp basement corners, suddenly had a purpose again.

   There were actually two suitcases; this is the smaller, second one, and shows the original condition of both suitcases.
   There was no plan, I just started painting.

   The desert appeared! I love acrylic paint; it sticks to almost everything and dries fast. That's good for painting things like suitcases, furniture, and more. I'm not concerned with making perfect art with this, I want color and I want to get my ideas out onto a surface. Later I might return and change things, or go on to make a painting on canvas that develops the idea into a more finished picture. Right now, I'm remembering the deserts I love and putting those southwest colors out where I can see them the rest of the snowy, white winter.

   Here's the sides:

   Leo the Cat likes the colors! I worked on the sides while deciding what to do with the pictures on the front and back. I went back and forth between the sides and the larger pictures.

   After the first side was done, it was left on the hearth near the wood stove to dry more quickly, then on to the back for another scene. This one is a view in Saguaro National Park, looking out to the southwest across a dry flat, to the mountains where Kitt Peak National Observatory http://www.noao.edu/kpno/ is located. 

   Here is the ready to travel suitcase. Even though I'm not going to see the desert this year, it was fun to visit it with paint.

Warner Creek Winter Reflections

   Warner Creek flows south along a rock wall that catches light only in the mornings. The low angle of winter light makes beautiful reflections along the cliff at this time of year. When the trees are leafy, the area is very shady but in winter it is bright and full of color.
   This pastel was started a while ago but I knew it had some problems. After Christmas several unfinished pastels, or ones that I was just not happy with, were taken out, set up where I could look them over and get comments from others as they walked by, and maybe finish. This was one of them.

   The dark areas need some softening. The reflections in the water and beautiful colors in the snow shadows were the reasons I was interested in the scene. The dark cliffs were distracting and the trees were a bit stark. A few careful changes brought it to a place I'm more happy with.

The trees, cliff and bridge are not competing with the water at this point. I might try this scene in oils and see what happens. The exposure on each of these photos is slightly different. Improving my photography skills is on the 'to do' list! 

Choosing Color Schemes For Your Coloring Book Pages

   Now that Kickapoo Colors (new edition is Nature's Colors) and A Day With the Horses have left home and are being enjoyed by so many people around the world (Australia, Germany, US, Canada!) I'm hearing from people with interesting questions I'd never thought of while making the drawings.

   One question several people have asked, in different ways, is how to choose colors. My illustrations are hand drawn from real life plants, animals and places, and maybe that leads the 'colorist' to think about coherent color combinations or planning color schemes rather than using any color anywhere on the picture. Which of course is just fine to do and often looks wonderful. But the question can lead to trying new ways to color and also learning how to use color for specific effects.

   Color schemes will influence mood. If you color to reduce tension or stress, think about how the colors you use may affect how you feel. This can be very subjective, so always trust your feelings but some general responses to colors are common to most of us. Bright, warm colors tend to bring energy up. Red, yellow, orange feel warm to look at and can increase anger or tension but also bring up energy if you need a boost from a low spot in life. Cool colors-the blues, greens, purples- tend to calm and cause cooler feelings. However, an interesting fact is that pink is the most calming color. It is used in prison and institutions on walls for this reason. I have personally seen this work. I was managing the renovation of a clinic and had the walls painted a soft pink, to the painter's consternation. However, over the two years I used the clinic, only one person noticed the color of the walls but many people, including executives who toured the facility, commented on how "relaxing and comfortable" the office felt. I repeated the experiment in a charter school for high school students. Again the construction workers and painters were shaking their heads about the color choices! But over the years the teachers felt the pink color did have an effect on the general mood in the rooms.

   I am especially fond of colored pencils for the variety of techniques they can produce and the detail possible. However some people use markers and other media very expressively. More on coloring materials later.

Try them all! Here are a few ideas about setting up color schemes for a coloring book picture. Try each one and see what ones work best for you.

   Dark colors lower any energy of a color. Too much dark is usually not inviting. Be aware that there is much more light in a night scene than we think. Remember Van Gogh's 'Starry Night' painting? http://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/vincent-van-gogh-the-starry-night-1889  Look at it again to see the colors he used to great effect. In 'A Day With the Horses' one picture is of the horses in a field under the starry sky. This can be very effectively colored with middle value colors if they are all similar. Use blues, grays, and gray-green, blue-green, etc. to give a night time feel to the picture.

   Now, here are a few specific ways to choose colors:

   Look at paintings you like for color combination ideas. It could be any subject and even any style of painting. Abstract or realistic, modern or a great master's work; the same type of flower or animal but maybe even a fantasy picture would do. What you're looking for are color combinations that make you happy to look at. Pinterest art boards, https://www.pinterest.com/asari1036/western-art/  or artists' websites, or best yet, go to the art museum or gallery and look at real paintings. 

   A note on the pictures on my pinterest link: each is of rock cliffs, out west. Yet notice how different each one looks and feels. Try to choose the colors each artist chose; this helps you learn to see the colors.

   Pay attention to the pictures that you like best. Use the colors you are going to color with and make the closest copy of the painting's colors that you can. Choose 3-6 colors from the painting, no more. Use them to color your picture. When you need more colors, use colors close to those already chosen. See what happens!

   Use real photos of the same subject in the coloring book page. Try to replicate the real life colors. Again, use the markers or pencils you will use in the coloring book to make close copies of the photo's colors. Follow the same procedure used above.

   Use a color wheel. This site has a very fun tool for choosing a range of colors that make a coherent combination in a picture; play with the color gamut tool to find your own color combinations.    http://www.livepaintinglessons.com/gamutmask.php  This gives a coherent combination of colors and it is infinitely adjustable.

   When you finish a page from A Day With the Horses or Nature's Colors, send it in and I'll post it. The diversity of styles and techniques is inspiring to see, and helps others try new ways to color. Thanks for sharing and have a happy day coloring!

Susan

  

   

When Paintings Find a Home

  Thank you Amy from Chicago, for the purchase of two pastel paintings.
   It is heartwarming when someone sees one of my paintings and immediately feels a connection to what they see. Happiness occurs! This makes me feel as happy as the other person does, whether or not they buy the painting.

   It's one pleasure to work through the challenges of creating a painting and it's another pleasure to share a painting and experience the spontaneous pleasure that almost jumps out of the air between the viewer and the painting when the viewer first sees it. It is as if all other artwork fades from their awareness; as they step back or walk away that one image stays with them and the person keeps going back to it. Sometimes it is as if the painting was waiting for those eyes to recognize it. I believe it's true that a painting is not finished until other people see it. When someone falls in love with a painting, in some very real way, they do fall in love. That makes everyone nearby feel good.

   It's also interesting that what I'm attached to of my work is not necessarily what someone else even notices. A painting, like a story, forms through someone's feelings and actions, then goes out into the world and finds its place. For the paintings as well as the people who create these things, one's place has to do with relationships. These two little paintings have found a place in the world, and are now 'finished'.

   My photography skills show their limits here; the camera wasn't quite catching the details or correct colors, but it's another part of painting to learn about.

Painting the Winter Landscape

   A rainy December day with clearing skies brought dramatic lighting to the bare fields along highway 80 north of Richland Center. There were beautiful scenes to paint in every direction. This small study shows early afternoon light flooding the fields. An abandoned farm is spotlit on the hillside and water puddles in the fields reflect the changing sky. A few minutes later this scene was completely changed to dull colors and flat clouds. Color notes taken on site, then the painting was done in the studio.
   Pastel on sanded paper 10" x 8".

A Struggle With Values

Brass Vases still life study

   Yes, I struggle with values almost daily. Well, not quite daily or I'd be better at figuring them out. As you can see from the picture here, the values are a bit muddy and inconsistent. This is a study, not a finished painting. It took three hours of mixing, thinking, eating chocolate and discussing the situation with my most patient, kind and skillful teacher  http://www.kendewaard.com/ Ken DeWaard.
   Going to painting from drawing is a challenge for me; if making good lines is the priority things move along ok but when I have to think about values, in different colors, I am feeling my way into unknown territory. And it feels exactly like groping in the dark for that lost key.
   Yes, this is a mess. I'm posting it because I expect to do something better, and then again better, through the coming weeks. Keeping these studies and attempts up where I can see them is helpful. No matter what the problems are in a painting session there is always something to learn and seeing the improvements over time is very satisfying. If only the 'good' pieces are looked at it's harder to see the progress, but compare what one thinks of as a 'good' painting with some earlier efforts is very gratifying.
    It's great fun to work hard on something that I have no idea how to do. Mixing color is one, making values coherent through a whole picture in different colors is another. Each time a small part of it is learned it feels like a big step taken and a door opens, just a bit, on one of the best things in life to find: potential. Through that slightly opened doorway of understanding value, I glimpse the potential of creating a painting someday that speaks of light and beauty.

A Return to Pastels

Underpainting for River Shadows
Another excellent class with Kay Brathol-Hostvet http://www.kaybratholhostvet.com/ at the lovely, friendly, comfortable Whispering Woodlands  http://www.whispering-woodlands.com/ near Verona. Thanks to Kay for consistently bringing out the best in each student. I learn something every class. This class I wanted to explore how to get light and color into dark shadowy areas, so chose a view on the Kickapoo River of dark cliffs backlit by afternoon light. The water is dark, the cliffs are dark and the trees above are mostly dark. Even in real life that day those areas were quite shadowy. Picking out the colors that are there takes some practice. So I practice by observing and taking notes at the scene. Later at the easel the hard work starts when it's time to figure out how to translate my ideas of what I saw into something two dimensional on paper. This picture is quite a way from being finished. Above is my first effort to get the 'darkest darks' and light areas down.

Some layers of color.

Next I will probably rub off some of it. The red leaves and details in the distance are premature and can wait until the values are adjusted. It's easy to get ahead of the process and this is a good example of that. It's fun to play with pastels. They rub off   leaving a clear shadow of the removed colors making changes easy to do. 

Monashee Traverse

   The painting at the top of this page is a study for a larger oil painting. The scene is in the Monashee mountains of central British Columbia and I am at the top of an icy, rocky, cold and windy place looking down on my friends who have all merrily skied down this forbidding slope without falling down. While assessing my chances of descending to join them without sustaining too much damage the breathtaking light across the far slopes was impossible to resist and since I hadn't fallen on my camera yet I managed to get a few pictures.
   It seemed that everywhere we skied I was left behind on a problematic precipice while my companions zipped away, but the reward was a few dramatic scenes saved for later enjoyment.
   Yes I did ski down that slope and all the others too but as a relatively novice "telemarker" did not have the aggressive technique to be in the lead.
   Now I ponder approaching the Very Large Canvas that this scene will eventually end up on. I love painting murals but have not done that in many years. Starting a big painting feels about the same as heading down a steep slope after not skiing for a long time. But once some momentum is gained it will be a lot of fun. The first step is done of priming the canvas but since it's just a white blank it didn't seem very interesting to add a photo of that stage. Check in later for progress when the colors start showing up.

Kickapoo Colors adult coloring book is here!

   Fresh from the printer two weeks ago and already the first printing is winging its way across the Pacific to Australia, and to several states. It was great fun to draw the pictures for this book. They were inspired by drawings I had already done for the Kickapoo Valley Reserve http://kvr.state.wi.us/
or derived from sketches and paintings done at earlier times.
   Pen and ink line drawings are one of my favorite ways to relax and let my eyes see simple shapes. Mixing colors for painting is challenging for me but the simplicity of one color of ink brings out design ideas and patterns that do not happen with paint. So one drawing leads to another.
   Over a short period of time several friends mentioned how popular adult coloring books were lately. I had never heard of them! But of course; why wouldn't coloring be fun for adults? We like to knit, put puzzles together, doodle and more. Coloring books are an old idea made new. Suddenly a few drawings piled up on my art table, some unfinished, swooshed together in my mind and there it was: a coloring book of what was, until then, a random collection of individual pictures, each done for a different reason.
   I went to work, rearranging elements of some of the pictures, unifying them with border designs influenced by two of my favorite inspirations-Frank Lloyd Wright and Art Deco, and tweaking images to work as line drawings with enough detail to be interesting to color.
   There is a miniature, "Pocket Edition" for taking along wherever you go and the full size 8.5 x 11" book for leisurely coloring at home. Each has twelve pictures inspired by the Kickapoo Valley's winged, flowered and furred residents. Each illustration has a bit of information with it to share something interesting about the subjects. You can visit my Etsy shop for more information  https://www.etsy.com/shop/SusanCushingArt

   This was so much fun to create that I just kept drawing and so another book will be done soon.
Stay in touch for updates, and thanks for checking in!