Afternoon breaker - plein air seascape in oil

Green Islands, Albany. Photo by Andy Dolphin.

With the sun still shining, I threw my French easel, back pack, camera and bottle of cordial in the car and headed back to the Albany coast.

My back pack folds out to a stool (I stand when I paint though) and contains almost everything I need for plein air painting. It's a semi-organised mess but it carries rags, plastic bags, primed painting boards, colour charts, thinner, sketch book, pencils, hand wipes and sometimes a beanie to keep my head warm as evening falls. It has two side pockets that hold insect repellent, sunscreen and my bottle of drinking water - or cordial. It's handy having the drinking water in its own pocket so I don't reach into the back pack and end up grabbing and drinking thinner by mistake.

My SLR camera is too big and precious to go in the back pack so has its own shoulder bag. My paints and brushes are in the French easel.

Here's the result for this trip. First, the "proof I was there" location shot...

And the painting...

 (Afternoon breaker. Plein air sketch. 30x20cm oil on board. © Andy Dolphin)

The photo at the top of the blog shows how things were looking as I was packing up. Spectacular, as always.

Bluff Knoll - plein air oil

It was very warm yesterday with clear blue skies in every direction. I took the opportunity to head inland looking for something to paint. With one month of spring to go, the paddocks are starting to lose their winter greens and take on the warm, dry colours of summer. I drove around for a few hours before ending up at Bluff Knoll, the highest peak in southwest Western Australia.

I painted here one morning a year ago (see Bluff Knoll) and in January this year (See Bluff Knoll in January) and while I was happy enough with the sketches I'd done on both occasions, I felt it was worth another go to try and capture the essence of the bluff.

By the time I'd set up my easel, there was only about half an hour left until sunset. I decided a thumbnail sketch was in order to ensure I knew where I was headed before the light changed too much.

I tried two formats, each sketch taking less than a minute. I decided that the vertical format gave me a better feeling of the towering nature of the mountain. I was particularly interested in the zig-zag line created where the major shadow area met the sunlit area. There's a very interesting piece of geology up there, where the sandstone forms a turret-like ridge that catches the sunlight, but it would fall almost dead centre in my picture so I couldn't make too much of it and decided, instead, to draw the eye up to the cliff face.

I quickly washed in my major shadow area with a mixture of ultramarine and crimson, thinned with low-odour mineral spirits. Then I assessed the colour of the sunlit areas. This is one of those confusing situations where you know the shrubbery on the mountain is green but the light shining on it leans strongly toward red - green's complement. So what colour is it now? It's a sort of red-green-yellow-orange-brown colour.

I used my handy-dandy oil colour chart to find a starting point and settled on a combination of cerulean blue (a green-blue), mixed with cadmium yellow deep (an orange-yellow) and added permanent crimson (a purple-red) to warm it up. I washed a mix of burnt sienna and permanent crimson on the sunlit area first to provide a warm, earthy base for this "green".

I approached this painting a little differently to how I usually paint on site. I didn't try to take any area toward a finished state and just laid in large areas of general colour until almost all the white primer was covered. I didn't even take these areas up to each other, at first. Once I had it all mapped in, I went back over all areas with heavier colour and closed all the gaps that I'd left in the early stage.

The shadows moved fast and I found the thumbnail sketch an invaluable map of where I was headed. You can see in the thumbnail that I'd noted a small patch of sunlight right at the top of the shaded cliff face. This highlight disappeared soon after I started painting so the sketch was a useful reminder to include it - and it is important to making that area interesting enough to look at.

I finished painting after sunset and had to use a small headlamp to see what I was doing as I added small flashes of colour to break up the large masses. I used a flash to take the location photo, above, just before I finished working on the painting.

Here's how things ended up with almost no work added in the studio...

 (Spring evening - Bluff Knoll. Plein air sketch.
25x30cm oil on board. © Andy Dolphin)

Plein air challenge!

Green Islands, Albany. Photo by Andy Dolphin.

Date: Sunday, August 26, 2012
Weather Forecast: Fine with a late change

I made the decision that, with fine weather forecast, I'd head out to a spot near Albany that offers incredible views over the Torndirrup coastline. My plan today was to come home with more than just photos.

I found a spot just off the walk trail, and a few metres short of a very long drop over a very high cliff. I was around 180m above sea level. The sun was shining, the sky was clear and there was a gentle breeze blowing. It was near-perfect. So I set up my easel and got to work.

I worked on a panel that had been stained with burnt sienna. I used it mainly because I had it with me and it was the right shape.

Knowing the light would change dramatically, I pre-mixed small samples of critical colours and referred to these throughout the painting process. I used my oil colour chart to determine the best colours to use for each mix and was surprised to note that the deep ocean was almost a perfect match to cerulean blue out of the tube. In fact, cerulean featured in mixes throughout the painting from the sky to the sunlit hills and rocks.

I approached this painting is a relatively steady manner, rather than as a quick sketch. I roughly outlined the major shapes, separating sunlit and shaded areas, before under-painting all parts in approximate final colours. Then I painted the sky and worked my way down and "forward", painting into all areas before adding the white-wash along the edge of the coastline. I left the white-wash until fairly late in the process because it doesn't really shift much in colour. My main concern was the shadow side of the hills because I knew those shadows would disappear completely as the sun moved higher in the sky. I finished with dark accents and highlights.

A strong wind warning had been issued for the afternoon and the breeze grew steadily over the two hours that I painted. I eventually had to take my hat off because I was holding onto my easel with my spare hand. If anything blew away, I wasn't going after it!

While I was packing up, TRAGEDY!!!! struck!!! (Yes, there were definitely exclamation marks when it happened). The very wet painting fell off the easel and face first into the sand. Hmmm.

"Golly gee!", I said. "That's just a little bit too authentic", I added. Or, something like that.

When I got back to the studio, I decided it was worth fixing. Using a razor-blade scraper, I carefully removed the paint where the sand was stuck, leaving a ghost of colour behind. I mixed up some fresh paint and set to work. It only took about half an hour to recover things.

 (Plein air View to Cave Point. 35x22cm oil on board. © Andy Dolphin)

Bonus material:

Here's a few "quick" sketches I've done around the Torndirrup coast in the last week or so.

Showers are forecast for tomorrow but I might head to the coast again, and see what's happening.

My oil colour chart

Soon after taking up oil painting I made a colour chart showing basic two-colour combinations of the standard palette I'd adopted. This has proved invaluable when working on site or from photos - some combinations are surprising! I use a shorthand notation to identify colours on sketches.

Click for a bigger image

To make the charts I first drew a pencil grid on an A2 sheet of textured oil painting paper and made a chart for each colour. I cut the finished sheet into separate pages to make the booklet you see above.

The base colour for each chart is on the far left and below this is that base colour mixed approximately 50/50 with titanium white.

Across the top is each other colour in my standard palette. Below these is a 50/50 mix of each of these colours with the base colour for each chart. Below this is that combined colour mixed 50/50 with titanium white.

If you make a chart like this, take note that each mixture is used twice. For example, a mixture of cerulean blue and cadmium scarlet will appear on both the cerulean and scarlet charts. If you keep this in mind, you'll get the job done in almost half the time! It only took a couple of hours, as I recall.

I used a small palette knife to mix the colours as it was much easier to measure even amounts of paint. I used a small square brush to apply the paint. Be careful to keep your brush clean.

I have since seen charts that take this idea much further, mixing varying amounts of each pair of colours and then each resultant colour is tinted with with increasing amounts of white for a very wide range of combinations.

My standard palette:

• French Ultramarine
• Cerulean Blue
• Cadmium Yellow Deep
• Cadmium Yellow Light
• Cadmium Scarlet
• Permanent Crimson
• Viridian Green
• Yellow Ochre
• Burnt Sienna
• Titanium White