#155 7/20/19 Wolfsville Landscape

I prepped 3 canvases for landscape paintings...thinking I'd get them done over the weekend.  The prepping happened ok.  And I decided I would paint the sky on all of them first, then the next day begin painting the landscapes.  That way the edges between the trees and the sky would look a bit better...that the edges of the tree could have bits of sky poking through the leaves.  Saturday came and I set to work on the first one, the view from the top of Woodland Way looking down the hill at the road that leads into Wolfsville.  This is a road I travel sometimes on my way to work, when I've a bit more time (it's a little longer, but just a lovely road to travel).  Somebody bought some land and built a big white house, which I assumed was going to look out of place among the farmland and old houses.  But it actually looks rather nice.  My painting of this view, not so nice however, it took forever and I wasn't happy with the results and never made it to the other two landscapes.

So on Sunday I spent a bit of time watching a you tube video of a man doing a beautiful landscape, the title was "tutorial for a simple landscape" (by Yasser Fayad).  The video was nearly 2 hours long, included no instruction, just music set to a sped-up video of him painting.  The camera was set directly above the painting and he kept his palette right next to it. He used a very limited palette, so it was nice to see him mix so many different colors from just 5 blobs of paint.  He painted, and repainted, and repainted, and repainted....the thing was very labor-intensive, with so many layers of color.  I counted, and he tapped his brush to the canvas 42,856,011 times before he called it quits. Tap, tap, tap, turn the brush, tap, tap, tap, redo a spot that already looked perfect to me, tap, tap, tap, turn the brush, tap, tap, tap, redo another spot that looked perfect.  Phew it was exhausting!  I didn't watch it from start to finish, I kind of jumped around.  The end result was gorgeous, and it was helpful to see the mishmash of initial colors slowly transform to recognizable objects through the sheer persistence of tapping.

I worked some more on my landscape that evening.  Then the next day as well.  I noticed on other landscape paintings that I like, there is something in the foreground, even when the main event is far off in the distance....so I added some black-eyed susans.  They weren't in the photograph, but they're blooming everywhere right now, especially roadsides.  Sometimes it takes a few days for me to notice what it is that is holding a painting back.  In this case, it was a few trees in the first tree-line that lacked the normal symmetry that nature usually provides....they looked juvenile and once I tap, tap, tapped them into a better shape I became happier with the landscape.  It's not near where it could be, but it was great experience, and I need to put the brush down on this one.

Grandson checking out Nanna's paintings, deciding between an apple and that cute clownfish