Noah Layne

Thursday, July 28, 2011

More landscape paintings!

Here are two recent landscape paintings.  The first is from Mt. Doug, a local park around a small mountain.  It's around 5 minutes by car from my studio, so it's a good place to go painting!  I also enjoy running the trails at Mt. Doug lots of good hills to run ;).

Mt. Doug Tree Study, Oil on panel 9x12


It's so much fun to be out painting the landscape live.  It's both an exercise in slowing down and working slowly to develop your painting at the same time trying to paint as fast as you can before the light changes!  Or the bugs get you...:).  For this study, when I started the painting it was an overcast afternoon and I was in the trees enough that I thought that if the sun came out it would not change things too much.  I was wrong.  About midway through the painting (1 1/2 hours in) the sun came out and was penetrating through the tree coverage enough to change the lighting a little for me.  I had to then decide what to do.  I decided that when the sun was very bright I would wait a few minutes until the clouds would dull it down a little and then I would paint and wait and paint and wait.  I'm happy with the way it turned out.


The second painting was painted later that evening at Swan Lake.  I love painting the sunset, the colours and lighting are very beautiful to me.

Swan Lake Sunset, Oil on canvas panel 8x10
 
When I'm painting the sunset, I try to setup around an hour or so before sunset and tone my panel with some umber and ultramarine blue or some of the muddy colour that was left on my palette from earlier in the day.  I use some mineral spirits and rub the colour on with a paper towel.  The point of this is to dull the white of the canvas so it's easier to judge values and hue as you start to paint.  After toning my canvas, I do a line drawing of the major shapes with oil and then wait for the sun to go down.

In this case, when there were no clouds to block the sun and shield it from my eyes, I had to wait until the sun was almost at the horizon before really starting to paint!  I was able to put some of the sky colour down before this but not too much.  So as the sun set, I madly started to paint!  I try to burn the image in my mind as the sun disappears over the horizon.  I try to balance the big picture of value and colour on my painting in a mad dash to the finish.  I will at times make a few adjustment when I bring the painting back to my studio after the sun has set.  The colours and image are still in my head enough to use it to unify the painting as a readable work of art!


For those of you interested, I'm teaching a week long landscape painting workshop on Quadra Island, BC, Canada. Sept 12-16th more info here.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Studies

Here are a of couple studies.  I was teaching a workshop up-island and on my way back to Victoria I stopped off in Maple Bay to visiting my friends and fellow Hudson River Fellows, Kate Stone and David Gluck (check out their blog in my blogs list).  We headed out to do some landscape studies.  The Maple Bay and Duncan areas are beautiful, lots of great things to paint!

Maple Bay Study, Oil on canvas panel 8"x10"

Here is a small hand study I did the other day.  I enjoy working on a bluish paper for these kind of drawings.  This one is on Canson Sky Blue.  I used to love using Fabriano Ingres papers but unfortunately they are no longer being made.  This seems to be the way things work the good stuff gets discontinued :(

Hand Study, Graphite and white conte.

Saturday, July 2, 2011

Finished painting

Here is a photo of a recent painting.  You can view some progress pics in an earlier blog post here


Sight and Sounds 
Oil on linen 18" x 24"