I never thought I would enjoy my drive to work. Since I have moved to this beautiful place, I have always LOVED my drive to work. I get to drive through a tunnel of beautiful old oak trees, down a two-lane road to through the islands around me. I drive in awe of this sight each day and each day I notice a new hidden gem of this road.
One day, I was driving to work and was noticing all these pretty little nooks on the side of the road. I was mentally picturing these places as paintings, I decided that morning that I was going to challenge myself to take photographs of each place and create paintings of each place that inspired me. My challenge is to grow myself as an artist through this process. The photographs were not the easiest to get because there is no where to pull over and snap pictures at most of the places I want to capture. So I recruited my husband to drive down the road as slow as traffic would allow and I would get pictures while were driving. Now I am working through these pictures creating a shaded sketch, then gouache painting, and finally an oil painting of each.
This is my first one I am working through!
I don't give myself time to sit down and draw with a pencil very often so I wanted to stretch those skills and create fairly detailed sketches of each of these photographs before beginning painting.
I used the sketching to work out as much of the perspective things that I could. i played with angles of the sides of the road to make it appear to go far into the distance. I also played with how much of the trees I showed and how the shading translates to them and the sizing of each one to contribute to that perspective.
I jumped into the painting by laying down the basic divisions of the painting. I created the blue sky, the brown ground, a grey road shape and allowed that to dry. I used very watered down gouache to do this and it created a nice watercolor looking base for me to work off of. I did not do very well taking progress pictures of this painting and will work on doing a better job at that. I decided my road would be the first thing to really work on because I would have grass and dirt fall over the edge of that and need to look like it is on top of the grey road. I then penciled in my tree trunks very lightly and began layering colors and hues to create the shading of the trees. I got a good start on the trunks so I went in with some greens for the leaves. I wanted to create lots of layers to give the look of multiple rows of trees.
The opaque-ness of the gouache paints make it easy to work lots of layers and textures inthe bark of the trees, the leaves, and grass.
I spent about 2 weeks working on this painting. I went through many days of stopping when I was frustrated with it and many other days I stopped when I was afraid to keep going and mess it all up! When I stopped painting for the day I try to prop my painting up somewhere I can look at it throughout the next day or so. This allows me to see it from all distances and catch places I find that need more work from far away.
My last step in this painting was adding some metallic watercolor details and highlights. I discovered these wonderful handmade metallic and color shifting watercolors paints on Instagram and have completely fallen in love with them! I have really started using them to finish off all of my gouache paintings. It gives such a fun finish and who doesn't love a finish of some sparkle!? I will link the shop I get them from below if you want to check them out. Just click on the logo and it will connect you to her Etsy.
Find peace in yourself. Create peace around you.
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