There's A Reason...

...that my 100th landscape painting is better than my first, and it might not be as simple as the fact that I painted 98 in between the two. It is the systems of creating the paintings that I am constantly developing and then refining that make each painting better (with some exceptions) than the last. My newest system is using a color grid of all the colors I use in each layer of each painting.



The colors on the right of this panel I'm holding up in front of my painting are from the first layer of paint. On the second layer (to the left), I not only get to tighten the detail, but by using comparison, get to refine the color to create atmosphere.



You might think the marsh is all one tone, but in reality the oranges and browns go from dark and deep in the foreground to light and faded in the distance. On the right of the color grid (first layer) the colors are broken into background, middleground, and foreground. In the second layer (left side), these three steps were split into five, to make the transition even more subtle. This use of shifting tones creates a natural perspective and adds atmosphere. Oh, and by the way, the top green colors were for the fading of the horizon line, while the bottom three colors were for the grass reflections in the water, and I only used the darkest of these in the foreground reflections.

-jb.