Barns on a bright sunny day

I enjoyed the video-making yesterday and wanted to see if I can do any better on timing today. And I did! Practice does make things better. It helped that I didn't have to ask internet a zillion questions about how to do simple things in GoPro Studio. 

Today's demo is of barns on a sunny day. I chose the reference from pixabay.com, my trusty source for copyright free high quality photographs.

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I like this photograph because I could easily break the composition down into a series of shapes, which gave me confidence that this is something I can tackle in 10 minutes (I am making a series of 10 minute paintings for my youtube channel).

In this painting I wanted fewer neutrals and more warm and cool colors so I chose a palette accordingly. The colors I used were :

1. French Ultramarine
2. Carmine
3. Quin Burnt Scarlet
4. Viridian
5. Permanent Orange

The main motivation for this demo is to demonstrate that you don't have to be a slave to your reference. It is your painting, and you are free to choose the colors you want, the composition you want and free to add in elements or leave out some. Do what you want, it is your painting!

As you will see in the demo below, these were the steps I followed :

1) I left the sky white, to reflect the clear bright sunny day. I pushed the coolness of the distant mountains and added interest by using intense purples. In the closer mountains I used a combination of Viridian and purples.

2) I framed the barns with some trees that are closer than the mountains. You see that this is not actually clear in the photograph, but I liked the idea and went for it.

3) Then I mixed a dark shadow color for the sides of the barns, flooding in darker color to indicate some detail. 

4) I used Permanent Orange for the grasses, and made vertical marks with Quin Burnt Scarlet which blended together with Orange and gave the feeling of tall grasses.

5) I mixed a shadow color with French Ultramarine and QBS, and used to paint in the shadows on the ground. I took the shadows further to the left and right than I see in the reference, in order to frame the composition better.

6) The final step is adding some details, just some dark bits here and there to make the picture pop. 

All of this took no more than 10 minutes to do.

I hope you enjoy the video.