The Hardest Thing an Artist Can Do - Plein Air Painting

Hey, let me ask you something. Do you paint plein air? Well, this is one thing you might want to do if you want to improve your studio paintings. I want to share with you a recent trip that I had with my good friend, Mike, who joined me for a really special outing, painting down at the outlet in Wanaka, New Zealand. Let's get into it. Bit of that peak, but you really want to look down that valley right there. So you've got something nice. You don't have to come all the way out with those rocks, just get inspired, but we'll come up with some options. We couldn't have asked for better conditions on the lake edge. Are you taking any, there's a couple of nice little duckies in the foreground too. Yeah, we might be able to squeeze in a duck if you're lucky. Mike, I'm going to go straight 8x10 for this. I'm not going to go fancy. Would you like a nice 8x10 as well? Yeah, of course. Absolutely. Well, then I'm going to get the proportions the same as yours too. It's going to be a bit easier. Cool. Sounds great. So what we want to do now is just get our panel on there. Yeah, I think this could be a really successful painting actually. Really quietly optimistic. I'm looking for a strong sense of foreground, mid-ground and background. Lots of depth. Mike. Yes. This bit's important. Yeah. Right. This is your friend today. Not me. This. That's my friend. That's your friend. Okay. So you have that so you can wipe off your brushes as you go. And you just use it as a little booklet. You don't get paint on your hands and you clean the brush as you go. And it means you're getting cleaner brushwork. You're getting cleaner color. I'm not muddying it up too much. You're not muddying it up too much. Now, what we're going to do first is we're going to start off with our earth tones. Grab your paint, sir. We're going to go with our burnt umber first. I can't open the bloody tube. Not enough time in the gym, mate. Too much speed work. Oh. Not enough strength training. That's it. Hang on. I'll try. Oh. These tubes really got the better of me. Oh, flip. Gee whiz, they were tough to get into. Well, we're not painting with umber, are we? Yeah. Oh, hang on. I've got, I think I've got pliers in the car. Good thing he's prepared. I've always put my painters on there. Are you putting them in here? Put them in here. Put them in here. Put them in your box, bro. What? Put them in your box, bro. Put them in the box. Oh, okay. I'll give you some white. This is criminance white. Pretty genius. We won't need this today, all right? But it's just fun to play with a different kind of white that's not so overpowering. Right. Because titanium is very opaque, very bright. But the criminance has got a lovely transparency to it. Titanium would be better for like the highlights later, right? Yeah. Spot on. Spot on. Next one you want is that bright yellow, that cadmium lemon. Yeah. And then you want, after cadmium lemon, you want your cadmium red light. Okay. And then you want ultra blue. Ultramarine. And we want a bit of cobalt teal. And then last, just a wee bit of phthalo green. Probably won't need it today though. I'm just calling it. Maybe a little bit for the water, just to give it a bit of a tinge. Or is that where we're going to get clarity through? But would you, would you? A wee bit. You want your transparent yellow oxide and your phthalo. There we go. Now you've got your palette set up. Yep. Spot on, man. Right. Cool. Now with your Liquin Original, you can do two things. You can put it in a little pottle, like I've got, or you can just dump it right there in the corner. I think I'll just dump it, right? That's this one, isn't it? Yep. That's it. But has it formed a skin? Not really. Can I just use some of yours, man? Of course you can. I'll have to listen at home. Dude, this is dried in here. Look, it's cracked right up the middle. That's gone off. Is it? That's gone off. Why you waste my time for? You want just a wee bit? There you go. It's beautiful. Thank you very much. I'll put a little bit in my corner too. There you go. But you just need a dollop. That's all you need. And so every, every mix that we're making, we just add just a little bit to your mix. Every time. Just a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. First thing we want to do is we want to start creating our underpainting. So first thing I'm going to do, Mike, is I'm going to make a color with a bit of quinacridone magenta and burnt umber. Okay, very weak color, not too much gobby paint on your brush, just a very weak color. So a bit of burnt umber, quinacridone magenta, touch of medium, right? We'll start to sketch up our composition. First decision we want to make is where's that horizon going to go? Now, just to get a little bit of an indication of foreground, I do want to bring my foreground in here. The foreground is going to be important. It's like, how am I going to lead the eye? But get a little bit of that bay that we see right here in the, right here in the immediate foreground. And have that little spit of land out here. Bring that up very close to the horizon line, nice and flat. And really just plug into those trees almost. Boom, there. Just, you know, you can be a little bit loose with your drawing too, that's all right. As long as generally everything's in the right place. But really this is about nailing down your color. You're bringing those in a little bit, aren't you? Yeah, so the bank now, that shore, stand of trees like that. The trick here is to press really lightly with your brush. And what's going to happen over this city, we're going to watch this light here that's sparkling beautifully in the foreground. And it's going to start to move this way into the scene. And that's just going to be magic when that happens. Now, what I'm going to do here is I'm actually going to shift my perspective. I'll show you. I'm going to shift my perspective slightly. I'm going to bring this rock up. I'm going to clip the horizon. And I'm going to bring this rock that we're looking at right here in the foreground, right there. So we're almost looking over this little beach, this little shore here, which is in the immediate foreground. I just think that that makes a nicer line. Now, you might be thinking, well, it's not there. Why? Why are we doing it there? But the minute I step forward a few meters, that's exactly what's going to happen to that rock. So don't be too precious on where elements go. You know, you can shift stuff around. You can use a little bit of license here. Don't have to paint exactly what you see. With a random assortment of lines, hopefully you can see now the method to my madness as I zone in on those exact locations and my big shapes. I press a bit harder. What I'm going to do is I'm going to shift this peak here. I can move that peak. So I'm going to shift my drawing. I'm going to move that peak here, bring it into the composition and I'm going to move that mountain out there. Then that mountain's got a really nice scoop on it. Really beautiful shadow down in that valley way up high. It's going to be a nice shape. And that blue violet that's coming through, it's almost going to be a beautiful energetic destination in the composition. And then over on this side, now we can have that tree come in, leaning in here. Now there's our drawing. Time to bust out that color. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go for the immediate foreground and I'm going to lock in that shadow. And so I'm just going to apply this in the shadows. And this is where it takes a little bit of ultramarine blue, a little bit of burnt umber. A bit of Liquin Original. Which one was that? Liquin Original, just medium. Burnt umber, ultramarine blue. And I'm going to get in here and I'm going to go, cool, I see, I see shadows. And so I'm just going to start and map in where I see these shadows. Get that locked in place. You're not doing it very dark though, are you? Not too dark. I mean, yeah, it's, I mean, it's reasonably dark right now, but I'm just painting where I see those shadows going. A bit of umber, a bit of ultramarine blue, a little bit of quinacridone too, why not? Everyone will enjoy that. I gotta shout out Joe Barkat, how can I not? It's after meeting Joe and talking to him about his process that he really inspired me to change my approach out in the field. And so now I'm applying an underpainting and I'm trying to go for that careful control of values across the scene. My foreground is going to be darker and it's going to get progressively lighter as we go back towards those mountains. This will really open up the depth. Break it up with a few, a few random marks. This is why, you know, it helps having a little bit of a chisel end to your brush for some of those kind of flatter marks for the lips of rocks. That'll help us a bit later. So once we've locked in, what I'm going to do is progressively lighten it. I'm actually working a very different way than I'd work in the studio right now. But you can work back to front, front to back. But right now what I'm going to do is just lift the tone. I'm adding a little bit of crimson. I added just a touch of titanium, just a touch. I'm going to purposefully extend it, right? So open up that space a bit more by lightening my shadow. The more I plein air painted, the more I started to realize how much time I was actually spending in the palette. It's all about loading that brush. You've got to have enough paint on your brush to go the distance. And also using a bigger brush helps. Nice dusty blue for the mountain behind. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, if it gets too colorful, too saturated, too much chroma, you desaturate with a touch of burnt umber. It's slightly, I'm actually seeing it slightly grayer in real life. But what I want to do is communicate those trailing shadows that we have up there in those mountains. Those fleeting light effects, that's kind of what we want to nail down straight away. Over the course of this sitting, that light is going to drastically change and you'll end up with an entirely different scene. And so knocking in our shadows early is the key first step in establishing the scene. From here, we can then fill in that other information as that light changes. But I really want to lock it in here. Paying close attention as well to my edges. I've identified big zones within the painting. Well, if you can call them big, even though it's an 8 by 10. But I'm working from zone to zone, bringing those edges together. Once my underpainting is dry, I start working in a similar fashion to how I'd approach a landscape painting in the studio. I go into the distance, the furthest thing away and start working with that sky first. Then bring the scene forward just one layer of depth at a time. I found that limiting the amount of paint on the palette really helps me with my color choices. It removes a lot of the complication. I talk a lot about my colors and my approach to color mixing plein air in my blog. You can check that out by clicking that link down below. We also have a longer version of this painting demonstration available on Tisch Academy. Make sure you check that out. It comes in at about an hour long. Now, this is one color that I've struggled with for years. And when I had my students come to New Zealand and paint alongside with me, they found it also pretty challenging. Yellow is the bane of our existence when we are painting plein air. It's a color that does not travel well over a distance. So we really have to limit the amount of yellow that we're adding to these distant passages. As we're bringing that scene forward, gradually we can introduce a bit more. But it makes sense to hold back with those initial stages. I use a really desaturated yellow, adding just a bit of burnt umber and white, and kicking it with a touch of transparent yellow oxide. That gives me the golden glow that I'm looking for here. It creates a nice resonance with some of those violet shadows on the mountain. What you're trying to do right now though, Mike, to be honest, man, in terms of painting, this is the hardest that it will get. This is really going to stretch you. But as things start to click out in the field, it just so impacts your studio work. Impacts it in a couple of ways. You learn to see color differently. You develop shorthand for combinations so you can go to it real quick. You have to communicate on the fly what it is you're seeing. You learn about your edges. You learn about your brush loading. Because you're just forced into this pressure cooker situation. And then you've got this time element. Because you look at this light. This light has swung from over here. The sun's done that. Which is pretty forgiving in this sort of situation. Because it's slightly backlit. We've got a little bit of an extended working window. Because it's not shifting in terms of height as much as it would in summer. Like in summer it would just go right over. And you go from backlit to frontlit. And it would do that really quickly. Right now we're just coming out of winter here in New Zealand. And so that light is remaining pretty steady. With the sun being so low in the sky. Hey dude! This is why you've got to be very careful. Look at me. Don't touch your face. Don't try and get it off your face. Can you hand me a wet wipe please? Have I got paint on my face? Did I touch my face? Down in there you'll find the celly. It's very dangerous. Hold very still. Okay hang on. There we go. Hang on. One more. This is very romantic. Okay now get your hands with that. Gotcha. I got it all. You made my nose drip. Did I? Oh sorry bro. It's probably really toxic chemicals. In the wipes. I'd laugh if you blew your nose into the paint one. And you come back it's even worse. No no you're good. It's all gone. Yeah you had a spot of blue like right on the end of your nose. I warned him. You heard me. He heard me. I warned him. This always happens when we go out playing or painting. Well it hasn't happened to me in many years because of my friend. Right? What's my friend? It's that little booklet. That little folded piece of paper towel. You'd be amazed at how many people end up with paint on their face out in the field. With all the flies and dust and everything blowing around. It could be quite tempting to itch your face. Without good brush hygiene well you're just going to make a mess. But with those painters wet wipes on hand you can clean up just about any situation. I keep all of my gear in a clear plastic storage tote. Now if you want to get my packing list for these plein air excursions. I've actually included that in my blog. See that link below. I'd like to get some of the sort of reflection in the water here um that were in in the green. Okay what we do is don't don't kill it then with your white. Hold off on your white. Okay so to get that green. So I'm going to take this synthetic right here and put my palette knife down there. And I'm going to just give this a wee bit of a wipe off. Okay so I'm going to go for the transparent yellow oxide. Yeah. Straight into a bit of ultramarine blue. Transparent yellow oxide. A little bit of criminance white and some medium. We'll test that out. Should be a nice warm color. A bit lighter than our rock. And you get that nice golden glow right there. Just below your rock. And just below where the rock is. Just start working that in there. I'm going to leave a little edge where my shore is. A little bit of transparent red oxide as well. So it doesn't go quite so mustard yellow. But the red will add a nice kick to it. This is single-handedly the most important exercise for any studio painter. It's actually getting out of the studio. Studying from direct observation and painting your subject from life. From here you develop so many techniques as I was explaining to Mike earlier. You learn how to see the landscape and see color. And you start to hone in on your individual unique process. There's a few reasons for this. A big one is the time. You got to move quick when you're painting plein air. You got to make those snap decisions about how to mix those colors that you're seeing in the landscape. Often when we're painting in the studio we have our go-tos. Our favorite combinations for skies, mountains, the light on the trees and even water. And veering from this can sometimes feel like a bit of a stretch. But when you paint plein air suddenly you have a situation where you have to adapt and overcome. You have to look at what you're seeing in front of you and make those decisions. How to capture it. Now though we might not be turning out sellable paintings in the field, you certainly learn a lot. And these lessons pay dividends at the easel. Is that you then bro? That's me mate. Yep. Thank you very much for a wonderful few hours of painting. My pleasure. Well I'm gonna keep going here. Yep. I've got a few hours drive home so… Right. I'll have a look at mine back at home and see if I can finish it off. If I'm inspired to finish it off. Good man. And yeah, it's been wonderful. I've been dragging my feet here so I better get a move on eh? Well it's difficult. There's nothing hard, I mean nothing easy about painting in this style. That's for sure. In this way. Kind of on the spot. Everyone looking. Camera's on you. The whole bit. That's the hardest thing ever. Isn't it? Yeah. Yeah the minute I start feeling really confident about my painting abilities, I just come outside. In the nexus yeah. And it's like oh I know nothing. Everything just shrivels up. It's very, it's very humbling. Yeah. That's awesome mate. Well thanks bro. I'll keep going. Thank you for joining me. Thank you buddy. Awesome. It's been a real pleasure. Hope to do again soon. We must. I press on with my painting. Wanting to get a few of those details that I'm seeing in the foreground. Now because we're just coming out of winter, that foliage has not yet shown up on these poplars and willows to the left hand side. These beautiful bare branches form a nice series of vectors over here on the left. And will lead the eye into the scene I hope. I just left a little gap of that imprimatura. That first layer of color showing through. And I start to mark through. Heavily loading my brush. This is a synthetic filbert brush. It makes some really nice lines. I use a similar brush down here in the foreground with some of those ripples on the water. And studying this water from life, it's a little bit of a trick. Because it's moving so fast. In about three hours, our study's done. It might have the bones to make a bigger painting. We'll see. Well I think it turned out okay. In fact, I was probably a little bit hard on myself on the actual day. But there it is there. And you can tell I was there because there's even a cheeky little sandfly. That ended up drawing in the paint there. I might just varnish that sucker in. But look, now that you're here, let's just take a quick second. And talk about the materials that you're going to need if you want to paint plein air. Now there's all sorts of options on Prashad boxes. But I gotta say, my favorite is Alloprima Prashad. They're made by Ben White in the US. And this one here is the 6x8 version. Look, it carries panels here in the lid. It folds away, collapses up. And on the base of this thing, you attach it to a camera tripod. It's a really convenient way of working out in the field. Now these will set you back a few hundred bucks. But I really believe they're worth the investment. And I'll just say right now, not a sponsor. I just really love this product. Now I've got the 6x8 version, the 8x10, which is my favorite. And the Yellowstone, which is the 11x14, big one. But this one is great if you're going to just chuck it in a backpack, climb a mountain, and paint some plein air. But you're going to want some colors to go with it. So let me take a minute and just tell you about Blue Ridge handmade oil colors. Click that link down below and check these out. They're handmade in North Carolina. Absolutely love Blue Ridge. And also Rosemary & Co. brushes. There's a plein air set right there. And if you click that link down below, you can pick up one of these directly off the Rosemary & Co. website. Well, that's going to do it for this video. Thank you so much for joining me out in the field and here in the studio. I'll see you again in the next video.