Tony Conner Artists Blog

Family takes  priority during family vacations, so I sketched and painted less than I might have.  Still, I was able to get some work done on our recent trip to Hilton Head.   Living in New England means that I have very little opportunity to see and paint trees from the southeast.   Trees are a favorite subject of mine and are often featured in my paintings.  It was pleasing to be able to see and paint trees from a new area.  Obviously, palm trees don’t grow in the forests of the northeast.  The two sketches below are of a palm located in the courtyard of the condo complex where we stayed for the week.  The pencil sketch captures the reality of the tree, while the watercolor sketch is a study in color, light and shade.

By the time I did this watercolor sketch, I had adjusted my color mixtures to be more representative of the colors of the plants and foliage in the Hilton Head area.   My initial works lacked a bit of authenticity since I was using colors – particularly greens – that are more like those found in New England.  The sketch below of a beach and salt marsh near where we stayed shows the difference.  The green areas in the fore and middle ground are tall marsh grasses.  As sketched, the green is more like the green of a grassy field in the northeast.  Marsh grasses in this are tend to be a somewhat more intense yellow green than as depicted.

Port Royal Sound marsh & sky - Hilton Head Island

On this particular morning, the sky was overcast.  I was pleased to find that my favorite combination of cerulean blue and cadmium red did work well to capture the look of the sky.

Unfortunately, the weather did not cooperate for my Plein Air workshop the week of June 22.  The idea was to spend four days painting on location in the Cape Ann area of Massachusetts.  Instead of being able to paint outdoors, heavy rain, drizzle, low clouds and wind drove us indoors for most of the class.

We did venture out on the first day, optimistically expecting the weather to clear any moment.  It didn’t – so we made the best of it by taking photos to use as reference material  -  praise be to digital cameras!

Below are a couple of photos taken at Good Harbor in Gloucester on Monday the 22nd – just to give you an idea.

Good Harbor, Gloucester, MA Monday June 22

One student got a photo of some brave souls walking on the beach in the wind and rain.  The photo itself was a study in gray, but had potential as a composition.  It was chosen as a subject on the second day of the workshop since it could be instructive in demonstrating obtaining mood in a painting as well as in the techniques of creating rock mounds and reflections.

"Cape Ann Walk"

Although most of my paintings begin with pencil sketches and thumbnails, for this one, I jumped right in.  The idea was to capture the feel of an overcast day on the coast, while also depicting the reflective quality of the water.  A minor point was to demo the techniques used to paint rocks – in groups and individually.

The work began by sketching the large shapes – sky area, distant ground, middle beach area, rock pile to the left and the foreground.   Washes in these large area were next, beginning with the sky.  In order to establish the mood of an overcast day,  colors needed to be low intensity and value contrast was minimized.   Overcast skies are a favorite of mine and I used one of my favorite color combos : cadmium red and cerulean blue.  It’s a great combination but needs to be used carefully. The opacity of cadmium red and the heavy sediment in cerulean blue can become an flat, muddy mess.  The key is to use the colors with plenty of water – either wet in wet,  or directly with a big brush that hold lots of water.   With enough water, the colors will disperse and settle evenly.  These two colors will separate in wash, creating some beautiful gradations of temperature, value and color.

This same mixture was used to create many of the grayed violets in the painting – sand, rocks, some reflections and some shadows -  and the cerulean blue was used alone in much of the fore and middle ground water areas.

The painting was about 3/4 done at the end of the day.  I brought it back to the studio and continued working it to the finished product shown here.