Sketch of the Day – April 30, 2013

Didn’t have to wander far to get this sketch.  This is a view of my neighbor’s yard, home and the brightly blooming forsythia.  Catching late afternoon light and shadow on the forsythia against the deep shade on the back of the house is the main focus of this sketch.  It’s nice to not be able to not use my winter palette of blues, browns and grays!

This view is visible both from my studio window and our back patio.  This side of their house is west facing and catches afternoon and evening light.  I’ve painted it in different lights and different seasons over the years.

Despite the advice given to my class and workshop students, I too find it difficult to resist buying art supplies and materials that I don’t really need!  I attended the Vermont Watercolor Society Spring Meeting this past weekend.  John Bates, owner of Black Horse Fine Art Suppy of Burlington, Vermont came to the meeting loaded with supplies and materials.  I resisted most of the temptation but did purchase three new sketchbooks at close out prices.  The sketchbooks are  by Holbein with a strange name. As John says, the Japanese name of the book doesn’t translate well, so it became “Clester”.  In any case, the sketchbooks contain 28 pages of heavy watercolor paper, fairly rough texture but also heavily sized so that washes tend to sit on top of the paper.  Of course I couldn’t wait to try out one of the new sketchbooks so today’s sketch is from one of them.

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Sketch of the Day – April 29, 2013

Another in this series of sketches based on a group of reflective and transparent objects on a dresser top.  Similar objects as before on April 16 and April 26.  The point of view on this one is a bit wider again than either of the earlier sketches.  As before, the key to depicting refletions and transparency depends upon accurate value relationships as much as anything else.  Being arranged in front of a large picture window also means that the objects are all backlit, creating the opportunity to manage color intensity and relationships as well.

This sketch was done in a Strathmore field sketchbook. I must say, it’s not my favorite surface to work on.  It seemed difficult to create higher intensity color.  A number of the color areas seemed very washed out once dry.

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Sketch of the Day – April 26, 2013

Another sketch of the objects set on top of an old dresser.  It features many of the same objects from my April 16 post. This sketch includes more of the scene and objects, as if I was sitting a bit farther away. Like the earlier one, there is a focus on reflections and transparency along with an effort to better depict light and shadow.

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Sketch of the Day – April 23, 2013

A bright but chilly spring day.  The wiry looking trees along the ridge line casting shadows on the spring green field caught my eye as I drove along this road.

I last posted a landscape sketch on March 21.  There was still snow on the ground on that day – even though it was the first day of spring by the calendar.  The winter like landscape called for a winter palette – blues, browns and grays.   Today, the bright sunshine and spring colors called for a different palette.

In full color paintings – basically any scene that isn’t depicting  winter – I often use a triad of “primary” colors and use those to mix secondaries and neutrals.  I say primary in quotes because, with one exception, all of the primary watercolor paint – red, yellow & blue – available, are actually tertiary colors.  That is they are unequal mixtures of the primary and something else.  For this sketch, I used two yellows – Burgundy Yellow Ochre and Quinacridone Deep Gold;  two blues – Cobalt Blue and Cinnerous Blue; one red – Permanent Alizarin Crimson.  There is also some raw umber in certain areas.  The bright green of the field is a mixture of Cinnerous Blue and Burgundy Yellow Ochre.  Most of the grays and the browns of the trees are a mixture of cobalt blue, alizarin crimson and quinacridone deep gold.  It is my sense that mixed neutrals tend to have more life than those obtained directly from a tube.

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Sketch of the Day – February 5, 2013

A bright, sunny and cold day, but recent warmer temps have melted all the snow cover.  This scene, of the Henry Bridge in North Bennington, Vermont looked more like late fall than winter.  Although I could have used my winter palette of colors, the bright sunshine and warm color in the grass made me want to use a warmer, sunnier palette.  The painting is mostly done with cad red, permanent rose, cad yellow, raw sienna and Sennelier’s Cinnerous Blue.

There was a good bit of editing in this scene. My view was obscured by a good number of trees in the foreground.  Most were removed so that the bridge could be seen easily through the trees.

Most of the scene and the sketch are warm colors – reds, oranges and browns. Including some contrasting cools was important which is the reason to include at least some of the trees with their relatively cool gray trunks. The bridges proportions really are quite elongated, as depicted in the sketch.  The addition of  some of the trees made very nice contrasting verticals against this very dominant horizontal.  x
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Sketch of the Day – January 29, 2013

As an early riser, it is more typical for me to be up out and painting scenes in the morning light.  A meeting in  Massachusetts took me south from Bennington afternoon.  On the way home, passing through Pownal, a small town south of Bennington and an area full of paintable scenes, I decided to venture onto the back roads to see what I could see.

On Mt. Anthony road and looking south, there was a terrific view into a hollow with barns, and a farm homestead.  The sky was showing nice color for late afternoon on a winter day.  So many of my winter sketches are done with the same few colors. Lately I’ve been looking for the opportunity to add more color to my winter landscapes.  The colors presented in the sky and the buildings were presented a perfect chance to expand my “winter palette”.  This sketch includes three of the four winter palette colors – raw sienna, burnt sienna & cobalt blue. To those were added cadmium red, cadmium yellow and quinacridone violet.  The red and yellow were added wet-in-wet in to the sky along with cobalt blue and raw sienna. Different mixtures of cadmium red, cobalt blue, raw sienna and quinacridone violet were used to create the various colors of the barn buildings and the chimney on the farm house.  Speaking of wet-in-wet, the bare winter trees in the middle ground were created with a loose mixture of the winter palette colors, mingled together in a single passage.

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Sketch of the Day – January 26, 2013

Venturing out on a cold morning knowing I’d again be painting “en plein air” from my car.  Painting from the car is comfortable since it keeps me out of the temperature and the elements but requires that I find a good view from a location where I can safely park the car AND not get stuck in the snow when I’m ready to leave!

In this case, I found an area off the side of the road that gave me a view to the north east, and this forest edge along the road.  Bright morning sunlight was streaming through the trees and casting fairly delicate shadows over the snow covered road.   As with most of my winter sketches, this one uses the winter palette of colors – two blues, two siennas – but today, I added warmth with some cadmium yellow, cadmium red and quinacridone gold. The shadows are done with a combination of the two winter blues – ultramarine and cobalt and enhanced with a cool blue called “Cinnerous Blue”.   Cinnerous Blue is new to my palette. It’s produced by Sennelier of France, known for their creamy and fluid watercolor formulations.  This color was sent to me as a promo along with two other colors.  It’s a cool blue, similar to Cerulean blue only several steps more intense and much less sedimentary.  One of the things I like about using my watercolor plein air sketching kit  is that it allows me to try different pigments and mixtures of pigments before adopting them for studio work.  In this case, I removed the pan of Winsor Newton Cerulean Blue from the sketching palette and replaced it with the Cinnerous Blue.  I’m a creature of habit and relatively slow to change so it’s too early to know if I’ll permanently add this color to my palette, but I like the results so far.

The main focus of the sketch is a weathered and wizened old maple tree, placed prominently along one of the “golden sections” on the paper.  I wanted to catch the morning light as it filtered through the background trees onto the lower trunk of this one old tree.

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Sketch of the Day – January 22, 2013

A very cold day outside today.  Even though my sketches are done “en plein air”, today I spent the time painting from my inside my car.

“Farm on Coulter Road, Shaftsbury, VT”

This sketch is of a farm on Coulter Road in Shaftsbury,  Vermont.  This area, west of Vt Rt 7A  on Meyers Road is one of my favorite painting areas.  This farm has a number of buildings of various shapes and sizes which stretch  out along the property – a composition just right for one of my home-made sketchbooks. The pages in this one are 6″ x 10″ – slightly elongated and panoramic in shape.

Just after New Year’s Day, we had a fairly thick covering of snow on the ground.  An early thaw took care of that, but a couple minor snow storms have added some white back on the ground while leaving some places where grass and weeds show through.   This kind of alternating snow cover and weed cover often makes for interesting patterns and shapes. Although it was a cold day, the sun was bright and was casting long shadows across the fields.

The nature of color in winter means that the use of my limited “winter palette” which consists of two blues – cobalt & ultramarine – raw and burnt sienna and, in this case some cadmium red mixed with these colors to get the barn red.
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Sketch of the Day – January 1, 2013

Wishes for a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year to all!

Out and about early this morning looking for a good subject for the first day of the New Year.   Since it has snowed a good bit since the middle of December, it is already laying deep on the ground.  For me, this means  plein air sketches will mostly use the “winter palette” of colors that are so handy and appropriate for northern climates this time of year.

“Farm on Burrington Road, Pownal Vermont”

Today’s sketch was actually done with only three colors – cobalt blue, burnt sienna and quinacridone deep gold.

Painting the landscape plein air in the winter is a great way to get a handle on tonal values.  The winter landscape   often consist of many various shades of gray, especially if the ground is snow covered and the sky is cloudy. Observing and matching these values in paint is a great exercise which will only strengthen one’s ability to see even subtle value differences.

In the case of this sketch, the barn buildings themselves are sided in what is now just wood weathered down to to subtle shades of gray.  Except for the dots of brown-orange weeds and leftover stubble from harvested fields, this sketch is really a tonal study.   All of the grays are mixtures of cobalt blue and burnt sienna.  Quinacridone Deep Gold (from Daniel Smith)  is used to indicate the dots of warm “weeds & stubble” as well as mixed with cobalt blue to get the deep green used for the evergreen trees in the background.

Contact me if you have an interest in this or any other paintings on the site. Email me at tc@tonyconner.com or by phone at 802-375-5548.

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Sketch of the Day – November 15, 2012

Stand Of Trees On Carpenter Hill Road At Sunset

Late autumn and winter trees, bare of their leaves and silhouetted against evenings skies are an attractive subject for me – although I have to admit that I rarely paint the subject.  In this case, and knowing that the light would be disappearing, I headed for a spot that rarely disappoints, subject-wise on Carpenter Hill Road in Bennington.   Even so, this sketch got started almost too late in the day.  From the time I got started to until I ended, the light disappeared from the sky.  My vantage point was low and sheltered by surrounding woods which filtered the available light to paint by.   At this point in the day, barely 4pm, the sun was already very low in the sky and would actually disappear below the mountains in less than 30 minutes.   The sky was still bright and tinged with warm yellow and orange near the horizon.  The foreground were all silhouetted and appeared to be very dark against the sky.  Needing haste, the sketch was worked quickly, with wet washes laid over large shape areas and then dried using the car heater so that I could move onto the next area quickly.

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