Mastering Sunsets Course Notes

Table of Contents

Click a page number to jump there.

Introduction 3

Sunset Physics 4

Color Lingo 6

Painters Keys 7

Photography 11

Project 1 - Photography 12

Project 2 - Value Study 13

Project 3 - Glazing 21

Project 4 - Alla Prima 25

Project 5 - The Glow 32

Project 6 - Colour Harmony 43

Project 7 - Plein Air! 58

Project 8 - Inventing Colour 70

Summary 81

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Introduction

Hi, I'm Richard Robinson. We're here in New Zealand, which is arguably the first country in the world to see the light of each new day, and so it's also the first to see each new sunset. Everyone loves sunsets, but for painters like us they're particularly beautiful because they inspire us to paint them, so we're lucky in that way, but also unlucky, because sunsets can be very tricky to paint. Anyone can paint a sunset, but how can we paint them really WELL? That's what we're going to find out in this course. We're going to paint a number of different sunsets, starting out quite simply and getting more complex as we add new concepts and techniques to your skills.

We know that the best way to learn something is to do it, so you may want to watch the whole course right through to start with, but I encourage you to come back here to the beginning and work through the projects one at a time if you want to be able to paint beautiful sunsets yourself.

The course does not begin as you might think with painting sunsets from life out here - that's really quite tricky so I leave that right till the end. In my experience you can always paint a thing much better once you understand why that thing looks like it does, so to get the ball rolling let's take a look at how a sunset works.

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Sunset Physics

The sun sends us white light, comprised of all the colors of the spectrum. When that light hits the Earths atmosphere it gets scattered a little by the moisture in the air. Longer wavelengths of light like orange and red don't get scattered so much by the atmosphere, so the more atmosphere the white light has to go through to get to our eyes, the redder the light becomes.

Photo by Rubs.

Sometimes dust and pollution in the atmosphere increase the effect making the light even more red. In Hawaii for instance, the volcano there often puts out so much volcanic smog, or vog, that you end up with very beautiful sunsets.

You can think of our atmosphere as being like the peel of an orange. Light coming straight down to us at midday

has the least atmosphere to get through, but light slicing through at a low angle at sunset has about 10 times more atmosphere to get through than at midday, increasing the scattering of short wavelengths and leaving more red and orange wavelengths to get to us. In actual fact the atmosphere is really a lot thinner than we all imagine and an orange is a poor example - an apple is much closer to the truth. If the Earth were the size of an apple, the atmosphere, which keeps everything here alive, would only be the thickness of the apple skin. It gives you a good sense of how precious our atmosphere really is.

Light from the sunset gets whiter higher up.Photo courtesy Sonya Johnson www.sonyajohnsonart.blogspot.com

The atmosphere gets thinner the higher up you go which means the light gradually gets whiter up there because theres less filtering going on. You can sometimes see the effect of this on tall clouds and mountains as a gradation of colour from orange to yellow to white.

Sunset, Ilya Nikolaevich Zankovsky (1843-1917)

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Theres also occasionally a gray layer that creeps up from the eastern horizon. This is actually the shadow of the Earth being projected into the atmosphere! Like me, you may find the sunset light effects in the east just as beautiful as those in the west, so it pays to look behind you when youre facing a beautiful sunset.

The Best of Both Worlds

The grey-blue layer in the sky is the shadow of the Earth cast into the atmosphere.Photo https://sites.google.com/site/thebrockeninglory/

Footsteps 2008 Oil on Canvas 122 x 91cmby Richard Robinson

This painting of my son Luke headed down to our beach is something of a montage of two sunset lighting effects. The foreground is light from the front (west) while the sky displays more the effects of a sunrise in the east. You can have your cake and eat it too! Its something of a cheat but it solves the tendency for loss of foreground colour in a backlit situation.

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Color Lingo

Im going to be talking a lot about color in this course, and more specifically, the 3 aspects of color which are

hue, value and chroma, so let me just define those terms for you so youll know what Im talking about.

Hue is the name we give to a color, like red, purple, yellow - it describes where the color is in the spectrum. Thats the easiest one.

Value is how dark or light a color is, as if you were seeing it through a black and white camera. White is our highest value and black is our lowest value.

Chroma is the amount of gray in a color. Its more often called saturation and sometimes called vibrancy, strength, brightness, purity, or power - all of which are a little misleading, so I tend to use the terms Chroma or Saturation. A color containing lots of gray has a low

chroma, or low saturation, and a color with no gray in it, like yellow straight out of the tube has a high chroma, or high saturation.

So again, we have Hue, Value and Chroma. All colors break down into these 3 parts which makes it a lot easier to discuss the intricacies of color usage in a painting. Another term used a lot to describe color is temperature.

Temperature is how warm or cool we perceive a color to be. Its really just a function of hue because its describing where the color fits into the color wheel, but its a useful term because it tells us immediately what side of the color wheel the color is on and since we use warm/cool contrasts a lot in painting it can be really helpful to think in terms of color temperature.

Reds, oranges and yellows are usually classed as warms while greens, blues and violets are usually classed as cools. Temperature is a relative measure because for instance we can describe one red being cooler than another red, which just means it leans more towards the cool side of the color wheel than the other. Again, its important that you understand those terms so youll know what Im talking about next. Ok, time to get on to the fun stuff.

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Painters Keys

What are the things we need to watch out for when we are painting a sunset?

ValuesThe first thing we get wrong is the values. Values are particularly tricky with sunsets because sunsets often have some very high chroma colors in them and we tend to see high chroma colors as having higher value than they actually have and low chroma colors as having lower value than they actually have.

Using too much white to lighten can result in chalky color. Glendalough, Early Morning - Acrylic 11x14 by Deb Hill

Chroma affects our value perception. We see high chroma as lighter and low chroma as darker.

These two swatches have the same value, but see how the high chroma appears to be lighter than the other? This means that when we are painting a sunset we will tend to paint the intense warm colors a little lighter than they actually are, which will make them look a little chalky as we add more white to raise their value. What that means for us practically is that we need to hold off using our lightest value (which may not necessarily be white) till the last possible moment as in this painting by Albert Bierstadt.

Save your white (if at all) right till the very last moment. Deer at Sunset Oil on paper 19.5 x 14 by Albert Bierstadt

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Also, one might think that adding a bright red to a sunset will make it more vibrant, but in fact red has a fairly dark value which can often look out of place amongst the other light values there.

Painting from our symbols tends to lead to over-saturated, simplified color. Sunset by Roy H. Scott

http://pixdaus.com/single.php?id=42456

GradientsPainting light is more about painting gradients than anything else. Each little section of sky you might look at always has at least two gradients happening within it. The sky gets lighter towards the horizon which gives us a

vertical linear gradient and it also gets lighter and warmer towards the sun, which gives us a second overlapping radial gradation. Being aware of that is crucial to painting believable skies.

Every piece of sky contains 2 gradients - 1 radial, 1 linear.

Warm and CoolSunsets can be a prime example of the general painting guideline that "warm light makes cool shadows" and vice versa. Clouds that are fairly neutral in color during the middle of the day can display dramatic color compliments during a sunset - bright orange where they are touched by the sun and deep blue on their shadow sides. Yellow and violet is the other common complimentary color scheme in sunsets.

Australian Outback Sunset. Photo by Kerry Heffernan

Sunset clouds often display color complements - oranges and blues, yellow and violets.

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Chroma and ContrastSomething else we tend to get wrong is to oversaturate our colors, making them look too gaudy. There are two reasons for this. The first reason is that our eyes are being tricked into thinking things are brighter and more saturated than they actually are. How's that? Well, the usually warm bright colors in a sunset cover a fairly small area compared to the larger, darker and cooler sky, which makes the light area look lighter, warmer and more highly saturated than it really is. Conversely, that bright warm light makes the cool darks look cooler and darker by comparison.

Sky colors are usually not as vibrant as you might think.

In the color locators taken from this photo, the further the color point is from the top right of each locator, the more gray the color has in it (lower chroma). Notice how the blue of the sky in position A is actually very nearly gray. Notice too how much grayer and darker the orange cloud is in position C than it is in position B. Its very easy to make these grayer colors too vibrant in a painting, which often tends to take away from the beauty of the sunset rather than adding to it.

Florida Sunrise 2 8x16 Acrylic by Peni Baker.This is a striking image, however the blue sky seems too

blue to me - it might look better a little warmer and grayer.

Painting our SymbolsThe second reason we oversaturate our colors is that we all tend to paint from our current understanding of a subject (our symbols) than from what the subject really looks like. Skies are one of the first things we paint as children, using LOTS of BRIGHT BLUE!

Fireworks at the Park Watercolor by Danielle Robinson (Age 6).Our painting symbols show our current understanding of a subject.

So we have that symbol in our head to overcome when we come to paint a sky as adults. The sky is usually not as high in chroma as we think it is, and the same goes for sunsets.So what does all that mean practically? Just that sunsets overall are a bit grayer than they look and with not quite as much contrast as you'd think either, and if we want to paint them really well we need to stop painting our symbols and get outside and really analyze those colors.

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CloudsWhere would a sunset be without clouds? Sunsets seem to be a little boring without them - they really add all the drama to the scene. Without them a sunset is just a big gradation of color - a big beautiful one which is very soothing to look at, but it's not something we really get excited about. It's when the clouds almost seem to catch on fire that we run outside to see it and parents around the world hold their children up for a better view.

Australian Outback Sunset. Photo by Kerry Heffernan

Making MudFor the painter, clouds can bring a sunset to life, but they can also very quickly get out of control and muddy all the colors in your sky. The reason is that when you mix warm colors with cool colors you are instantly graying or muddying those colors.

Sonoma Coast Sunset 24x36 Oil by Jackie Lee. Warm/cool color variations in clouds make it all too easy to make mud.

My photoshopped version.

Those are some of the things to look out for when were painting sunsets and youll see all those in action in the painting projects later on, but first of all we're going need some reference to start from, so lets look at how we might get some good sunset photos.

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Photography

To begin with we will paint from photographs, as many painters do these days, but you will hopefully graduate to plein air painting by the end of this course. By beginning with photos it will help you appreciate the difference between what a camera can achieve and what the human eye can perceive. To get good photos of sunsets you have two options - make your own photos or get some from other sources, probably the internet.

Using photos from the internetEvery image and creative work is protected by copyright from the moment it is created, so if we want to use someone's image to paint from it pays to ask them first, UNLESS it's purely for individual educational purposes (which means you won't sell the painting) OR if you only use a small portion of the image or transform the image substantially in your painting so that it is quite different from the original. Saying that, it's always nice to ask anyway - it shows someone that you appreciate their work and most people are excited to hear that someone wants to paint from their photo.

You can find many sites which provide copyright-free photos for artists to use. Here are a few of them:

http://paintmyphoto.ning.com http://www.photos4artists.co.uk http://www.morguefile.comhttp://www.public-domain-photos.comhttp://www.sxc.hu/http://images.google.com/hosted/lifehttp://www.everystockphoto.com/

Get more photos at www.masteringsunsets.com/photos

Exposed for the lights.

Exposed for the darks.

HDR (High Dynamic Range).The camera takes several exposures at once and combines them into a single, better balanced photos.

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Photographing a sunset

Most cameras these days are pretty clever, but sunsets really do test them. The problem is too much contrast. If you focus on the bright sky before you take the photo the camera might get the colours in the sky pretty close to what youre actually seeing, but it will tend to underexpose the dark foreground, making it a black silhouette. Similarly, if you focus on the foreground before taking the shot the camera may capture the colours in the foreground better, but the sky will be blown out, nearly white. So if youre taking a photo of a sunset for a painting youll want both of these photos - one exposed for the sky and one exposed for the foreground. Usually that means half pressing the shutter button while youre centred on the dark foreground, moving the camera up to see the whole scene and then pressing down fully to take the photo. Thats exposing for the darks. Do the same for the sky to expose for the lights.

Every camera is different so youre going to have to play around with yours to find the optimum settings. Try using the sunset setting on your camera if you have one too, and make a note of what settings you used for each photo so that when you get them back home where you can see them properly on your computer screen youll be able to figure out which settings give the best results.

Some cameras now come equipped with a function to take multiple exposures at once and then combine them into a single, better balanced photo. This is usually called HDR (High Dynamic Range) - look for it in your camera. The more expensive the camera, the better it will be able to capture true to life colour, although nothing yet compares to the human eye.

In a nutshell, get there early to plan your shots, take lots of different exposures and settings to see which ones work best and make sure you expose for the foreground as well, but before you go out check you have a full battery and plenty of room on your memory card.

Project 1 - Photography

1. Find 5 sunset photos on the internet (or any other source) that you might like to paint from. Save them to your computer. (Dont spend all day!)

2. Shoot your own sunset photos, taking note of the settings and procedure you used for each photo so that when you get back home you can figure out what the best method is for your camera. Also take note of the difference between what the camera sees and what your eyes see. Thats important!

3. Make a new folder on your computer called Sunset Photos and put all your photos in there for use in the projects which are coming up next.

Note: For more student work and to upload your own sunset paintings visit:www.masteringsunsets.com/photos

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Project 2 - Value Study

Value Study 10x8 Oil on Board by Richard Robinson

Value Study Oh, boring! Well, remember I said that value is the first thing we get wrong? The object of this project is to help you with that, and it will also give you a chance to focus on your brushwork and edges before things get trickier. So get your paints out and here's what we're going to do - paint a simple sunset sky using just black and white. Sounds pretty easy and for some of you it might be a little bit too easy, but I find there's always something to be learned when we get our paints out.

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*See Figure 1 for a larger printable version.

Materials

10x8" Wood Panel primed for oil or acrylic in white.3 Coats of Acrylic Primer, plus 1 coat on the rest to prevent moisture absorption. I use MDF (Medium Density Fiberboard) but you can use Masonite or whatever you have available. You'll find that canvas is easier to hide brushstrokes on if you prefer that, but I often prefer the honesty of a wooden panel which shows all your brushwork. You could use a toned surface to begin with, but for sunsets I prefer white which allows the colors to be shown at their highest chroma more easily, which is not important with this black and white study, but will be a factor in the following paintings.

Ultramarine Blue, Burnt Sienna, Titanium White.

Flat bristle brush #8. (Robert Simmons Signet).

Palette knife.

Painting Medium. (Chroma Archival Oils Lean Medium or similar e.g. Liquin, M. Grahams Walnut Oil Painting Medium)

Note: View all materials used in the Mastering Sunsets course in your discounted online shopping list here: www.masteringsunsets.com/materials

Resource photo or painting from life. Use your own photo or Figure 1.

Get more at www.masteringsunsets.com/photos

Extra Materials for Acrylic Painters

Painters using acrylics can do all the same techniques presented in these projects, but the trick for them is to keep their paints wet on the palette and on the painting itself, which just means using one or all of three things to help with that - a stay-wet-palette, a water spray bottle to spray the palette and the painting every few minutes, and a retarder medium to slow the drying time of the paint.

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STEP 1. Define your value rangeMix the darkest dark and the lightest light for sky & land.

TIP: Warm vs CoolThe nice thing about using Ultramarine Blue & Burnt Sienna instead of just black is that you can make it warmer or cooler by adding more of the Blue or more of the Burnt Sienna. My idea is to make it a little bit cooler in the darks and a little bit warmer in the lights.

TIP: Mix Small Piles FirstWhat I tend to do is mix a small pile first to get the color right and once I know the mixture I'll mix a larger pile and join that together with the first one.

STEP 2. Mix Intermediate Values: 3 values in between lightest and darkest for the sky. Mix larger piles than you think you'll need.

STEP 3. Block in your darkest darksUse some medium - enough so that the canvas does not show through.

STEP 4. Block in the next lightest value.Use a little less medium. I prefer not to blend my strokes and to make my brushwork as random as possible - not paint strips like a house painter. Don't get fiddly! Keep painting large shapes and pay attention to their edges - are they sharp or are they soft?

STEP5. Paint the remaining valuesKeep moving through the values towards the sun, using less medium with each lighter value so that the paint gets thicker.

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TIP: Acrylic PaintersRemember to keep spraying your palette and painting every few minutes to make sure that those paints don't dry. Otherwise you won't be able to make these beautiful soft edges.

TIP: Two Gradients CombinedVertical Atmospheric + Radial Sun Glow.Whenever we're painting a sky or especially a sunset it's good to remember there's a vertical gradient as the sky gets lighter towards the horizon but around the sun there's also a radial gradient. These two gradients combine in the one picture, so that each little piece of sky has two gradients happening in it at the same time; the radial and the linear (the vertical).

Every piece of sky contains 2 gradients - 1 radial, 1 linear.

TIP: Keep Your Brush Clean!There is no surer way to get muddy color on your painting than to NOT clean your brush in between different paint mixtures.

STEP6: Block in the LandscapeMake it warmer and very slightly lighter as it gets closer to the sun because that sun glow is actually affecting the landscape as well.

STEP7. Lights to DarksReclaim lost detail and adjust edges. When you reach the sun, work back outwards to your darkest value, making sure you keep your brush clean in between values. Apply the light accent of the sun (White with a speck of Burnt Sienna) with a palette knife to make it really thick and textured.

I'm often tempted to stop painting after I've gone from darks to lights, but there's a lot of detail that gets painted over in that first run through, as you can see here... This is at the end of the dark to light stage, and here's the finished painting after going back from light to dark... You can see the painting looks more finished, but it's very easy to overdo it, to forget about the separate areas of value and end up introducing to much light into the darks, which makes the painting look pasty, so that's something to watch out for.

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STEP 8.Evaluate (Coffee/Tea Time!)Take a break and enjoy your little sunset painting! Think about what you learned by doing this and if you're really going for a gold star, make a list of the things you learned. Think about stuff like contrast, brushwork, light effects, edges, values - all that sort of arty stuff and make a note in your note book, or below.

Light Effects___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Values___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Contrast___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Brushwork___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Edges___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Other___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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Figure 1. Australian Outback Sunset. Photograph by Kerry Heffernan

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Figure 2. Australian Outback Sunset. Photograph by Kerry Heffernan

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Student Examples for Project 2

Sunset in Value9x12" Oil on canvas boardby Nora Mackin

Subtle value work Nora. Youve made this more interesting than the photo by simplifying the shapes and tilting the horizon. Nicely done.

Sunset Gray40x50cm Oil on Canvasby Elena Sokolova

A good first try Elena. The overall value scheme is good but if you had joined together most of the darker values in the sky into a larger mass the cloud forms would be easier for the viewer to understand. See Noras version above.


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Project 3 - Glazing

Value Study - Glazed 10x8 Oil on Board by Richard Robinson

Transparent vs Opaque Some paint colors are transparent by nature, some are semi-transparent and some are opaque. The label on the tube will tell you which is which. If you are wanting to achieve the most luminous effect possible with your paints you'll need to use transparent colors in thin glazes over white. These thin transparent layers of paint behave like stained glass windows, allowing some of the light through the paint layer to bounce off the white ground, back through the color again to our eyes.

TIP: If a finished sunset painting just lacks a little punch in the highlights you can paint over that area with white, let it dry completely and then glaze over top of that with a transparent color - something like Indian Yellow, Transparent Yellow, Transparent Orange - those are colors in the Chroma Archival Oils range, but just check your own tubes of color to see what you've got. If it's not transparent or even semi transparent you can still use it in a thin glaze (using lots of painting medium) but it won't be quite as vibrant as a transparent color.

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Let's try glazing over our first value study, just to see what happens. I've let mine dry for a few days first - it wasn't very thick paint. Usually with oils you'd want to wait about 7 weeks to avoid cracking, but this is just a study so I'm not too worried about that, plus these Archival Oils from Chroma actually stay permanently flexible so you don't need to worry about cracking like with normal oils.

Materials

Your previous Value Study painting, dried.

Ultramarine Blue, Alizarine Crimson, Cadmium Red Light, Cadmium Orange, Cadmium Yellow Light.

Soft synthetic or sable hair brush, size 8 or similar, any shape.

Painting Medium. (Chroma Archival Oils Fat Medium or similar e.g. Liquin, M. Grahams Walnut Oil)


1. Make a very thin mixture of yellow and painting medium on your palette.

2. Brush the yellow over the light areas of your paint with a fine haired brush. Wipe back the edges if necessary.

3. Wait for that layer to dry (give it a day or two until its not sticky) and then do the same with orange, but moving further away from the sun.Wipe back the edges if necessary. If youre too impatient to let this yellow dry first (like me) just go ahead and try to make smooth transitions between the yellow and orange. You can always brush the transition area very lightly with a soft sable brush to remove any brush strokes.

Glazing several different colours works best when they are applied separately and allowed to dry properly because that way the paint mixes optically rather than chemically. Chemical (physical) mixing is more prone to creating muddy mixtures than glazing is.

To learn about the classical masters technique of building a painting with seven individual layers click here.

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Here are a few great artists who have used the glazing technique to achieve beautiful glowing sunsets...

Sunset over the River by Albert Bierstadt

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A Sunset Bay of New York by Sanford Robinson Gifford

Sunset by Joseph Mallord William Turner

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Project 4 - Alla Prima

Colour Study 10x8 Oil on Canvas by Richard Robinson

Glazing is definitely a great way to get your colors glowing, but for myself I prefer to not to have to wait that long for the paint to dry so I really love the immediacy of the Alla Prima technique, translated roughly from Italian as 'at once', otherwise known as wet in wet, technique. What I will do is a little bit of glazing on top of this alla prima painting ready at the end of the painting after its dry so well get to see how the combination of the two techniques works.

You can see at a glance that there are many differences between the colours in the painting and the colours in the photo.

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For instance I could have made the top of the sky more purple-grey. As far as Im concerned it doesnt matter how close I get to the photo, so long as the painting stands by itself as a good painting. If I become a slave to the photo it cuts down on my enjoyment, and if Im not enjoying it I stop painting, and then I certainly wont get any better, so I have to make sure Im painting with enough freedom that I continue to enjoy the process, which means theres always this fine balancing act between copying and painting.

As things move closer to the sun they take on more of the colour of the light. In this case the light is yellow, so everything gets lighter and more yellow closer to the sun. Thats the general idea but the tricky thing is figuring out how to make for instance, a blue cloud, turn gradually into yellow. What helps me do this is thinking of the colour wheel. How is that colour going to get from here to there? Weve got a few options. It could go around to the right, or to the left, or straight through the middle. Now just looking at the photo it makes sense to me that blue is going to go through purple, red and orange in this painting to get to yellow.

Materials

10x8" Canvas Panel or similar

Ultramarine Blue, Magenta, Cadmium Red Light, Cadmium Orange, Cadmium Yellow Light, Titanium White.

Bristle gesso brush 1.5(Blick Economy White Bristle Gesso Brush)

Flat synthetic wash brush 1(Robert Simmons Expression Flat Wash Glaze)

Filbert synthetic brush size 4(Robert Simmons Titanium Filbert Long Handle #4)

Liner brush size 2(Golden Natural Liner #2)

Painting Medium. (Chroma Archival Oils Lean Medium or similar e.g. Liquin, M. Grahams Walnut Oil)

Resource photo or painting from life. Use your own photo or Figure 1. Get more at www.masteringsunsets.com/photos


Extra Materials for Acrylic PaintersPainters using acrylics can do all the same techniques presented in these projects, but the trick for them is to keep their paints wet on the palette and on the painting itself, which just means using one or all of three things to help with that - a stay-wet-palette, a water spray bottle to spray the palette and the painting every few minutes, and a retarder medium to slow the drying time of the paint. It also pays to mix twice as much paint as you think you will need.

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Student Examples for Projects 3 & 4

"Almost Night" 8x10" Oil on Canvas by Roberta Murray

Great glowing effect. Interesting details in the landscape. The three main clouds share a similar size, shape and spacing which makes them look less natural.

"Project 3" 7x7" Acrylic Glazing by Sharon Repple

Dynamic design! Achieving a good glowing effect with punchy colour.

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"Fire in the Sky" 8x10"

Oil on Board by Roena King

Nice to see so much palette knife work creating a great shimmering paint texture. Beautiful organic cloud shapes. I like how the sun glow is eating away the landscape.

The light grey swish in the middle of the dark cloud seems out of place.

"Sunset Part 3" 10x12"Oil on Board by Dorothy Debney

Good glowing effect. Starting to form interesting cloud shapes although it looks like you're not quite sure yet how to transition a cloud from the light side to the dark side. If a cloud's light side is orange it's going to get slightly redder as it turns over to become more purple or blue on the shadow side. That's a gross generalisation but the point is that there is often a soft transition between the light side and the dark side of a thick cloud.

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"Algow in the East" 9x12" Oil on Canvas by Sharon Casavant

A good glowing effect and good gradations of colour. The glowing effect in the land would have been more pronounced if you had gone more orange instead of green or grey with those areas close to the sun. Similarly the grey cloud obscuring the sun may have looked more dazzling painted a light warm rather than a cool. The strong blue and red on the right side might be more realistic greyed down a little.

"Dance of Colors" 5x5" Oil on Canvas by Pandalana Williams

It's great that you've taken this to abstraction Pandalana. If that was your intention you succeeded beautifully, especially seeing that your usual work leans more to descriptive realism. Very exciting!

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"Sunset Over Castle Park " 22x24" Acrylic on Board by Pauline Le Merle

Love the composition Pauline and all the interest in the sky which looks quite abstract - a beautiful counterpoint to the crisp realism in the landscape. I'd like to see you paint this alla prima as well to see what the difference would be.

"Sunset Alla Prima" 40x50cm Oil on Canvas by Elena Sokolova

Very powerful colours there Elena and some beautiful shapes in the clouds which I know is not easy to achieve what with everything else you need to think about while painting a sunset like this. From a distance this works extremely well. Up close it looks a like you could have spent had a little more care with some of your brushwork.

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"Glazed Sunset" 10x13" Acrylics by Silvana M Albano

Fantastic cloud shapes Silvana with a great sense of perspective. Good work.


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Project 5 - The Glow

Sunset Beach 16x16 Oil on Canvas

The previous project introduced us to the colours and the forms of a sunset. Now it's time to take those concepts a little further in a larger painting. I want to look a bit closer at the glowing effect of a sunset. The way objects close to the sun are infused with the warm light, also called a color corona. I also want us to have a look at how to add even more colour into the sunset foreground and see how that contrasts with what the camera does. As well, I want to show you how we can invent a scene from various resources and also how the larger canvas gives us more options for exciting brushwork. Thats all going to happen in this painting.

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Materials

16 x16" Canvas primed for oil or acrylic.

Phthalo Blue, Ultramarine Blue, Primary Magenta, Pyrrole, Red Light, Permanent Orange, Primary Yellow, Titanium White.

Flat bristle brush 1.(Blick Economy White Bristle Gesso Brush).

Liner brush #2.(Golden Natural Liner #2 Short Handle)

Filbert Synthetic #6.(Robert Simmons Titanium Filbert #6 Long Handle)

Filbert Synthetic #8. (Robert Simmons Titanium Filbert #8 Long Handle)

Flat Synthetic Wash brush 1.(Art Spectrum Series 700F Golden Taklon #10or Robert Simmons Short Handle Sapphire Flat Wash 1)

Painting Medium: Walnut Oil



Video Transcript

This painting is a 16 inch square where the first one was a 10x8 inch, so that gives you some indication of the scale. This scene doesn't actually exist because the sun never sets in this position. But I wanted to use this photo of my beach, Ruakaka Beach, as the foreground for a sunset painting. So how did I get this painting out of this photo?

Photo: Sunset in my street

Pataua Oil on Canvas 152 x 51cm by Richard Robinson

Photo: Ruakaka Beach

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Well I could have just invented it all but, normally, it doesn't turn out very good if you do that. In fact, most great studio painters I know put as much time in gathering resources and making preparatory sketches in paintings as they do in making the final painting.

So, I needed some reference for a sunset sky. I had this old photo I had taken just across the street from my house and also found this photo online and I was looking at the way I dealt with this sunset in an earlier painting of mine. (Pataua).

I really liked the way the light was coming through the dune grasses in the foreground. This little plein air painting I had done on the spot also helped. So having all those resources in front of me, I sat down and did some sketches about what I thought I would like to see in this painting.

So I chose the best of those and looked again at my resources and painted these two 4.5 inch square studies.

The one on the left was a little too vibrant for what I wanted and so I basically just grayed all the colors except for the yellow colors right around the sun in order to achieve the second painting on the right. So I was pretty happy with that and you can see it is not to dissimilar from the final painting. It took me about a day and a half to finish that whole design process. So don't be in a hurry

to jump into your big studio painting. Just allow yourself the creative space and time to build your painting one idea at a time. and just enjoy. You will find plenty of resources in the lesson notes to work from but I do encourage you to use your own material. For the moment let's just see how I painted this one.

16 X 16 primed canvas, Stretched with masking tape, Toned with Beige Acrylic Gesso.

There is my canvas all stretched and toned. I've given it a day to dry. And there is my palette of colours. And all my brushes. Now you can see on the left there thatI am using black and white reference photos. That is so I don't become a slave to the colour in the photos. I am going to start off here by making two piles of gray. One will be cool and one will be warm. I'll use these colours to subdue some of the brighter colours when I need to. A cooler mix is made from mainly white, then blue, lesser red; then a tiny bit of yellow.

I am aiming for a mid-value half way between black and white. Now, the warm gray is made with red, blue, yellow and white but with much less blue in it. You can see these grays very obviously cool and warm. They could have been much closer to neutral gray. If you do make them more neutral you may end up with a slightly more neutral gray painting in the end. It all depends on how much you use these pre-mixed grays in your colour mixtures.

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Premixed grays - cool and warm.

I am going to try a technique which has been used by many artists down through the centuries. It is called "painting into the couch". It has absolutely nothing to do with the couch. It's coating the canvas with a very thin layer of painting medium. In this case, white. My painting medium is walnut oil. So I am going to add a bit of that to my Titanium white, mix it all together with a palette knife and spread it very, very thinly onto the canvas, where I am going to avoid putting it on at the bottom right corner of the painting where the darker land is going to go. It is very, very thin though, it is a very light scumble. If you put it on thick, I am pretty sure it will ruin your painting. The idea is that it helps the paint flow a little better on to the canvas and that it helps with the lighter atmospheric properties of the sky.

So the first step, as with the previous project, is to start painting that sun glow. Now where do I want to put that? I could put it anywhere. I am going to start with the rule of thirds, so I am going to put it one third in from the right and one third up from the bottom.

Starting with the glowing area.

Right from the start, I am thinking of the glowing area around the sun as an oval shape, rather than a circular shape, I am adding a little bit of orange to that yellow mixture and working out a little bit further from the sun. Now using more orange I can start to indicate some of the mountains in the distance there that would be lit up by a sunset if it did occur in that area. Now I can add a little bit of red as it gets further away from the sun.

Im think of an oval glowing shape as I go.

So, in general all the colours in the painting get cooler as they get further from the sun. In my palette of colours happens to be laid out in the same order, from warm to cool. Just like the keys on the piano, if they are all in the right order, it is a lot easier to play. So more white added to that orangey mix and moving out once again up into the sky. All the paint has gone on pretty thin at this stage and we can put on the more impasto thick paint after the initial block-in has been done and the whole canvas is covered with the major colors. Very thin coat of orange and red going on here to start establishing the glow in the foreground. I've still got that oval shape in mind.

The warm gray that I mixed just happens to work very well as the next colour in the sky. So I start using that to start sketching in some of the clouds. How do I know what cloud shapes to paint? Well I am always trying to think of clouds as three dimensional objects rather than flat paper cut-outs. So as the clouds get closer to us and we look more up into the sky and we are seeing more of the base of the cloud and less of the side of the cloud. Colour wise the bases of the clouds move from warm to cool as they move away from the sun. The sides of the

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clouds do that as well but the sides of the clouds are a little bit cooler than the bases they are on. That is because the bases of the clouds are being lit directly by the sun.

Cloud shapes and colours alter with linear perspective and atmospheric perspective.

Of course the sky gets cooler away from the sun as well and up in this area I am going to lay down very thin pink , almost a wash, to start with before I go over it with blue so this area gets infused a little bit with the warmth of the sun as well. After a few attempts I got the blue mixed from mostly white and a tiny , tiny touch of pthalo blue. because it goes a long way, that colour, and then tiny additions of magenta, red and yellow, just to gray it down a little bit. It's about the same value as the clouds, just a little bit lighter at the moment, but you can see by the finished painting at the bottom left there that, in the end, I darkened the clouds a little and the sky is a little lighter by comparison. While I am working with blue I just added a little bit of blue and yellow to that to make it a little slightly darker and block in the ocean, there. The cool gray which I mixed before which is pretty blue, really, which is a good colour for darkening the clouds at the top of the painting here. Soften that edge right off just mixing it into the sky colour. I don't want any hard edges leading off into a corner.

The block-in continues, covering the canvas.

As we get down to the middle of the clouds, here, I am, adding more of the warm gray to the cool gray. At this point, I am using a Robert Simmons, number 4, synthetic filbert brush. Now, with some red and blue and a little yellow and white, I am mixing a cool dark to block in the foreground with. Just warming and lightening that a little with orange as it gets closer to the sun. I thought it might be nice to have thee hills a little darker, maybe, some rain over the side to help balance out all that sun on the right. Slightly cooler gray for the sand, which is all in shadow. This will be part of the rain graying down the colour of the ocean here. A blue, red and orange for a darker dark here. Softening that edge off with a paper towel. That is the block-in finished. Before I move on to the next part, I will get my soft nylon brush here and soften off some of the edges. Here comes the rain.

Soften some edges.

So now I am going to start using a thicker paint with little to no painting medium in it. I have mixed up a red, white and a little bit of orange to get that pinky colour here. And brushing it on very lightly. This is another synthetic brush.

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It is one of my favorite brushes and can give a nice variety of strokes, from very fat to very thin. (Art Spectrum Series 700F Golden Taklon #10) Adding a bit stronger yellow orange in there now. And working it up into the clouds a little bit as well. And adding the sun back in. So basically I am going over a lot of the lights in the clouds with a much thicker paint and adding a few more details as I do it. Adding some more pink , a bit more vibrancy to the sky, a little more white to the shadow sides of the clouds. Using the same colour for the hills in the distance. And starting to play with the idea of putting some detail further away there. Using a very light cool gray to paint what is called "rim lightening" at the top of the clouds here.

Adding Rim Lighting

Remember that higher up in the atmosphere there is less air and moisture and dust for the sun's light to travel through, so the light up there is generally, whiter. Using a nice long brush to put this on, but if I often find, if you want to get thicker impasto highlights, it is better to use a palette knife. The nice thing about a palette knife is, well, it is a little bit easier to make a random organic texture with it. But if you use a combination of the palette knife and the brush, you've got the best of both worlds.

Using a palette knife for interesting texture.

I don't know if you have seen me paint with an old credit card before. I got tired of dragging my knuckles through the paint, so I stuck it onto the end of an old brush. Thanks to Stuart Gourlay for the idea. It is good for smooshing paint around and giving it more textural interest. Or if you haven't got one of those, a big painting knife will do much the same thing.

Painting with a credit card brush.

If you add some small details into the clouds with a little brush, it helps to give the whole scene scale. Just like adding a little person in a scene, it helps to give it scale. Paint back in with the sky colour to help define those shapes some more. Very easy to get too finicky with a small brush. The nice thing about this brush is you can apply it more heavily for a broader stroke. Really put the paint on very thickly and scoop it up with the brush and lay it down gently onto the canvas. If that is not enough grab the palette knife and trowel it on. If your cloud forms get too dense it is easy enough to put little sky holes into them. Here is where the wet sand is reflecting some of the orangey colour in the sky there. A few vertical strokes

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help to reinforce the idea that it is a reflection. Just playing with the colour of the sand in the shadow here, again, making it a little bit cooler. I often find that when I cannot tell what the colour should be, it is probably closer to a neutral gray, so I end up, a lot of the time, mixing a cool gray over a warm gray, or vice-versa, and that often ends up working well. High-lighting the tops of the Dune grasses in the distance, there.

Highlighting dune grasses with a large bristle brush and loads of paint.

And again, as you get closer to the sun, all the colour becomes much more like the sun colour,so, I am being very careful to keep all of the colours in this area very similar. This foreground actually turned out being a lot harder than I expected it to be,and I spent quiet a long time working back and forth from the lights to the darks trying to create interesting form without over-simplifying things. I guess there is a lot going on in this small area so it is quiet a tricky part of the painting. Here, I am using a thick bristle brush to try and simulate the texture of the grasses in the foreground. If an area starts to look to regular and predictable , then, hitting it with a palette knife is often a good cure for that.

At this part of the painting, I wasn't really happy with the foreground and I had a look at my old Pataua painting. I thought, "That looks nicer, with the warmer foreground." So I started pushing the colours in the foreground in that direction. If you scrape an edge of paint on the palette knife, you can lay it off really thinly to create very crisp lines in the distance. Then dragging the paint off the flat face of the blade, creates more of a textured look.

This is a mix of ultramarine blue, orange and a little bit of red to create this very warm, greenish-brown colour for the foreground grasses. If you do mainly up-wards strokes it gives you a very soft finish to the top of the grass. Just softening and cooling this area off again. I really want this to be a very atmospheric, mysterious part of the painting.

As I keep trying to get the foreground right here, I do three things to help me. I step back 10 to 15 feet in the studio to see how it reads from back there. I also step out and have a cuppa and come back after five minutes and register my first impression in the first couple of seconds I see it. I also have a look at it in a mirror. That is a very, very good way to see if the painting or small area of the painting is reading correctly.

Using a fine sable watercolour brush to add some details. Time for a couple of little seagulls on the beach. Very dark gray for the dark wings and their little reflections and a very light warm for their light sides.

With a clean palette knife I'm just smooshing the paint to give that edge a little more interest. A soft edge in the corner so your eye doesn't get taken out there. And a soft edge way down the beach to help that recede into distance. The continuing saga of the foreground here, just trying to get it to read right. And again, I am looking at my older painting, of Pataua to see how I solved that particular problem. Just adding some juicy highlights to the bottom of the clouds now and remembering that they get cooler as they get further from the sun. So they go from yellow through orange through to pink.

In the photo and in the original sketches and colour studies, I had that big lamp post in the foreground here, but in the end I couldn't bring myself to put it in. It just seemed to intrusive, so I just put in this little fence post instead with the dark gray and a light highlight.

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Ive replaced the lamp post with a less intrusive fence post. Dont be afraid to change from your original design - large paintings often have different needs than small paintings.

Now, with some pthalo, some magenta and a bit of white, mixing up a slightly more vibrant purple to add to the clouds as they get higher up and take more of the dark blue of the sky on and get some quite beautiful vibrant colours up there. I guess I could have made the cloud over the hill here a blue but I thought it would be more interesting and balance the sun up a little if it were pink. A little seagull in the sky here, using a very fine brush for that and signing it. The real fun part is taking the tape off. The hard part is knowing when to stop. I just keep going until I can't think of anything that would make it better. Actually, one thing I did do after I stopped filming was add a couple more darks to the foreground.

The finished painting.

Viewing it in grayscale allows us to appreciate the importance of colour in this painting.

So, there is the finished painting. It is all about the colour. I guess most sunset paintings are all about the colour. And you can really tell that when you take the colour out and you can see it really doesn't look that appealing. You can put the colour back in and it's like the sun is coming out. Beautiful! Okay, now it's time for you to get your paints out and give it a go. HAPPY PAINTING!

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Student Examples for Project 5

"Sun Sinking, Dying Light, Winter" 30x30cm Oil on Board by Julie Cross

A lovely painting Julie and it generated a lot of helpful suggestions from other members on the site which is great to see. I'll just repeat what Michael Severin said in that the hard line of the river bank could be softened by adding the reflection of the bank into the water which I thought was a good idea. I took the liberty of photoshopping your painting a little to see what that would look like and I also gradated the reflection of the sky in the water and added a slightly brighter colour corona around the sun and warmed and lightened the landscape in front of the sun to aid with the glowing effect. I also put the foreground into shadow which I feel makes the light reflection in the water more intense and

provides a stronger base for the overall design.

The Original Fiddled in Photoshop

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"Dors Workshop 26" 16x16" Pastel by Dorian Aronson

Beautiful colours Dorian and a soft edged ethereal feeling to the whole painting. Great stuff!

"A Captive Audience" 12x16" Oil on Canvas by Michael J Severin

Great work Michael as always. Fantastic glowing effect and a solid composition. I like the depth of colour you have in the top blue clouds and I've made a note to head in that direction with mine with glazing at the end of the month.


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"Twilight Serenade" 11x14" Oil on Panel by Karen Meredith

Really interesting work Karen (and I do mean that in a good way). Such a beautiful arrangement of colour - especially all the broken colour in the ocean, it inspired me to have a look through your website www.karenmeredithart.com and I'm glad I did - love your work! My only reservation with this one is the colour and forms in the cloud arch over the sun because they seem to me to have gotten just a little muddied and not thoroughly finished unlike the rest of the work although that's to be expect

in an intricate warm/cool light/dark area like that on a small painting. Love how you've used large to small brushwork in the water and softening in the foreground as well to give us some perspective. Beautiful work! Thank you.

"Passages" 24 x 26" Oil by Luba Robinson

That's quite some glowing sky you've got there! Very subtly painted colour transition from warms to cools. The intricacy and dark sharpness of the foreground is a nice counterpoint to the soft sky. It's easy to see all the work and thought that's gone into this - great to see. My one reservation would be that I would want slightly thinner, flatter bottomed clouds closer to the horizon to help with the linear

perspective, and because the roof of the building is well above the horizon we should be able to see the underside as a very thin elliptical shape - that's why it's currently looking a little flat.

Oh and you know how all the books say don't place things smack bang in the middle of your canvas vertically or horizontally? Well rules are made to be broken, right? Centering the sun as you have and having the sky fairly symmetrical is giving this piece a balance and radiance that reminds me of a meditation mandala. In fact I took the liberty of taking the idea further in Photoshop.

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Project 6 - Colour Harmony

Rogue Wave 12x12 Oil on Canvas

A colourful sunset tempts the artist like nothing else to cover the canvas in all the vibrant colours they can get their hands on. It's very hard to resist all that colour, and that's why amongst artists at least, sunset paintings have something of bad reputation for being too gaudy and commercial. Beauty, as always, is in the eye of the beholder. Some people simply prefer lots of vibrant colours together in a painting, whereas some prefer a slightly more subdued colour scheme. I personally find that a painting containing a good amount of fairly gray colour makes a beautiful stage for more vibrant colours to work upon. What's a good way to achieve that in a sunset painting? Sunsets themselves give us a big clue - they create strong colour complements. Yellow and violet for instance. If we were to use a complementary colour scheme like that in a sunset painting it would make it easier for us in a number of ways:

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1. All colour harmonies are based on excluding some part of the colour wheel (just as playing every note on a piano at once doesn't produce a nice sound, so can too many colours produce a visual cacophony). A two colour complementary scheme excludes much of the colour wheel so it makes a simple colour harmony easily achievable.

2. Mixing complements together often creates a beautiful chromatic (colourful) gray, which is perfect for use within that same complementary scheme.

3. Simplifying our palette makes colour choices much easier and greatly reduces the chance of muddy colour, which is just a grayed colour in the wrong place in a painting.

In the demo video we look at using the Gamut Mask tool to help us develop a simple colour scheme and then we mix colour strings on our palette to use that colour scheme in the painting. We also look at the special effects created when light and water interact and what special brushwork techniques we can use in a scene like this.

Feel free to follow me step by step in painting the same scene or use the photos below or your own resources to design a piece that is more your own. You can paint this any size or shape you like using any medium. Happy painting!

Materials

The Gamut Mask Tool (click here).

12 x12" Canvas primed for oil or acrylic.

Ultramarine Blue, Pyrrole Red Light (or Cadmium Red), Magenta (or Alizarine Crimson), Yellow Ochre, Bright Orange, Primary Yellow (or Cadmium Yellow Light or Lemon Yellow), Titanium White.

Flat bristle brush 1.(Blick Economy White Bristle Gesso Brush).

Liner brush #2.(Golden Natural Liner #2 Short Handle)

Filbert Synthetic #6.(Robert Simmons Titanium Filbert #6 Long Handle)

Filbert Synthetic #8. (Robert Simmons Titanium Filbert #8 Long Handle)

Flat Synthetic Wash brush 1.(Art Spectrum Series 700F Golden Taklon #10or Robert Simmons Short Handle Sapphire Flat Wash 1)

Painting Medium: Walnut Oil



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http://www.morguefile.com/archive/display/616959

Photo by Li Newton http://paintmyphoto.ning.com/photo/crashing-waves

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Ivan Aivazovsky, "The Ninth Wave", 1850

The Tintagel Coast, Cornwall, England, circa 1886-1888William Trost Richards (American, 18331905)

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Rocky Surf Off Rhode Island Oil on Canvas -c1899 46 x 86.5 cmWilliam Trost Richards (1833-1905)

Garrapata, California, USA

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Video Transcript

In this project we're going to be looking at colour harmony and to do that we're going to be using the Gamut Mask Tool. That's going to lead us to colour strings and while we're actually painting the painting we're going to be looking at how light and water interact and what special effects that creates and of course going to be also looking at what sort of brush work we can use to enhance a scene like this one.

A colourful sunset tempts the artist like nothing else to cover the canvas in all the vibrant colours they can get their hands on. It's very hard to resist all that colour, that's why amongst artists at least,sunset paintings have something of a bad reputation for being too gaudy and commercial.

Beauty, as always, is in the eye of the beholder. Some people simply prefer a lot of vibrant colours together in their painting. Whereas some prefer a slightly more subdued colour scheme. I personally find that a painting that contains a good amount of fairly grey colour makes a beautiful stage for more vibrant colours to work upon.

So what's a good way to achieve that in a sunset painting? Well, sunsets themselves give us a big clue, they create strong colour compliments. Yellow and violet for instance. If we were to use a complimentary colour scheme like that in a sunset painting it would make it a lot easier to create a simple colour harmony.

Sunsets suggest complementary colour schemes

What else could we use? Blue and orange. Red and Green. Maybe yellow-orange and blue-violet. Let's try a few of those, but first of all we need a subject to try the colour out on. I chose Garrapata for this because at the end of my painting session there, the sun was setting and it turned out to have some really spectacular colour in it, but I didn't get to capture that in the painting, because of course I had started three hours earlier.

So I only had my memory and few photos to go from. I was painting right on the waters edge there and I was little bit worried because my Californian friend had told me all about the rogue waves that keep taking artists out to sea there and so I was a bit worried and so I thought it only fitting that I should paint a rogue wave in this place with the sun setting behind it.

Thumbnail sketches help develop ideas.

Value studies help to further develop the design.(5x5)

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So I did some thumbnail sketches, working on some design ideas. Then did a small value study, working out some of the details. Then I used the Gamut Mask Tool to map out two different complimentary colour schemes. The first one was blue-violet and yellow-orange. The second one was blue-green and red-orange. I knew I wanted a moderately vibrant look to the finished painting so I reduced the chroma by about a third. That adds more grey into the colour scheme.

So how do I get that colour scheme onto my palette? Well I start with the easiest colour. The grey-yellow-orange at the top looks exactly like yellow ochre. So I just put that down. For the blue-violet I use ultramarine blue, little bit of pyrrole red and a little bit of magenta. To grey it down I just add a little bit of yellow ochre.

Using the gamut mask tool to create colour strings.

Now starting from there I'm going to mix what's called a colour string of five values. So I've just added white to that to get a lighter value and then add white again to get the next step, which should be something like a mid grey in value and then I do that twice more so that I end up with five steps from nearly black to nearly white.

Now I need to do the same thing with yellow ochre so that I end up with two colour strings of equal value. But there's a problem because pure yellow ochre is a mid value, rather than a dark value, so I can't start with the yellow ochre. So I move the yellow ochre to the mid value range, where it belongs and I add a little bit of the dark blue-violet and a little bit of red and a little bit of

ultramarine blue, in order to darken that yellow ochre down.

Now I added the red because I didn't want the colour to go to grey as it moved into the dark. Now I do the same again but this time I add more dark blue-violet and more red to make this colour darker still, so it's the same value as the dark blue-violet. And then I clean off that palette, and just add white to the yellow ochre and white again to get my last two lighter values.

So next using just those colours and white, I did a small five and a half inch square colour study based on the sketches I had done previously. Now I was pretty happy with that already, but for interest sake I mixed up a whole other set of colour strings based on red-orange, blue-green and this is the little colour study that came from that.

I decided from there just to go with the yellow-orange, blue-violet colour scheme. But I encourage you to do more than two colour studies if you find you have the patience to do that. Because you'll learn more about colour and value each time you try a different colour scheme, and especially how easy it is to grey down a colour by adding its compliment. The next step is taking that little colour study through to a full blown painting, and that's what I'll take you through step by step next.

So I've got my canvas stretched and ready to go, and I'm just going to tone it with yellow ochre, and because I'm using water mixable oils, I'm using a lot of water with this. You do the same with acrylics but if you're using standard oils, you'd just be using your odourless solvents or turps, something like that.

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Toning the canvas with acrylic.

Then with a lint free paper towel, just going to wipe that whole thing down until there's hardly any left. And next I have to mix up my two colour strings again, making sure I've got plenty of paints. So big piles of paint. In the little pot down the bottom there I've got walnut oil as my painting medium, and these are the brushes I'm using. A range of sizes.

So, on the left there I've got the black and white study at the top, the colour study and then the finished painting down the bottom. I'm starting the sketch in with yellow ochre and a small brush. I start off with the top of the wave. I'm just angling it down slightly, which means that the top of the wave is slightly over head, because the horizon will be a straight line, just below that.

And this is the top of the next wave, which is below eye level so it's angling up towards the horizon, or eye level. And that's my glowing area there and the sun will go directly above that. Now I've put the rocks in and these and the sun and the sky and the wave, they're all going to reflect to some degree into the water below and into the wet sand in the foreground.

So what I've tried to do in the design is to make a lot of the major lines lead the eye back to that glowing spot in the wave, which is the centre of focus. What I'm also careful to try and do is give everything variety so the rocks will be a different size and shape and angle, and the wave forms will all be slightly different. And not just the objects themselves but the spacing between the

objects need to have variety as well. So variety is the main thing that I'm thinking of when I'm doing the sketch.

The completed sketch. Shape variation is the key.

So I'll take a larger brush, dip it in the walnut oil and start with the darks. So my plan is to move from the darks through the mid tones to the lights, and lets see if we stick to that, through the whole painting. These darks are going to go on a bit thinner, so that means they have a bit more walnut oil or painting medium in them than the lights, which will go on thicker and juicier later on.

At the same time I'll paint in the reflections for those rocks and they will get painted over with other colours later on. I'm also adding some of the dark blue-violet into those rocks as well, so it's not all the same colour. While I'm at it I'll just add a little bit of the next lightest colour and use that for the really dark shadowy area at the base of the wave here.

Then I'll add a little yellow ochre to that, just varying the colour and continue painting some dark shadowy water areas. And I will paint back into these areas with the next lightest value so I'm painting these areas further than what I need them. Now I've added a lot more yellow ochre and starting to work some colour into the face of that wave. So I'll build up this glowing area very gradually.

Here I'm just using pure yellow ochre. And a little darker version for the next gap in the wave. And with that I also start building the glow in the smaller wave face in the mid ground. Next I use some of the mid value blue-violet for the foam in shadow. Remember this whole wave is like a

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wall that's blocking the light, but allowing some of it through in the thinner sections of water. So all of the foam that's on this side of the wall is in shadow.

I'm staring to put in some of the rock there, with yellow ochre. I'm just going to paint a glowing area in the rock here so the front of the rock is going to be very very warm and light and it's going to hopefully merge in with the glowing area around the sun and that will give that sun the real appearance of being a very strong light source. Now the foam in shadow down this end of the wave is going to be a little bit darker because it's further away from the sun and I'm going to use that same colour to start suggesting a cliff way in the background, obscured by atmosphere.

Also add a little of that colour to the darkest brown to start suggesting the right hand side of the rock as it reflects those cooler colours away in the distance. And again using that same colour as the basis of the foam and water in the foreground. Lightening it a little as it gets closer to the area where the sun will be reflected. Starting to paint that stronger reflection in the wet sand now, with yellow ochre. And if you do this all with vertical strokes and then just finish off with a few horizontals, it'll really give the nice appearance of the wet sand reflecting the sky.

And just like the sky in the background it's reflecting against darker and cooler, the further away it gets from the sun. The sand itself is just a warm grey. I know I want this distant cliff to merge with the sun glow in the background and the sky, so I mix a cool and a warm together, which makes a warm grey, which is slightly lighter than the blue-violet grey, which is already down there. Then I go slightly lighter and warmer again to paint the sky in behind it.

Now I really want all these elements to stay well back there in the background and let the rock and the splash be the centre of focus. So the closer I get these values to each other and the more analogous the colours, like the closer they are together on the colour wheel, the better, because they'll all just sink back there nicely. And the

sky's getting warmer and lighter around the sun. And the sun itself I paint in with very nearly just pure white. It's got a little touch of yellow ochre in it.

Some of the clouds can start to be suggested with a cooler grey. And it's really nice how that shimmers next to the warm grey, cause it's the same value. But then I did darken it just a touch and the cloud also gets warmer as it gets closer to the sun. Now with a very light warm mixture and quite thick paint I block in some of the foam spray coming off the top of that wave. Then I work a slightly grayer version of that into the background as well, just a soft mist coming off the top of the wave.

The completed block-in.

So at this stage of the painting we've really finished the block-in. Most of the canvas is covered and the rest is the icing on the cake or the details. One of those details is this shadow line across the top of the wave. Because the sun's behind the wave, the light has more water to travel through as the wave curls over towards us at the top.

Of course there's not one wave in the ocean which is the same as another wave. But I'm just trying to make use of principles, which will make sense of this wave in this particular lighting situation. So I know for instance that when the foam comes over to the front of the wave it's going to be in shadow and there'll be light across the top of it.

Now I've actually just extended the colour scheme a little bit, I've added primary yellow or cadmium yellow to the

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palette there, and I'm just using that for the very intense colour corona area directly around the sun, and I'll also use that later in the reflection of that sun in the wet sand, and to intensify the glowing area in the wave just a little bit.

Just decided to give this foam some more interest by adding some of the smooth curling water in there, instead of having it all foam. And this is the start of some highlights on the rocks here. Remember this is wet rocks, so it's reflecting that sunlight really well.

Now I've just darkened it a little bit as it gets further away from the sun. Trying to get this light paint on as thick as I can here and by just grazing it lightly across the surface you end up with that nice speckled texture, which you don't get if you press firmly, you just get a big smoot

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