PLEIN AIR PAINTING STEP BY STEP by TOM BROWN

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Artists who follow my work often enjoy seeing how a piece was created. For their enjoyment I am showing some photos here that were taken as I painted this one. It's a canyon road leading into one of my favorite painting locations.

I began this painting with a few marks on my toned panel, to budget the space and make sure all essential elements fit properly on the panel in the correct proportion to each other. Then I established the darkest tones/colors that would be in the final picture (the trees). Following this I immediately blocked in general colors and tones for some of the distant areas (mountains). This established the most important masses of color and value, and established how they related to each other. From that point on everything else was compared to these masses to maintain the correct relationships of colors and values throughout the painting.

Bit by bit the underpainted areas were eventually overpainted to add more color variation and texture for interest. And to bring the painting to the finished state I then added more details like the phone poles, wires, the road itself, and more detail in the major tree area. 

I hope you found this interesting and I’d love to hear from you if you have questions or comments.

Email me at tombrownstudio@cox.net

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