Rainbow Clouds

Rainbow Clouds

11x14 inches acrylic paints on gallery wrapped canvas

This time around I'm talking a bit about a small but hopeful landscape called Rainbow Clouds. Frank had taken a lovely photo in our pasture showing billowy clouds over a green field with trees in the fence row and if that wasn't enough there was a rainbow to boot! 

I took a printout of Frank's photo, and using my handy dandy homemade viewfinder (the two sides of an old orange mat) blocked off a portion of the image that fit the ratio of the 11 x 14 inch canvas I wanted to use. To lay in the groundwork for the painting, I used some  inexpensive matte paints in the appropriate colours and began ghosting in the grass, clouds and trees.

I switched my table top from horizontal to vertical to make it more enjoyable to do looser brushwork and blending on the painting. Here I have gotten in the basic shapes for the underpainting, and have switched over to some slow drying acrylic artist tube colours that have a bit more intensity of colours. 

You can see in this progress photo, I have almost finished up the modeling of the sky and billowing clouds. I have “punched holes” in the outlines of the tree foliage and given a higher intensity of the greens right at the shadow line of the grass meeting the trees.

Once everything was dry, I got out my acrylic glazing medium, and glazed on the colours of the rainbow. I used a glaze to show the transparency of the rainbow colours.