Lake Superior Rocks in Pen and Ink

The geology of the north shore of Lake Superior has a variety of rock formations. As my wide-eyed four-year-old grandson said, "These rocks on our beach were once red hot lava!"

I always thought it was more fun to draw the rocks were the lava had cooled more slowly into "squarish" shapes. My sketchbooks are full of these more linear formations. If you are just starting to draw rocks, these simple shapes are the ones to start on. Our beach cooled more quickly so the basalt did not have the time to form into large crystal shapes. Instead it is lumpy and irregular and full of holes and cracks. Not as graphic looking but very interesting. the trick is to simplify.

Here are a few pen and ink drawings of our lumpy beach. The lake is indicated by watercolor washes in a variety of blues.

"Places Between, Spaces Within": New Art from Project Art for Nature

Left: Filtered Sunlight, Pastel, 10 x 8 inches, copyright 2011 Diane Wesman. Click on images to view enlargement.

For the past several years I have been a member of Project Art for Nature (PAN). I’m pleased to invite you to my latest show. Starting this Friday, August 19 Project Art for Nature’s Places Between, Spaces Within opens at the Phipps Center for the Arts in Hudson, Wisconsin. New work by twenty-six Minnesota and Wisconsin artists will be on display. Most works will be available for purchase. (See second link for participating artists.)

PAN artists create and share artwork to encourage protection, restoration, re-connection and stewardship of natural communities of native plants and animals.

The show runs form August 19 to September 25, 2011 with an opening reception from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., August 25. There will also be a round table discussion with artists on September 25, 2 to 4 p.m.

Hazy Sunshine on Lake Superior

Hazy Sunshine 5.75" x 7.5" Oil

Here is another look out onto the great inland sea that is Lake Superior. It was a cloudless afternoon at the cabin. The sky was faintly hazy and yet the lake sparkled like diamonds. A brilliant contrast to the purplish-brown rock. The small spruce tree hangs tight to this rocky, lichen covered outcropping above Lake Superior. It is battered by the elements but its roots go deep into the cracks in the basalt.

This painting is done on book board primed with three coats of vermilion colored clear acrylic gesso. It give me a nice toothy surface, a little rougher than regular gesso. I started using clear acrylic gesso as a ground for my pastel paintings and find it is also nice for oil.

I will be showing this painting along with several others at the Phipps Center for the Arts in Hudson, Wisconsin. The show will run August 19 to September 26. The opening reception is Friday evening, August 26 from 6:30 to 8:30. More details about the show next week.

Luminous Twilight Colors

Lake Superior Sunset, Peach Pastel, 4.25"x4.25"

This small painting was done looking west along the shore of Lake Superior to what is known as the Sawtooth Mountain Range.

I started this painting with a watercolor wash to lay in some complementary colors to the pastels used to render the final image. You can see the texture of of the cold pressed Arches watercolor paper. The texture worked out well to help me show both the small waves on the water and the rough rocks of the shoreline. I primarily used Rembrandt and Unison pastels and then put in some details with Carb-Othello pastel pencils.

Pastels work especially well to capture the luminous colors of the long twilight along the north shore of Lake Superior. We are located about forty miles from the Canadian border where in midsummer twilight lasts until after 10 PM on the summer solstice--noticeably longer than twilight in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Not quite the same as the "White Nights" of a Scandinavian summer, but almost.

As I sit here describing this painting, I realize the titles of this series should have been "twilight" not "sunset." Too late: the titles are posted on the gallery walls. If you want to see them in person go to Betsy Bowen's gallery in Grand Marais, Minnesota. The Summer Underground Show will be there until July 27.

Spruce Tree in Prismacolor

Light on Branches Covered With Lichen 10x7.5"

Here is another aging spruce tree near our cabin. Like so many trees on the north shore of Lake Superior, many of the inside branches are covered with lichen which gives them a sort of fairy-dusted look. The complexity of the tangled, needleless branches makes trees like this lots of fun to draw.

This drawing was done with a Prismacolor colored pencil, #931, Dark Purple, on Gutenberg paper. Again, it is from a Roz Stendahl journal.

I had prepared this page by smearing stamp pad ink along the edges and the gutter of the spread before I left home. When I got to this page in the journal it seemed natural to choose a purple pencil and work on the recto half of the spread. Here is an example of how doing something simple to a journal ahead of time gives you something to work with and just launches you off in a direction so you can get to drawing instead of dithering about what to do with a blank page.

Time to Change Out My Palette

A few weeks ago fall colors were brilliant in central Minnesota. The color change was so dramatic compared to late summer that I had to make changes in my traveling watercolor palette. Out went the cobalt teal and in went pyrrol and cadmium oranges. I have used up a lot of the cerulean blue since the sky color has changed. My nathamide maroon is also in heavy use. Mixed with with pyrrol red and burnt sienna (especially when you use various amounts of each) it can represent the changing oak foliage.



Above is a field sketch. Below is a small watercolor done

with this as an inspiration.

I don't necessarily use local color in my pastels and oils, but they are evident in my field studies--it is the fastest way for me to get the light right. Even my studio watercolor paintings like the one above is more representative of local color. (Yes, there is a lot of pink in the grasses.)

A note on fall greens. In the little study below I used some sap green which is a mixture of Quinacridone gold (PO49) and Pthalo green(PG7). I do use Quin gold but I'm a little leary of having powerful pthalo green on my palette. Even in the fall you need some green and the sap green is very useful. Last year I started to use Daniel Smith's Serpentine green. It is lovely and I seem to be going through a lot of it. It is expensive but I'm not sorry I bought a tube.

Evening Painting

Evening is my favorite time of the day to be painting. The light is luminous and the shadows are deep. Best of all, I have to put myself on auto pilot and just paint; no second guessing, no overthinking. Why? The light is fading fast forcing me to make decisions and stay with them. Otherwise I can get caught in the plein air landscape painter's trap of chasing the light.

The painting above was done on my recent trip to Utah. The sun was just setting. Cottonwoods were catching the last direct rays and were lit up to a chome yellow and the field in front of them was still sunny. Everything else was in that sort of early evening mountain shadow where they were gently illuminated by the reflected light from the sky.


The painting above was done another day but also in the early evening. (Actually it is the third painting done the day I painted the two from the last post.) As you can see, neither has much blue in the sky. Just a faint bit in the part farthest from the sun. So the yellow light of the sky is present in the rest of the landscape and influenced my choice of pigments. Doing a bit of forensics will help me remember my instinctive, auto-pilot choices since I foolishly did not take good notes. Now that I'm back home and attempting some studio paintings with these as reference I sure wish I know exactly what I used. Another lesson learned.

Here is a lesson I did learn: The advice that one should always lay out one's palette the same way is smart. When you obey this rule you don't have to wonder if you are dipping into cobalt or ultramarine or violet or alizarin in the dark. Believe me, after the sun goes down, they look alike.

Both paintings were done on gessoed board. The two above each had one coat of regular white acrylic gesso and one coat of clear acrylic gesso. I like the bit of tooth given by the clear acrylic gesso but I have wondered if it causes too much of the paint to be absorbed. I use a bit of odorless solvent but no medium. The result are paintings that dry relatively quickly (a day or two) and have a matte finish except where I have laid on really thick layer of paint.

I took a wonderful workshop from Marc Hanson this summer and have been using his suggested palette with the addition of Ultramarine Violet:

Titanium White, Cadmium Yellow Light, Cadmium Yellow Deep, Cadmium Red Light, Permanent Alizarin Crimson, Magenta, Light Red, Transparent Red Oxide, Ultramarine Blue Deep, Cobalt Blue, Viridian, Yellow Ochre.

This a nice palette for landscapes--especially representational ones.

Last week I went to a lecture by a representative of Gamblin Oil Colors which prompted me to drive to Wet Paint to get some new pigments. Stay tuned!

What I Saw

My husband Eric and I just returned from a trip West to get out annual mountain fix. To accommodate all of the paraphernalia that goes with plein air painting and fly fishing, we drove. It was wonderful. We took a relaxed three days to drive to Utah and returned the same non-rushed way. In the middle he fished and I painted for a week using Park City as our base of operation. On the drive to and from Utah I did small paintings of the scenes along the road in my journal. I'll show some of them in a future post.

We had been to Utah to ski and had seen the state in the Summer but we were not prepared for the glory of Utah's Fall. Or the great fishing! The maples had turned a fluorescent red and the aspens were starting to yellow. The color is almost too much for a landscape painter to deal with. Frankly, it just doesn't look real. Painting it risks going down the road of sentimentality or cliche. As it was, most of the spots I found myself oil painting in were in the Provo River Valley near the good fishing waters of the Middle Provo River. No maples or aspen there, just the willows and cottonwoods of the river bottoms and long stretches of meadow. Fall color was obvious but not shouting at me.

I left home with about twenty panels primed with either a rusty red or a medium gray. It was good having the choice of grounds. Evening subjects turned out better on the gray panels. You can see a bit of the red ground showing on the image above. In the image below I used a gray panel. It turned out that not having to deal with the red ground helped me catch the mercury-like color of the water as it looked long after the sun had faded. In fact, I was doing this painting almost in the dark by the time I finished. The red you see around the mountains in the background are bits of the drawing I did on the panel using some thinned down alizarin crimson.

These two images were painted at the same site. The top one looks south toward giant Mt. Timpanogos, the second one, immediately above, looks north along a lower section of the Middle Provo.

I came home with thirteen paintings. I'm still trying to get to 200.

Painting and Fishing on Thompson Lake

It was a beautiful day to paint. My husband, Eric, and I spent two afternoons at one of his favorite trout lakes last week. Located off the Gunflint Trail in northern Minnesota, Thompson Lake is one of those catch-and-release lakes that is small enough for me to have several good views to choose from. Today the sun was getting low and I turned my easel toward the west.

The sun was streaming in through the trees. A shaft of light was coming through the bushes near the bottom of this painting and the scene just glowed. Next time, if I try this view again in my studio, I'll jack up the yellow in the sun lit areas.




This painting was done on a panel primed with acrylic gesso tined with cadmium red. Most of the red is obliterated except for a some along the top and a tad near the bottom. It would have been better to leave a bit more. I've done about 25 paintings since my worshop in August. The practice helps!

And yes, my husband really does fish while I paint. I took this shot just before I packed up by easel. That speck near the far shore in Eric in his float tube with fly-rod in hand.

Traveling Light??

I have a habit of carrying some sort of art supplies with me at all times. You never know when inspiration will strike, or you see something that absolutely must be captured by a drawing or little painting. So, if these are supplies in my purse of pocket, how do I keep the weight managable?

I learned some great tricks from my friend Roz Stendahl who gave me the two little mini palettes you see below. One is for gouache, the other for watercolor. The quarter in the photo shows how tiny they really are. One of these palettes along with a Niji waterbrush, a section or two of paper towel and some pieces of watercolor paper or a tiny sketchbook and you are equiped. The gouache palette carries enough paint for many outings. In my earlier blogs you can see some of the small paintings done with these supplies.

The tiny palettes have gone a long way to replacing the larger traveling palettes below. I continue to use these larger ones when I go away for a week or two and want to have some backup. I still take the tiny palettes and use the bigger ones for when I am settled in my hotel room or am at the cabin's kitchen table. They have the advantage of having more mixing space. Part of the tiny watercolor palatte is visible on the right so you get a sense of just how small it is.

My bigger black windsor Newton "traveling" palatte just sits in one of my supply drawers. It is just too heavy.

So, what is this seeming fixation on simple, small, light weight painting gear? After all I am a pastel artist and lug around an outdoor easel and a brief case full of pastels and the various paraphanelia that goes along with them. The answer: my shock at discovering how heavy oil paint is!

I'm scheduled to take a workshop next week in Taylors Falls, Minnesota from Marc Hanson. The plan (when I signed up) was to push my pastels to another level. Marc Hanson is a wonderful pastelist. Some years ago I was stopped dead in my tracks by a pastel painting he did of three trees shrouded in fog. But, as the weeks went by I began to wonder if this was the opportunity to return to oils. Bottom line: I decided to order some oils.

So, out came the catalogues. I thought I did my research fairly well about brands and pigments but I forgot to think about what is now obvious: cadmuim paint is heavy! I knew that if I was going to give oils a try I better have plenty of paint and it seemed like a good idea at the time to order the paint in a size that gave me the best value. Voila! The 200 ml tubes were a much better deal so I orderd them. Yipes! When the boxes arrived on my doorstep I could hardly lift them.

Even loading up tubes of watercolor and gouache when I go to the cabin did not prepare me for the weight of the oils. But I had not really factored in the relative size of the tubes either--20 ml watercolor and gouache tubes versus 200ml oil tubes. Gosh, they didn't look that big in the catalogue....

"Not to worry, we will be close to our cars when we go out to paint and you are wise shopper to get the bigger tubes (I paraphrase)," Marc Hanson graciously responded to my e-mail wondering if I should be concerned about schleping the giant tubes.

The whole episode has been good for some hearty laughs and right now carrying around the pastels seems awfully easy.

Do those thumbnails!

Hayfield in July


Recently I was out scouting for good places to paint and came upon this newly mown hayfield in northern Washington County. Minnesota is gorgeous at this time of year. The day was sunny and it was later in the afternoon--perfect to begin to see the landscape defined by the shadows.

I made some quick thumbnail sketches (below). It is important to establish some abstract shapes to carry the painting and I also needed to decide how best to convey the sweep of the vista and yet zero in on the really interesting roll of the nearby fields. Thumbnails are invaluable to help establish the masses and format for a painting. Without some good "bones" it is pointless to continue. Get those established and you have a fighting chance to get a good painting.

The masses of trees on the left were so interesting and they swept nicely into the trees on the ridgeline. All together they made a nice shape that hung together as a single mass.

The sun was blistering hot by the time I finished the block in of the pastel. Maybe that is why the orange I chose for the closest part of the field seemed to be an appropriate color to use. I decided to stop and leave the piece with just a few layers of pastel. At this point I needed my umbrella and had not brought it. My wide brimmed staw hat was just not giving me enough protection. More work on the piece would have to wait for a return trip to the site or another day in the studio.

However, the sketches and block in make my favorite point: values and good shapes give you a darned good start.

Working from A Photo

Here is an example of an experiment: working from a photo. I can count on one hand the number of times I have tried painting or drawing from a photo. Let's face it--the camera distorts what is "out there." One does not get the feel of the panorama in a photo. I my mind the artist is better able to depict the three dimensionality of the place and put it into a two dimensional format better than the camera. And I have friends who can spot a painting done from a photo in an instant. I would rather work from life. But one day I decided to spend the day on composition issues and did about 50 thumbnail sketches from photos. I was more interested in the composition than anything else that day so I thought photos I'd taken would work.

Below are two photos taken in Yellowstone Park followed by six of the thumbnails and then two stages each of two paintings.

1

What interested me was the bright grassy meadow against the dark trees.

2

This second photo shows continuation of the panorama--just some visual information but nothing that "grabbed" me.

Thumbnails

The question was where to crop the image. I ended up trying two options. First the upper left thumbnail, below, and then the thumbnail on the right.

More thumbnails

Using the first thumbnail I did a color study to see if I could work out capturing the feel of the day. Unfortunately I had not make a sketch of the scene and relied on the camera. For me a sketch has a lot more information than a photo. I have been able to develop paintings from sketches even without color notes. In a sketch your eye and hand do the editing and you get to the essence of what attracted you to the scene in the first place. And conveying that idea is what I want my painting to be about.

Below is stage 1 done on ColorFix sanded paper.

Stage 1

In stage 2, below, additional layers of pastel help push back the hills in the distance and give a little more shape to the grassy meadow.

Stage 2

The format was not working for me so I started a quick study on mat board coated with a few layers of transparent gesso. I like the texture of the brush marks and the gessoed surface allows me to wet the surface down after I lay in my first layer of pastel. You can see a bit of the underpainting where I have put down warm colors where the sun hits and cooler colors in the shady areas.

Stage 1 below.

Stage 1

Stage 2 of this study starts to tone down the intense yellows, give a bit of form to the trees and begin to soften up the distant hills.

Stage 2

The next several stages are yet to come. Time to put these studies away and return to them with fresh eyes.

Light on the Water

"Hungry Horse Evening," pastel, 6 1/2 " x 17 1/2."


A few weeks ago I was asked to give a talk on the subject of drawing and painting the landscape. The audience was a group of journalers who meet regularly at The Minnesota Center for Book Arts. The talk was to encourage the members who did not often (or ever) use the landscape as subject matter in their journals to give landscapes a try.

The subject of landscape painting is, appropriately, huge. But I needed to boil it down to something manageable in the time I had. After much thought about how it is that I do what I do when out plein air painting I came to the conclusion that my talk to could be summarized in one word: "Simplify."

For me it is a matter of getting down the basic masses and their values. Seems fairly simple to me now, but it wasn't always so. I think it has just taken years of looking and analyzing. And lots and lots of drawing. That said, I had to give them some other practical hints to take home.

I started to reflect on how it is that our preconceived notions sometimes get in the way of seeing. And I remembered the old problem most people have when they draw a face: the eyes are usually drawn way too high on the head resulting in a tiny forehead and a funny looking drawing that does not look like a person. We learn eventually to trust the classic diagram of a head based on actual measurements that shows the correct placement of the eyes to be smack dab in the middle of the face. The other parts of the face like the nose and mouth, distance between the eyes, placement of the ears, et cetera, really are where they are because we can measure them. Once we have measured the distance between features that usually calms down the part of our brain that is yelling at us to say "The eyes are too important. They must be higher on the face than half-way between the chin and the top of the head!"

So, I wondered, if there was an analogy that would help describe something about the landscape. Probably not since there are always some exceptions to the "rule." However there is a sort of rule-of-thumb useful for general lighting conditions from the famous artist/teacher John F. Carlson, author of Carlson's Guide to Landscape Painting. First published in 1929 it is now available from Dover Publications, http://www.doverpublications.com/. In it he describes his Theory of Angles.

Carlson believes that "the prime cause of the big light-and-dark relations in a landscape is the angle which such masses present to the source of light (the sky)." In a nutshell Carlson points out that there are four basic planes in a landscape: the ground or flat-lying plane, the vertical plane of the trees, the slanting plane of the hills or mountains and the arch of the sky which is the source of light. "Our landscapes' prime elements--tree, ground, mountains, etc--receive light from the sky differing degrees of light depending on their plane...." p. 33. The result is that the sky is the lightest element, the ground the second lightest, the upright trees the darkest and the mountains/hills the lighter than the trees and darker than the ground plane. (With some exceptions, for example, when the ground is covered by snow it will be lighter than the sky except for the part of the sky near the sun.)

The audience seemed to understand that. And then one of the audience asked me a question about light on the water.

Hmmm. A good part of my life has been spent staring at water or thinking about how light hits the water. In particular the great expanse of Lake Superior. I have, for hours, stared at, drawn, painted and studied the way light changes the look of the water. When she asked me how The Theory of Angles applied to water I could only think of the number of times I had seen it darker than the sky and then of the times it was lighter than the sky--or both at the same time.

(Below is a gouache painting I did one summer while looking out over Lake Superior. Here the water is darker than the sky, but the same scene on a cloudless day might look any number of different ways. In some cases the water would be the same value as the sky to the point that it is impossible to see the horizon. The painting, Hungry Horse Evening, at the beginning of today's entry, illustrates the "rule" that the ground plane--in this case the water--is darker in value than the sky.)


Untitled, gouache, 4" x 6."

As I drove home I realized having a set rule for how light behaves on water was one of those times as Carlson says, "If the student will once recognize the general and everyday value-differences in anything, he can easily see for himself any incidental departure from this common condition. He will in time despise any 'rule' concerning painting." p. 42.

So, in the case of water, look. Then trust your eyes.

From My Sketchbook: Testing Some New Colors

Last week I talked about two new watercolors I tried: Daniel Smith's Transparent Red Oxide and Schmincke's Translucent Orange. (Note the Red Oxide is in tube form, the Translucent Orange is in pan form.) I did several experiments in the field and show some of them here. These pigments used with Cobalt Blue or Indanthrene Blue (PB 60) make some beautiful grays that are really good at capturing the array of grays the deciduous trees and bushes present at this time of the year.

Those of you who know my pastel paintings might wonder why I am trying to portray local color since my paintings are often anything but! Must be from looking at leafless trees so much of the year in Minnesota and wondering how to depict them poetically. This month, while waiting for the leaves to come out, I am simply acknowledging they are simply many, many shades of gray.

These images are from a small 4.5" x 5.5" journal made with Folio paper by Roz Stendahl. It is perfect size for carrying around on walks. I can paint in it and then hold it open while it dries and I am off to the next scene.

Lake Country Pastel Society Spring Show

The Lake County Pastel Society Show, Pastel Springs, is open now until May 8. I was there on Monday to help check in the entries. Wow! It is going to be a challenge for our judge, Anita Louise West, to choose the winner from over 100 entires. Ms. West, famous for her own pastels, is in the Twin cities for a portrait workshop being held this week by Leslie DeMille. I have been a follower of Ms. West for many years--she is nationally known for her plein air landscapes.

So here is just one good reason to be a member of the Lake Country Pastel Society: Each year the Society sponsors a three to five day workshop lead by a pastel artist of national stature. In conjunction with this year's workshop, Mr. DeMille will give a public demonstration Sunday, April 5 from 5:30 to 8:30 at the New Brighton Family Center, 400 10th St. NW, New Brighton MN. The demonstration is free for members, $15 for non-members.

Come see the show at the Sherburne County Government Center and then check out the Pastel Society. In addition to first-class workshops, we meet six times a year for critiques, demonstrations and guest speakers. Spring and Fall shows are held each year. Dust in the Wind, the Society news letter, is a valuable source of information about materials, workshops, exhibits and grant opportunities.

It's Spring—Time to Start Something New

Left: Purple Marsh, ©2009 Diane Wesman, 9 x 12 inches, pastel on board.

Spring is officially here. The days are getting warmer in Minnesota. This is my last plein air painting for the winter. It captures the view across the marsh from my house.

Welcome to my blog. I'll be an occasional blogger writing from time to time about my artwork, how I think about painting, and the challenges and rewards of landscape painting. I'll also share information about materials and techniques. You'll get the opportunity to look inside my sketchbook and see how those entries evolve into paintings. My journals will provide a window into my life.

I hope that my blog will provide information to past and future students. I teach pastel painting at Como Park Zoo and Conservatory. You can view additional selections of my artwork at Project Art for Nature.

In Purple Marsh (above), the intense purples and rusts are colors typical of my winter palette. They reflect the moodiness of a late winter sunset. As things green up I'll start using greens and pinks from my spring palette. But, never one to stick to local color, you will see plenty of purple and any other deep color that will give me the dark values I love.

See Purple Marsh in person at The Lake Country Pastel Society Spring Show, March 31 to May 8, 2009 at the Sherburne County Government Center. Join me and the other artists at the opening reception, Saturday, April 4, 2 to 4:30 p.m.