Exercise 5 Creating Mood and Atmosphere

On  looking through a book ‘Alla Prima’ by Al Gury I felt quite inspired by his paintings portraying woodlands. To me they evoke differing moods and plenty of atmosphere – intriguing and mysterious. Consequently I couldn’t resist having a try at my own version. Gustav Klimt’s woodland paintings also probably had a part to play.
The next hurdle was to find my own subject material. I had a browse through some woodland photos taken during a walk a couple of miles away from where I live. Eventually found something which appeared to fit the bill.  After a couple of rough sketches from different photos I did a monochrome study. I thought it was a good idea as the source photos looked almost devoid of colour and very dark in the foreground. I reckoned it would be easier to pick out the values for my painting from this, rather than from the photos. I mixed 6 values, initially 8 but found it was too complex, so I cut the number down a little more. Firstly I painted in the darks for the tree trunks and some main branches. These were simplified and reduced somewhat from the photo.

 For the second (colour) study I experimented with oils to get and idea if I would find them suitable for my chosen approach this subject.  Early on in the process I had put on the paint for the middle background. This was a midtone, covering a large area. It was more diffucult to obtain the same amount of brightness from the palest tones as in the upper half, though I kept adding thick paint with a light touch of the brush. Eventually it appeared to work. After finding acrylic worked well on the monochrome study and struggling to avoid dullness, even mud with the oils, I decided on acrylic for the next painting of woodlands.

For this I got the ‘not’ so bright idea of sketching in the forms with inktense blocks first, then covering the ground with yellow ochre acrylic. In the meantime I had forgotten that inktense is not waterproof when wetted, so when a river of mud began to appear I had to try and seal them using dark acrylic, losing time unnecessarily. Fortunately it was relatively plain sailing after this near catastrophe. There was only one further small hiccup along the way: after a fairly short while into the process it became increasingly clear to me that my brushwork looked mechanical in comparison to the previous studies. I remembered that I’d rotated my wrist much more in those studies, so once I did this it soon began to take on a more varied and interesting appearance. I used transparent and opaque paint consistencies in layers, scumbling some areas to blend edges and leaving hard edges in others. I intended all the tree branches to be opaque but as some of them became transparent I decided I quite liked them, so left them alone. I was aiming for an impression of something elusive and curious and hopefully have at least gone a good part of the way to achieving this.

final painting