The Letter: Step 2
I tend to work through a painting from one of two nearly opposite approaches. Either I work in successive layers from the background to the foreground, or I paint the figure first and then fill in the background. The first approach is by far my most common, especially with compositions involving complex backgrounds, and the one I will take with this piece.
The sky in this painting is relatively large. So to make things easier on myself I think of it as five separate sections: the open sky of the extreme background with its wispy, linear clouds, the group of rounded, tower-like clouds on the left and right, the middle layer of clouds just behind the buildings (two groups, one on either side of the figure), and the nearest section in front of the two towers. Because all oil colors tend to become a little transparent as they dry, I know I will need to lay down at least two layers of paint in the whitest areas of the sky. So, my first step is to very roughly block in the entire thing. You can see in this image that I’m not even really worried about fully covering the primer coat at this point.
The next step is a second coat of color in the open sky area. This layer of paint is relatively thick allowing for some manipulation of the cloud shapes as I blend them. The main compositional purpose for these clouds is to counter the strong diagonal running from the terraced balconies of the building in top left of the canvas through the flowers on the lower right.
In these next two images the second layer of sky, the ‘tower’ clouds on the left and the right is complete. These clouds were really fun to paint. I thought it would be interesting to echo some of the architectural elements of the buildings, namely the terraces, in the shape of the clouds. There is also a repeating shape which mimics the pose of the figure moving from upright to diagonal as the clouds move from left to right. I don’t know how much difference all this made to the final painting, but it was entertaining to think about it while I spent hours painting the clouds. It also added some interest to what could have been a flat, boring, empty blue sky. Incidentally, there is a weird reflection near the top of the first of these two images that isn’t part of the painting.
