Two Shores: Step 7
With the entire background effectively blocked in, I can now turn my attention to the bridge itself. For this, as with the foreground and horizon, I use burnt umber. Burnt umber is a wonderful thing. It’s one of the fastest drying pigments a traditional painter has available to him, and it carries that property with it when you mix it with most other colors.
This is important when you consider the golden rule of oil painting: rich-on-lean. Rich-on-lean is a fancy way of saying “never apply a faster-drying paint on top of a slower-drying paint, or bad things will happen.” Some people–we won’t mention any names–choose to ignore important painting rules. And all I have to say is there are good reasons why the “Mona Lisa” and “Last Supper” are having troubles despite the care of the best trained and funded conservationists in the world.
By blocking in the foreground and bridge with burnt umber, I know I can come back when these areas are dry and paint on top of them without risking any DaVinci-esque blunders (oops, sorry Leo. I know I said I wouldn’t mention any names.). I want the foreground and bridge of the final painting to be very dark to play into the twilight setting and to allow the lights I plan on adding to the city and bridge to twinkle nicely without completely vanishing into an environment that’s overly bright. Pure burnt umber happens to be exactly the hue and value I want these areas to have, so I don’t need to bother mixing it with anything (hallelujah, this almost never happens). While we’re on the subject, I may as well mention that mixing colors–just sitting with my palette and knife in hand–easily makes up at least half of the actual painting process. It can be very time consuming to get the colors just right, and once I do I protect them with crazy practices like storing my palette in the fridge overnight.
I also take some of the pure umber (and some with a little titanium in it) and begin to add detail to the buildings on the skyline and the island on the right side of the painting. Because the theme of the painting is the progress of industry, and because factories are often located near the water, I choose to give the distant buildings a good industrial feel to them by adding a variety of smokestacks. This also works well with the red of the skyline above them, which adds a nice hint of the fiery goodness we know is percolating deep within those factories’ bellies. The last work that needs to be done with the umber is to start the bridge’s reflection in the water below it. As I described in the previous step, the hazy technique used to paint the water makes it very easy to blend the reflected color, even though the water is already dry.
