Painting On Location...The Sonoran Desert with oil painter Matt Smith. I'd never heard of Mr. Smith, but that doesn't mean nothun'. So when SmartFlix.com How-To DVDs kindly emailed me a recommendation for that DVD, I rented it. And highly recommend it to any representational landscape painter. Smith paints the Sonoran Desert; I paint the Chihuahuan Desert. We're both accomplished oil painters. Plein air painters. He seems like a likeable, nice guy. I'm dreadfully likeable, certainly a nice gal. (There is some trust involved on your part here.) I felt a kindred bond, and I'd love to visit with the man over coffee on a cool desert morning. Either desert.
Imagine my horror when he painted his sky dead last!!!! (And it worked.  For him. Rent his DVD and you'll see.)

My skies are generally almost as important to my painting as the focal point. I plan it that way. Light is the essence of any of my desert landscapes, and light comes from the sky. So I paint the sky first, then match the earth elements to what's overhead. I don't just block in the sky. I finish it. I start in the upper lefthand corner then work diagonally down and across. (With pastels, this yields the bonus of not dusting messy sky fragments across the lower part of my canvas.) I sketch rough cloud shapes, then treat the open sky as negative space by filling in around the clouds with my blue of choice. Then I go back to the clouds. I paint in the darkest values that contour each cloud, add some variety by throwing in earthy greens and blues and browns, define mid-values with gold ochres, oranges, lilacs or peaches. Then I blend pure white lightly over the cloud masses, using either my finger tips (pastels) or a broad, flat soft brush (oils).  Each color I use in the sky also gets sprinkled across the foreground and middle ground, so I'm harmonizing my painting as I go. I adjust, redefine darks, add more white, dirty that white until I have movement and form in the sky. Only then do I go into the earth. Here's an example of the first stage of one of my paintings. This is from my recent 20" x 50" pastel "Broken Sky Over Blue Mountain":


And after I've laced it with white and blended some:



I return to the sky as I finish the painting. I call this the "silver lining stage". With my lightest value of a sunny color, I add accents to compliment my composition and draw the eye back to my focal point.


It isn't the way Matt Smith does it, but it works for me. (I'd still like to have coffee with the man.)
Try anything. (What are you afraid of? It's only paint on canvas.) But find what works for you and stick with it.

FOR THE COMPLETE STEP-BY-STEP LOOK AT THIS AND/OR OTHER PAINTINGS BY Lindy Cook Severns VISIT MY WEBSITE LINDYCSEVERNS.COM OR GO BY KIOWA GALLERY, 105 E. HOLLAND, ALPINE, TX AND STUDY THE ORIGINALS! (I'm not well-enough versed in webpage design to make the links to those sites work yet! Maybe next week I'll have a clue.)