Painting the View from My Desk

I was going to share a different blog with you today, but the other day I painted the view from my desk and I happened to take photos at each stage of the process so I wanted to share it with you. It's a view that I feel incredibly privileged to wake up to every day and I often do little sketches or quick paintings of it. It's the northern end of the Santa Lucia Range, and at the top of the furthest peaks you can see sparse trees, burned in the 2016 Soberanes fire.

The view.

This view has so much depth and is very changeable, from fog-shrouded peaks to massive cloud formations, and the way the mountains are layered is beautiful but hard to capture.

I've been working through the watercolor projects in Discover the Art of Field Sketching by Kristin Link and it's a great refresher for me on skills I learned as a very young artist, but haven't revisited as an adult. I'm learning so much and improving my watercolor and pen, as well as color and composition skills. I used Kristin's guidance on creating depth in landscape paintings for this one, and it made all the difference.

This was a fun exercise because it was like field sketching but I got to sit at my comfy desk chair in the air conditioning.

I started with a pencil sketch on a 5x7 inch piece of hot press watercolor paper (I prefer Fabriano Artistico). I wanted the painting to be set in a little from the edges but didn't feel like using tape to mark it out with a sharp boundary, so I added little marks just inside each corner.

I drew over the sketch with a waterproof fine liner (0.35 Copic Multiliner) and erased some of the pencil lines. I decided not to trace the clouds and erased those.

I started on the watercolor layers. I used a cool blue as a base layer on the furthest hills and for the bits of sky peaking through the clouds. It was partly cloudy that day and the clouds were moving quickly, but most of the sky was white/light gray with bits of blue sky peaking through so I wanted to leave most of the page white with just streaks of blue to represent that. I gradually warmed up the colors towards the foreground.

Next was layering some green over the mid-ground hills.

Then I added some leaves to the oak trees in the front, and more green on the closest hills.

The finished painting, "Blue Hills"

Finally, I added shadows with blue and purple, and it's finished. I sort of felt like I went over-board on the shadows and it may be too many, but it did capture what I was seeing on that day and in that moment and that's what I like about it. It's impossible to capture that in a photograph. It feels a bit animated, almost Studio Ghibli-esque to me and I love that.

Thanks for reading! I've been able to do a lot more painting since my elbow surgery in June, so I hope to be painting more in the coming months.

And if you haven't heard, I'm having an art show in August!