Crested Butte

These are pictures, taken with my very ordinary camera, of the process of painting a commissioned piece, "Crested Butte".
The clients have a house there and supplied reference photos.

I start with a stretched and primed canvas, this one 30 by 40 inches. Since I work from dark to light I apply a base coat acrylic wash. Sometimes it's pure Dioxazine Purple, sometimes it's this color, a mix of Red Oxide, Cadmium Red Deep and Dioxazine Purple. This is the first coat.

After adding a second coat of the previous color mix I draw the image with white pastel pencil. Obviously this shows up better than charcoal or a standard graphite pencil against the dark base coat.

I work from the foreground back, so here I've painted the wildflower area in front. Just over the hill are the four pines, and a more distant stand of trees to the left.
I'm layering the different values of color, starting with the darkest and adding the lighter ones until it has the look I want.

Here I'm working on the more distant meadows leading to the mountain. The next darkest color, after the base, is a mix of cool blues and greens. Then a more pure Phthalocyanine Green layer is painted, topped with a mix of that green and Cadmium Yellow.


The pine trees on the mountain side are Phthalocyanine Blue and Phthalocyanine Green.

The trees in front of the mountain are topped with a lighter value of Permanent Green Light (easily the most optimistically named color of them all). Then the mountain's layers of color are applied.

The mountain completed, I begin to block in the clouds. These two are Dioxazine Purple lightened with Titanium White.

Another layer of lighter Dioxazine Purple and a finish of pure Titanium White completes the larger clouds. The smaller ones start with two layers of Cobalt Blue, each one lightened with White more than the previous one.

Now the sky is being applied. It starts with Purple, then a mix of Cobalt Blue and Purple with White to lighten the next layer.

The sky is finished with layers of Phthalocyanine Blue and Turquoise Green and White.