I love paintings of country scenes, and that is the direction I wanted to go in my paintings. So my next project was to paint a barn. First, I looked at online videos. I found one for doing backgrounds. So I followed along with it to get the background done. Then I looked up a video on painting a barn. The artist used a palette knife, but I used a paintbrush. I ended up having to draw it out on paper first. Then I drew it with chalk on my canvas. Finally I painted it. The following show those steps:
I wanted to add a fence and hay bales - along with a road. I looked up a photo of a round hay bale, and painted the three hay bales by looking at that photo.
I made the path from the barn lead to a road. Then I worked on shading and highlighting. But I didn't like the purple background. It just didn't look right to me. Whenever I'd drive around, I'd look at distant hills and mountains - and they weren't purple. So I changed it to a dark green grey. I also added a lake. But rather than a field beside the lake, it looks like a slide going into the lake. Hmmm. How would I make that look realistic?
I added more shading and highlighting, and I took the field out and made more trees instead. I added shading to the road. It was at this point (unfinished) that I entered this painting in the Williamson County FCE Cultural Arts competition. And look what it won! I KNOW there were very few entries - probably only 2-5. Since I was out of town to be with my mother while she was hospitalized, I wasn't able to attend the cultural arts day. So I have no idea what other pieces were in the competition. My friend DID tell me, though, that it missed being "Best of Show" by just a few points. Regardless of whether there was only one other painting or five or more, a first place ribbon is really nice. However, I still had more work to do on it. I felt it looked too dark.
After I got the painting back from the competition, I changed the road to make it look more realistic, added more highlighting to the front of the barn and field, lightened up the shading on the road, and gave the grass and hay bales a little more definition. Then I pronounced it finished. I still want to learn more about making realistic clouds. However, for this "Mountain Barn" painting, I will leave the clouds mostly wispy and undefined. As I did this painting, I sought help from several different videos, from photographs and from observing landscapes in real life. It is the most complex of any of my paintings so far.
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| "Mountain Barn" - June 2016 (Acrylic on canvas) |
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