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Just a Few More Steps

  • michaelpog-art
  • Aug 13, 2017
  • 4 min read

"Just a few more steps" - A lovely spring day in a colorful garden in Los Angeles county, California. My girlfriend and I decide to go explore the farther edges of the county, looking for the perfect symbiosis of wild nature and human made garden. After googling indecisively we found this lovely place called the Los Angeles Arboretum. When we arrived and found parking we were greeted by a screeching noise that sounded like a baby but turned out to be a peacock. Turns out the place is full of them, so is it full of flowers, bushes, trees and endless trails, which lead us to this stone staircase, starting at the ground level right next to a gorgeous waterfall, and leading to a more desolate, forrest area on top of a hill.

When I came home I immediately decided this is going to be the subject for my next painting. After eyeing the depth and prospective in the photo, realizing that the colors are a monotonic shade of green that will look fairly dull in a painting, I decided to go with a less realistic and more dreamy, almost fantasy style, yet keeping to realistic enough to feel like you could be standing in front of those stairs, gazing at the beauty that's about to unveil, once you climb up those uneven, half men half nature made stairs.

I took one of my 16 x 12 stretched canvases and grayed the canvas with a mix of ultramarine blue, burnt siena and white. The I started applied a mix of ultramarine blue and white for a dull, light blue sky. I wanted to keep the sky very basic and simply, not to compete with the many attention seeking subjects in the scene.

After working out a rough sketch using a soft dark charcoal I under-painted the ground with combinations of burnt-siena, cobalt blue, burnt amber and touches of white and purple, keeping it on the warmer side with the browns dominating the color. I later sketched the stairs more carefully using different vanishing points for every section stairs, as they shift both horizontal and vertical angle.

I preceded underpainting the staircase with a mixture of cobalt blue, burnt siena and purple to get a dark deep base color with the staircase, that color would stay as is in the shadowed area, and where the light hits the surfaces, the next layer will be applied.

Now it is time to apply the next layer with trees and bushes, my favorite layer that brings some glimpse of life into a more or less gray and boring painting that looks more like a work of a sad preschooler. Using multiple sizes of bristle brushes I applied tree-textured blobs of paint, using shades of green coming from the original reference and superimposing with dreamy pinks, browns and purples. Adding a few tree trunks and basic branches using a sable script brush, after thinning my paint with water to create a watery ink consistency.

A few bushes to the left and a lot of bushes to the right, all with the same tapping technique, and I'm done. Now it's time for the highlights. Picking the left top side as my source of light, I mixed lighter variations the colors I used for the trees, adding yellow to the green, red and white to the purple, and orange to the brown, using the same tapping technique, I applied the highlights on the left side of the patches of leafs that I imaged getting the sun light. Same with the bushes on the right and left sides of the staircase, expect for those I used a bit of yellow and lemon-green.

The hardest part by far was making the rocky stairs look realistic. Rocks and stones have a very undefined shape, at no point during the painting you can tell that you are going the right direction, even after finishing them sometimes it takes some time before those blobs of paint turn into rocks in your brain. Many times you need to stop, leave them alone for hours and come back and look at them as if you were not the one painting them, and try to look at them as if you just walked into a room and saw something new. Using the 6 feet rule, I stepped back frequently, applied many strokes with different color intensities, trying to image how the light would hit the surface of the rock. Remembering Bob Ross mumbling that if you want to paint a cloud you need to think like a cloud. It seemed so silly to me back then, but now I found myself tried to image what kind of cracks mother nature could make in those rocks.

Brilliant, the stairs look very realistic and now it's time to add the colorful flowers that add to the fantasy-like mood I'm in. I don't know much about flowers but I tried to think of colors that would seem happy and vibrant, so added some light blues, pinks, roses, yellow and orange flowers.

To finish it with a dramatic effect I added deeper cracks in the staircase, and putting the flowers in the spot light by scratching a few rays of sun making their way through the tall trees above our field of view.

We're done, it was a fun and successful painting, I hope you like it.


 
 
 

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