Progress on the Tuscan Hay painting

As is typical of my working method, I establish my sky and clouds first on my newly sketched canvas. This helps me to key the rest of my light values in the painting. At this point I alsolay in a first pass on the distant mountain.

Tuscany landscape painting in progress by Jennifer E. Young

Next come the hill town and terraced hillside of the background. At this point I am still establishing the compositional elements so there is not much color or value variation. I will go back into these areas again, but I really want to develop the entire canvas to the same level before it sets up too much, as I'm not sure when my next painting session will be.

Tuscany landscape painting in progress by Jennifer E. Young

Now for the middle distance, where my area of interest (the house) resides. I decided to lower the cypress to the right of the house, as I felt there needed to be some height/shape variation in the trees flanking the house.  I'll have to go back into that sky area again where I made this change to clean it up a little more. Good thing I still have plenty of that sky color on my palette! Again, I don't have much in the way of highlights yet...just a few value shifts to give certain objects a little form.

Tuscany landscape painting in progress by Jennifer E. Young

Now I'm ready to start laying in the foreground hill and those groovy hay tracks.

Tuscany landscape painting in progress by Jennifer E. Young

That was fun! Now I have the whole canvas covered more or less to the same level of finish. There's a good deal more to do, but this feels like a pretty good start for around 4 hours of work.

Tuscan Hay

I hope you all had a very Merry Christmas! Ours was filled with laughter and fun, (which is an easy achievement when there is a 3  1/2-year-old in the house). We are still in the middle of winter break, but fortunately I can still carve out a few more painting hours between now and the dawn of a new year. I've been playing around with a composition of the Tuscan landscape of a hillside decorated with the pattern of freshly gathered hay. The meandering pattern of those undulating lines of hay shaped by the rolling hills are what first inspired me to start sketching, first in my notebook, and then more purposefully on my  20x24" canvas:

My plan is actually to create those lines carved out by the harvested hay a lot more subtly, but they are pretty linear right now because I just want to establish their pattern. In the distance is a terraced hillside punctuated by cypresses, as well as  old stone walls and towers, and cypresses so typical of southern Tuscany.

Update on the Ansouis painting in progress

Now that we have some real Christmas deadlines looming, I've decided to give the self-hosted auctions a rest for a while. Thanks so much to those who bid and followed my auctions! It's been an interesting little experiment that I might revisit in 2014. But it was a lot more time consuming than I imagined, at a period in my life when it is a challenge just to maintain a normal studio schedule. Meanwhile, the painting of Ansouis is still on the easel (case in point!) Here are the latest progress shots:

So now I have the whole canvas covered. I started in on some of the details sooner than I would have liked, but there were a few breaks in the continuity of my painting sessions that compelled me to tackle certain areas while they were still wet. Over the next session or two I'll be finalizing the background mountains and fleshing out the flowerbeds. I'm going to do my best to finish this up in advance of Christmas. School's out for a couple of weeks for Christmas break so my studio time is about to get a lot more dicey.

Ansouis (W.I.P.- continued)

Here's some progress to report on the composition I sketched out in my last post.

Provence France village painting in progress by Jennifer E Young

After laying in the sky and distant mountains, I set out to establish the broad areas of light and dark in the painting. I'm really trying to think of my composition in terms of underlying masses of light and shadow, and not just a group of individual objects.

Provence France village painting in progress by Jennifer E Young

I'm using a broad palette of colors- my usual red, yellow, and blue, plus cad. orange, cad. red, permanent rose, sevres blue, as well as two earths; gold ochre and burnt sienna (for the tonal sketch) and, of course, white (titanium).

This is as far as I got today- about 2 1/2 - 3 hours' work- before it was time to pick up my daughter from preschool.

Provence France village painting in progress by Jennifer E Young

I'd really rather not allow this to set up, as this is my "first pass," and there is so much more to lay in. I am going to try and work on this again tonight after my little girl falls asleep, but I'm not normally good for much creative work after wearing the "mom hat" in the evenings. We will see. Otherwise my next dedicated painting day will be Friday, and I'm afraid it may be too tacky for my liking by then.

Ansouis/French village painting in the works

France village painting sketch by Jennifer E Young

 Not a great photo here, but I'm doing a bit of mobile blogging and the image editing options on my phone aren't optimal. Nevertheless, I  thought I'd share the rough sketch I've started on a 20x24" canvas of a French provincial village street scene.  Even though I mapped out the composition more or less to scale in advance, it took a little more editing than usualto get the layout the way I wanted it (the first pass had things too centered).

The plan for this painting is to portray a square in the center of the charming village of Ansouis. I have a busy next few days with family, but I hope to be able to get back to this soon. I'll post further developments as they unfold!