Today I will be sharing a piece I have been conceptualizing and working on for a few months now. Although it is still in a rough state, I am pretty happy with how it is coming along and hope to finish it soon. The canvas is 30 x 40 inches and definitely one of the largest I have worked on so far.

Before working on the canvas, I had been working for a while just to figure out what kind of landscape I wanted to make, the type of composition, colors, etc. Once I compiled a few reference pictures and had an idea in my head, I went to working digitally so as not to jump ahead too fast.

Above are my rough digital concepts for how the piece might play out. I thought they looked okay, but there was another reason why I went with something different. It felt like I would have had no room to paint something new and I would have lost interest pretty quickly.

After deciding to paint a new landscape, first I started out with priming the canvas as a bright orange for a warm, appealing undertone. Then I mapped out the shapes of the mountains, sky, trees, in burnt umber while keeping everything mostly general. Next, I started working from the top down while still thinking about the piece as a whole. I wanted to focus on values especially, and the direction of the sun as well as the distance of the viewer to the mountains. These are the biggest factors that come into play when considering how things are lit. Things like the magnitude of details, atmosphere, temperature, and hues are also important for me to consider.

Now that I have a clear basis of how I want things to look in my painting, it is just a matter of touching up some areas and adding some more details. I hope to complete it in about a week or so and I will share again when it is finished!