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| Veterans' Park Magnolia Stage One |
We returned to the Veteran's Park in Marshfield today. The water mill was spinning vigorously and we even spotted herring struggling to make their way upstream. There were lots of flowering trees to chose from, and I've been scoping out magnolias this week so I immediately gravitated to a small pink flowering specimen. I lined up my scene so that the magnolia's branches framed the right and top sides of the painting. I taped my viewfinder to the edge of my canvas so that I had a hands free view of my scene for placement. See Stage One photo.
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| Veterans' Park Magnolia Stage Two |
The canvas had been underpainted with ultramarine blue. I made a conscious decision to let the dark blue underpainting show through, forming the cool shadows. I worked warm light on the white arbor covered footbridge and the stone wall edging in front of it. Once I had all of the backdrop in, I used my palette knife to apply the magnolia blossoms. These blossoms were freshly opened and they had a habit similar to a conical lotus flower whereby the petals are darker pink at the pointy base, whiter and wider at the top.
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| Magnolia at Veterans' Park |
The warm light/cool shadow scheme was working until I got to these magnolia blossoms. The dilemma was how to handle cool, bright white and cool, pink petals. I tried to warm the white petals only slightly with yellow. I also warmed the mulch at the base of the tree with some cadmium orange. I painted in several tree branches on site, mostly the dark ones. I finished off the lighter sunlit branches back in the studio on the semi-dry painting.
A couple of days later, I took a critical look at the stage two painting. There were two main changes I decided to make. First I downplayed the footbridge since the center of interest was the magnolia tree, even losing some of the footbridge supports completely. Secondly, I warmed up the foreground grasses covering more of the blue underpainting with a warm green. Done?
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