Category: Blog

Sunrise Painting – The Steps

Following from this morning’s sunrise photo I posted here earlier (see here), I’ve now painted the painting.

It’s an impressionist study designed to capture the tones and colours I observed and committed to memory when looking at the actual scene. Here are the initial stages. It’s interesting to note the differences between a photo and an artist’s painting of the same scene. The tones, colours and composition should all usually be different.

Here’s an early stage which came just after a quick bit of loosely marking out the composition.

Sunrise-30-Jan-2018- stage1-Lawrence-Dyer-co-uk

Sunrise-30-Jan-2018- stage1-Lawrence-Dyer-co-uk

Next adding some silvery-green in the right places:

Sunrise-30-Jan-2018- stage-2-Lawrence-Dyer-co-uk

Sunrise-30-Jan-2018- stage-2-Lawrence-Dyer-co-uk

And the densely-frosted ground of the field. This snow/frost has to be considerably darker than the lightest part of the sky

Sunrise-30-Jan-2018- stage-3-Lawrence-Dyer-co-uk

Sunrise-30-Jan-2018- stage-3-Lawrence-Dyer-co-uk.

Next the sky begins, I nearly always do the sky last. There are good reasons for this that I’ll discuss in another post.

Sunrise-30-Jan-2018- stage-4-Lawrence-Dyer-co-uk

Sunrise-30-Jan-2018- stage-4-Lawrence-Dyer-co-uk

Finally the rest of the sky. Below is the nearly finished work but it was getting dark outside and using artificial light to photograph paintings doesn’t work as well, I find. So I’ll photograph the final piece tomorrow in daylight.

Sunrise-30-Jan-2018- stage-5-Lawrence-Dyer-co-uk

Sunrise-30-Jan-2018- stage-5-Lawrence-Dyer-co-uk

It’s just an oil sketch designed to capture light and colour and it’s not meant to be anything more than that, but hopefully seeing these stages will be useful to someone studying painting methods.

Here’s the finished sketch photographed the next day in natural light. I have some reservations about it but it was only ever meant to capture the light and colour.

Lawrence-Dyer-co-uk-SunriseStudy-LDSST300118smurl

Lawrence-Dyer-co-uk-SunriseStudy-LDSST300118smurl

Sunrise photo Lawrence Dyer Art

Sunrise 30th January

The photo shows the front garden and one of our fields beyond at sunrise this frosty morning in North Devon.

You can see some of our ponies in the field and on the horizon is the highest peak in Southern England, Yes Tor in Dartmoor. It may not be a huge feature in this view but the camera makes it look smaller than with the naked eye. There’s a much bigger view of Yes Tor and surrounding peaks from our top fields, where it’s pretty spectacular, especially when snow covered.

I feel a painting coming on…

In fact I’ve painted this view a number of times, as you might expect. It’s not, by any means, a particularly outstanding view, but it is my view from my bedroom window upstairs here on our farm in North Devon. It can become outstanding when the lighting is extreme, or extraordinary, as with this photo I took this morning.

The thing now is to ‘convert’ it into a satisfying oil painting. It will be a small, sketch of a painting, designed to capture the light and colours that inspired me when I looked out of the window at 8 am this morning GMT. (I mention GMT because when the rest of the country is on GMT over the winter months, I — as an individual — stay on BST — British Summer Time).

So the intended painting is going to be ‘Impressionist’ in nature (a much misused term these days) which focuses on light and colour rather than detail. A lot of the information about the light and colour I observed this morning is stored in my head, as the camera cannot capture it. Anyway, enough talk, the studio heater is on, everything is prepped, let’s go!

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