Jacquelin Vanderwood

October 2005

For this painting I started by painting the canvas gray. Next, using chalk, I sketched in the scene below.

I'll be painting with oils here. I start out with a fleshy peach color and block areas in. Then I change to a warm gray tone and paint in smaller areas. As you have probably guessed, the colors we will be using will give this picture a southwest flair.

I carefully blend here using a camel flat brush.

For the sun I lay down yellow mixed with a slight amount of white to make it opaque. Then I blend the edges.

For the back rocky structures, I laid in a lighter color for the base of the furthest one and a darker version of the color for the closer rocky structure on the right.

I then lightly blended the above colors and added a lighter color to accent and highlight the sun hitting the rocky structures.

Carefully blend. Notice how the colors are hinting at the atmosphere that you would see in the southwest.

For the ground areas I've set in three colors on the left and two colors on the right. The darker color on the right represents the shadow from the rocks.

On the left I blended at an angle then added a darker gray fro the shadow areas. For the right I blended the color of the rocks downward. I then blended the rest of the color. I added the same yellow that is in the sun and blended lightly again.

Here I again blocked in four different colors that would match the colors of the mood of the painting.

I then selected colors for the areas of shadow and highlight that more or less appear in the pictures in some version.

Finally I blended in areas of the American Native and added a final yellow highlight around the edges and blended one more time. You can now see how using a limited palette can achieve certain moods, and this case it gave us a southwestern flavor.

Copyright (c) 2005, Jacquelin Vanderwood, All Rights Reserved