Sandy Breckenridge

Steps-by-Step Guide for Painting Snowcap Mountains

February 22, 2021 By Sandy Breckenridge 2 Comments

View when hiking from Paradise in Mt. Rainier National Park.

“Our task, regarding creativity, is to help children climb their own mountains, as high as possible. No one can do more.” – Loris Malaguzzi

Mountain illustrations can be challenging and overwhelming subjects for many artists. A photo contains so much detail it’s often hard to know where to start.

It’s a good idea to take time to explore the landscape after you choose the mountain you’d like to paint.

Ask the questions:

“What sold me on this image?
Was it the contrast of the elements, the light source, the shape?
Where does my eye naturally flow?”

Now create a preliminary pencil comp to determine the best layout. A quick drawing can help with proportion and how much of the painting you want to allocate to the foreground, middle ground, and background as you determine the main point of interest.

Mountain Painting Process

After you have a plan it’s time to set up your Double Primary Palette and gather your supplies. Use the image guide below as a reference to help you in mixing the hues.

Mixing colors for Snowcap mountains — Use 3 dull colors plus white, and maybe a little black to match your scrap for: light now, dark snow, light rock, and dark rock.

Then follow the following steps.

First, prepare your paint mixes to match the scrap for all areas of your mountain:

Dark Snow,
Light Snow,
Dark Rocks,
Light Mountain Rocks.

Note: The overlap in your paints will define the medium shaded area.

1. With a #2 pencil, draw your mountain outline. Pencil in the fall lines and any additional detail that helps to define the light and dark areas. Later you can erase the graphite using a kneaded eraser that will not harm your painting surface.

2. Apply frisket or mask off your mountain area and apply a wash of color in the blue, mixed blue, and cloudy or cloudy sky and let the paint fully dry.

3. Now wash in the light snow on the major shaded areas. While wet, add additional wash in some of the darker areas. Then let this layer dry.

4. Now apply a single color wash over your entire mountain, building up the color to a darker tone at the bottom and lighter at the top. While still wet you can take a tissue and lift off paint to reveal the nearly pure white areas where you determine the light is brightest. Let this layer dry.

5. Now go back in and add detail to reflect the darkest crevices, caverns, small rocks, shadows, etc. so the highlights also appear brighter.

6. Add detail at the base of the mountain to reflect the shadows at the base of the mountain and where the middle ground will meet the mountain.

The following slide show provides a simple guide of the detailed steps.

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Developing A Style

After painting several life-like reproductions you’ll soon identify and develop a personal style. Mountain illustrations can be whimsical and fairytale-like or highly graphic with high contrast.

They can feature unique brush strokes, lines, and tones. The reference scrap can inspire you to choose how much detail you’d like to include. They can be painted digitally or painted by hand using gauche, acrylic, oil, or watercolor paint and brushes or even colored pencils and markers.

Painting Tips

Remember mountains shaped like cylinders, or a combination of cylinders that have areas that protrude and recede—cliffs, crevices, ledges, rocks, etc. The lightest tones are where edges protrude and the light shines the brightest. The tones get darker as they recede into the shadows.

You can use a combination of washes and dry brushing. The washes cover the largest areas and some will overlap creating medium tones. The dry brushing techniques help define the darker areas of the greatest detail.

In our next Tutorial we will cover painting the middle ground and how it creates harmony. Hope to see you there!

This is the sixth post in the Perfect Palette Series. To start at the beginning, visit > Art and Design Table of Contents.

Mixing Colors for Painting Backgrounds

February 18, 2021 By Sandy Breckenridge Leave a Comment

“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” — Edgar Degas

The background of a painting creates the atmosphere for the entire artwork. The success of the subject matter comes to life as the viewer steps into the background, becomes engaged, and is guided to the point of focus.

A close up of a flower, a bowl of fruit, a mountain cabin on a lake, or a distant star on the horizon all need to relate to a harmonious background. Closeups, still life, portraits, and landscapes are all sustained and strengthened by the background’s visual story.

The background forms the stage and is a big part of what the artist is wishing to convey. It should complement the middle ground and foreground while infusing light, depth, harmony, and visual appeal.

Planning Your Colors

Before you rush into painting the background, do a little prep work. By now you should have the Double Primary Palette set up and are ready to begin mixing paint hues for the background application. You have your scrap in hand and an idea of the composition of your painting.

In the same way you learned how to mix the correct value percentages for blue and cloudy skies, the base mixes for this area of your painting will start with primarily these 4 dull colors plus white.

The four dull colors are:

Ultramarine Blue
Alizarin Crimson
Yellow Ochre
Naples Yellow

At times your painting’s background will also need to include the other two dull colors: Burnt Umber and Raw Sienna that are also used when painting cloudy skies.

Mixing background colors — Example of how to mix background colors, keeping the hues in the range values between 10 to 55 percent.

Follow the plan as you see illustrated above when using these four dull colors and create three mixes of blue, red, and yellow as your base background colors. You can also use this same technique using the two other dull colors if needed.

As you apply the paint to your canvas, the mixes are blended again according to your scrap or your color guide plan.

To keep harmony always mix by adding a little red, yellow, and blue to each mix.

Remember, the background value should never exceed 55% or it will become too dominant. The viewer’s eye will get confused and your painting will lose its sense of atmosphere.

Applying The Background Paint

It’s important to always think in values as you see in a greyscale based on degrees of ten. As you move from the background forward, always add 10% detail as you get closer to the middle ground. The above sample painting is the background slice of a larger image.

The next tutorial will provide instruction on painting background mountains. These majestic structures need additional instruction before we move to the middle ground paint colors, values, and their intensity.

This is the fourth post in the Double Primary Palette Series, to start and the beginning click > the Art and Illustration Table of Contents.

How the Middle Ground Creates Harmony

February 18, 2021 By Sandy Breckenridge Leave a Comment

Distinct foreground, middle ground, and background values and intensity — Photo example showing distinct contrast between foreground, middle ground, and background values.

“It is the brushwork of the right value and color which should produce the drawing.” —Camille Pissarro

Space, as defined in art, relates to the relationship of the elements in your composition to each other.

A typical layout will include these three spaces:

Background
Middle Ground
Foreground

In most painting compositions the foreground is what appears closest to the viewer.

The Double Primary Palette paint colors include six dull colors. These manufactured paint hues have less intensity, luminosity, saturation, or concentrated pigment than the brights colors.

The dull colors may appear intense but when blended to the right percentages they work best to illustrate the values needed for backgrounds.

“Dull Color Recap: Alizarin Crimson, Naples Yellow, Yellow Ochre, Raw Sienna, Burnt Umber, and White.

The middle ground in your painting needs to appear to the eye’s perception to come forward.

This requires a greater intensity of color, thus the need to increase the percentage of color and the color value and saturation. To achieve this, one bright color is added to your mixes.

Bright Color Recap: Mauve, Windsor Emerald, Windsor Red, New Gamboge, Burnt Sienna, Windsor Blue, Cadmium Orange.

Middle Ground = 2 Dulls + 1 Bright

The tutorial image below shows how the size, value, and intensity increases in the middle ground in comparison to the background. Following the illustrated percentages and adding red, yellow, and blue to each mix we create both harmony and continuity. The Double Primary Palette makes this easy to achieve.

How to mix paint hues for the middle ground — The colors are abbreviated using the first and second letter of their name.

Hills will appear darker at the top and lighter at the bottom and become 10% darker as they move forward. Background percentages are best kept between 20 and 35. In the middle ground, the best percentage range is between 40 and 55. (reference your scrap).

When mixing your colors, start with the value first and add dominant colors last.

Types of Paintings

Value describes the lightness to darkness of hues and intensity is the brightness. Once you have the composition of your painting mapped out, consider these three key descriptions of a painting and how it pertains to value and intensity:

High Key: The dark areas create appeal in the artwork and a high contrast may exist between the elements.
Low Key: The white areas create interest and draw the eye in the artwork.
Intermediate: The whitest white and darkest dark sell the painting. Everything else is a greyed out scale.

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The next two tutorials in the Perfect Painting Palette Series will provide the keys for painting the foreground areas. You’ll learn underpainting tips for these areas along with tree bases and examples of how to paint rocks.

In case you visited this page first, you may want to start at the beginning, click > Art and Design Series Table of Contents.

To Plant a Garden is To Believe in Tomorrow

February 14, 2021 By Sandy Breckenridge 2 Comments

“Don’t wait for someone to bring you flowers. Plant your own garden and decorate your own soul.” – Luther Burbank

Spring is a little over a month away. We’ve all experienced a challenging year avoiding exposure to the coronavirus and most of us are finding new ways to stay emotionally balanced. So many of us have adopted the stay close-to-home requests and have been limiting our social time.

Now we are experiencing our second springtime coping with social distancing and mask-wearing while seeking safe ways to engage with others. We’ve had to find new ways to exercise while gyms are closed or are operating at minimum occupancy. Our prescribed social interaction is best left to the great outdoors.

Walking, biking, and running along with safely gathering in very small social bubbles in the outdoor air is mostly our chosen exercise. A walk with good conversation is a blessing.

Beauty In My Shelter

This last year I was invited to join an online group named “Beauty in My Shelter”. I am wholeheartedly thankful for the invitation and love what this group offers. The thoughtful moderator cheers on our posts and the members offer so much kindness. We share images from all around the world reflecting each individual’s environment.

Sometimes an image from a walk, a simple cup of coffee in a beautiful mug, a contented pet, a creative offering, or even a beautifully set table can bring each of us a feeling of comfort and connection—reminders we are not alone. The space we have created together is emotionally uplifting.

Having a positive and kind space in which to interact can help fill many of our senses. It’s also an invitation to connect with the beauty all around us that we normally might overlook.

Finding and Creating Beauty

Before COVID, I had planned on remodeling the bath in the master bedroom. After COVID, I had to create a new plan.

An ugly old stump in our front yard had been bothering me. I came up with the idea to dig it out using my tools and remove it, including all of the roots. I wanted to build a raised cut-flower bed. It could bring joy by providing flowers all spring, summer, and into the fall.

What a great way to get exercise while landscaping and creating beauty at the same time. Those who know me well understand I am a maker and I love to transform spaces and make beautiful things.

It took me about seven days to dig around and under the stump. Then a kind neighbor (I love my neighbors) came over with his chainsaw and detached it from the roots. He also lifted the stump out of the ground and took it to the green dump. 😀

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The next week I dug out the rest of the roots and was ready to build the raised flower bed. I already had most of the materials from an earlier deck remodel and was really happy I could repurpose some used lumber.

A Sharing Garden

During the time I was digging out the stump I remembered to order seeds online that were recommended for cut flowers. Because of COVID, all the flower nursery stores were closed and I had to make an appointment to get soil for the bed. It was an easy chore. I paid over the phone, drove there at my appointed time, they filled my little truck bed, and before long the raised bed was ready to plant.

I was getting a late start on the season but I had hoped my chosen plants would mature and bloom. At the beginning of May the seeds had germinated, and they were ready to go into the ground. I was pleasantly surprised it didn’t take long before I could share the blossoms from my labor.

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Through the last bit of spring, all through the summer, and into the fall I picked the flowers from the yard and the raised bed and created bouquets. It was so fun to be able to share beauty with others who I knew appreciated their essence. I was able to share my bouquets in person and virtually with my old and new online friends!

It’s so true that giving and receiving are the same. It’s reciprocal energy that goes round-and-round and is a beautiful way to fill our souls.

In closing, here is a wonderful quote from Audrey Hepburn:

“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.”