Assignment 1: Landscape

For our first assignment, we are painting a landscape using 5 colours to describe space. We are allowed to use perspective, overlapping, relative placement, etc. to help with depth, and we are allowed to tint and shade our 5 colours to enhance the space but, the 5 colours should be easily identified.
I'm thinking about taking a Cezanne-like approach using warm and cool colours to make the picture recede. I love the way he goes over and over his pictures, slowly building up the forms and spaces! I don't want to use the same kind of anxious strokes that he used though . . . but we'll see how confident I am while painting.
I haven't painted outdoors in a long time so it was rather fun! There's a sort of "on your toes" aspect when painting outside of the comfort of your studio (living room corner lol). It forces you to think about economy of paint and material etc.
We started about by doing a simple line drawing to work out the composition and to assign the colour zones.

Made some good progress today in class. The picture looks fairly solid in terms of space. I was starting to lose my concentration and was muddling around with my strokes. Thomas suggested that I use one or two bold strokes on the grass foreground. This'll make the viewer "trust me more" lol. I also have to pay attention to the perspective lines in my building. If I make them different, it might help me show which part of the wall comes forward (cuz I'm facing it straight on). He suggested that I keep painting the shadow each time I go over it as a kind of record of time (where the shadow has been ie. the distance traveled by the sun). I remember another painter using this type of method except he would paint different sections of the canvas in the differing light ie. morning = house and grass, evening = tool shed etc. It creates an interesting dialogue within the canvas between the different sections.

Gosh it was hot today! But it was nice to be outside . . . and the Department was offering free pizza after class = chomp to the omp! :)

I'll post more as the painting progresses.