Cooper Creek - Revisited

[Shane Keene]

Hello all. These two paintings are from the same location, one year apart. The first one was my first plein air and one of my first oil paintings. The second one is a small sketch from the same spot. Thought it would be interesting to see what has changed (in the artist) over the course of a year. Anyway, here they are:

Cooper Creek Reservoir 2006 - 9 x 12 oil on panel, about 2 hours



Cooper Creek Reservoir 2007 - 8 x 10 oil on panel, about 30 minutes


C&Cs welcome

[viking57]

Hi Shane,
Nice plein air work. A sketch is hard to compare to finished work. Sketch to sketch or finished to finished would be a more accurate account of your growth I think. A sketch is really a fast piece to capture the color, sunlight and shadows. That is very evident in your second piece from 2007. You've caught the contrasts between the darks of the foreground trees and faded (filtered) light of the background trees as you did in your finished piece.

The lighter sky and brighter clouds is also caught nicely in the sketch. What the comparison does tell me is that you have more control in capturing the light and values when doing plein air work. Had you spent 2 hours on the 2007 piece I think you would have ended up with a much more accurate capture of the light of the day at that sitting.

Also, the variations of color in the background trees works better than the first version. I think less texture would work better for the distance though.
It's good work and show much progress Shane.
Ron

[Shane Keene]

Thanks for the input Ron. Very much appreciated. The irony here is that when I painted this in '06 I spent about 3/4 of my time figuring out how to mix my colors so I probably spent about the same amount of time painting as I did on the '07 sketch. These days I tend to mix on the fly and my colors (at least to me) seem to be somewhat more accurate and I'm able to focus more time on my canvas and less on my pallet. I also just recently learned that I was over-mixing my colors and that was causing everything to come out quite dull and un-interesting. I'm finding that by mixing just enough to achieve an optical blend my colors are much more sparkly (is that a word?).

I noticed after I posted this that those trees that I added on the right hand side (completely imaginary) are way off the mark in both scale and value. If the painter police see that they'll probably take away my artistic license .