The Burning Mist = Oil on Linen, 24 x 36

This is the painting I am working on with my Shared Studio Time class. I went over how to lay out a painting, about how to use the Golden Mean to make a pleasing composition, how to transfer an image to the canvas, and how to begin. I forgot to chronicle this one until a fairly late point in the process but will go over most of what I have done. I worked with a fairly simple palette of Prussian blue, Cad Yellow Medium, Alizarin Crimson, Permalba White, and Vine Black. The cad yellow medium wasn't cutting the mustard and I switched to Hansa Yellow which gave a much better result. It is a more transparent and cleaner color to work with. I began by transferring a basic drawing using charcoal to get the placement of the important players. This is going to be a fairly simple painting so there isn't much to get "right" as far as scale and perspective, other than the deer placement and size. I am working from a reference landscape photo I took in Cades Cove Tennessee, as well as a photo of a whitetail buck in velvet that I took in another part of the same park. The sun was coming up and was burning off the fog giving a mysterious background with a strong light streak across the pasture. It is important to get the values correct, and possibly exaggerate the contrast to get a sense that the morning sun had just risen above the mountains casting strong light across the pasture, causing the deer to look up from it's feeding.