Arcadia – Fantasy Island House
“Queen Anne Cottage” 15″ x 11″ (quarter sheet) – SOLD
Today my art pal Wendee and I went to the LA Arboretum in Arcadia for some plein air sketching and painting. We found a shady relatively cool spot in the tropical lagoon area, made famous by the 70s anthology series “Fantasy Island”
(Alright, let’s just say it and get it out of our systems, shall we? “Da Plane, Da Plane.”)
I took some digipix of the work in progress this time. After doing a quick value sketch, I drew some light outlines on the paper of where I wanted the main features to go. In this picture I’ve already started putting in the trunk of the palm, which I knew would be the featured item. I’m using burnt sienna and a mauve to get that warm/cool feeling where the trunk turns from light to shade.
Next , I’m moving around the page with a big round brush, putting in some of the background colors, and making up quite a few also. I’ve done a lot of work on the palm, not only because it was fun but because the light was changing and I wanted to get it to some degree of completion so I could evaluate the values of other things in the picture.
At this point it was probably an hour and a half after I began, give or take a bit, and the morning sun had become overhead noontime sun. It was time to call it a day on location. I took the painting home to check the photo I had taken at the beginning of the day, and to decide where the reflections would go. Most of the hard work is done at this point – what remains are putting in the darkest darks, details and calligraphic brushstrokes.
Cobb Estate Cypresses
Cobb Estate Cypresses 5″ x 8″ – watercolor
The Cobb Estate in Pasadena is a wonderful resource for artist, hiker and nature lover (also dog walkers.)
These evergreens line the old driveway which is now crumbling slowly.
The plants were not my main interest here – it was the strong pattern of lights and darks created by the shapes of the italian-looking trees.
I can only imagine how stately they looked before the land was reclaimed by the chapparal.
This was painted with a limited palette of raw sienna, burnt sienna, prussian blue and mauve, with a swath of thalo blue for the sky wash.
The illusion of bright sunshine is all about value – the strong contrasts that happen during mid day when the noon sun washes out surfaces to white, and creates the deepest darkest shade.
