Depth and Atmosphere

Above was my award-winning painting from the San Clemente show two months ago. This 11x14 plein air scene, “Crystal Rocks,” was painted down at Crystal Cove beach in Laguna in the late afternoon. I love the great atmosphere that can pick up at this time of day. And if you hit a low tide too, the rocks can give you wonderful compositional choices.

The challenge for me is trying to capture the shear depth of the beach and bluffs. I love the golden haze, but it’s usually not that hazy in actuality. Value stepping and edge work becomes critical here. Making sure I get the right amount of hard to soft balances and utilizing a full value scale can make or break the illusion of distance. I started with a pencil map of where I wanted my rocks placed. In reality, they were pretty much as shown, but actual size, shape, distances between and whether they overlap were all adjusted slightly. I did this to eliminate repetitive shapes but also to create visual contrasts. For instance, the closest large rock on the left was enlarged so I could create the top white highlight and have it contrast with the dark rock behind it. Also, the second rock was raised a bit so the small wave behind it was visually “broken” and I could further contrast the whitewash with the right side of the rock. This gave me some nice focal points, plus created a sweeping arc that leads your eye up to the main splash on the rocks behind.

In the painting process, once I established my values in the foreground rocks, I made sure to make the mid-ground rocks lighter, and the far bluff even lighter than that. These conditions existed, but I pushed the values to create greater depth in the painting. Ditto for the sand and water. With the far bluff, I began on the right side, established a value I felt appropriate, and then gradually lightened it as I proceeded to the left and most distant part of the scene. The structures were painted as shadow and highlighted sides to suggest buildings but not drawing your eye there directly. I added the slightly darker cloud shapes in the upper left to force your eye back in the painting and lastly a handful of figures to complete the story.

Even in plein air, I find you need to adjust everything a bit to make a painting sing. Enjoy!

Simplifying Complexities

In painting this plein air painting of the Beachcomber bar down at Crystal Cove, I was faced with a dizzying array of information. In the foreground we have bar stools, bar benches and bar tables all in the same honey-toned wood and to make matters worse, a complex railing in front of it all blocking most of my view (I eliminated). The entire bar was built of the same wood. Add a thatched roof (brown too). Then there was everything behind the bar: glasses, cash registers, bottles and all other bar paraphernalia, plus a bartender.

What drew me to the scene was the contrast of the bright cream umbrella against the darker wood tones. I thought that would make a nice focus. So, how do we approach everything else? It's the suggestion of elements that's the key. I took my time and hinted at everything that was unimportant in the painting. By not fully defining the bottles, benches and misc. stuff, your eye does not dwell on those elements. This allows you to keep coming back to the umbrella and secondary focuses of the bartender, and a couple of glasses here and there. I suggested plane changes in the stools and tables, kept my contrasts down in this area and in the areas behind the bar. The viewers imagination will fill in those details, but in the painting they'll pull together as large unifying shapes.

This 9x16 was painted in two sessions on the same day, morning and afternoon (I broke for lunch at the cafe there in-between ... burgers and coffee are essential to good plein air painting!) This was probably completed in about 4 hours. All of the time was spent on the nuisances, the focal areas only took about 20 minutes. Enjoy!