Mountains and Clouds

This painting was done based on a photograph at Anastasia Art House. It's oil on 20x24 stretched canvas.

The original photograph looked a lot like Chinese brush painting, which is an ink and water based technique. I thought it would be interesting trying to use oil paint to achieve a different feel.

First, I started with the mountains, using oil paint diluted with two different mediums: turpentine and varnish. Diluted with turpentine, oil paint became thin and runny, and the runny paint created vertical edges and lines for the mountains. In fact, many of the runniness went all the way down to the bottom of the canvas. Diluted with varnish, oil paint was still runny, but less so than turpentine. So oil paint diluted with varnish was used on top of the turpentine layer, in order to give the mountains more definition, especially to deepen the edges along the top and some of the subtle valleys and rocks. The oil paint I used included sepia, olive green, viridian and cerulean blue.

After the initial mountain layer was dried, clouds were added. The clouds in the sky were warmer in color, using white plus cadmium yellow and coral. The clouds surrounding the mountains were colder and greyer, using white plus blue grey, violet grey, green grey, and grey on grey. Originally I painted the clouds using paint brushes, but I couldn't get the softness I wanted. So I used my fingers to smudge out the paint, giving it a lighter feel.