How NOT to Paint the Rocky Mountains - Turning my Mistakes into a Realistic Oil Painting

So. Many. Mistakes.

This could be said about almost every painting I've created. If I were to summarize my artistic process into a sentence, it would be this: doing my best on the first shot, then fixing it until it's right. Since colour and value are contextual, my first attempt sometimes means taking a shot in the dark and hoping for the best. 

This was certainly true for this painting of the Rocky Mountains. I made a series of mistakes with this piece, starting immediately with the drawing. 

If you've been following me for a little while, you'll know that I NEVER paint on a white canvas. But for this particular piece, given that it was completely dominated by blues, I wanted to dial up the saturation of my undertone. So instead of mixing my toning colour directly into my gesso as per usual, I applied it directly to my canvas, on top of the gesso. 

Fun fact: liquid acrylic paint is super glossy, and coloured pencil won't adhere to it. 

Try as I might, I couldn't actually get the drawing onto the canvas.

So I had to project the image onto the canvas and paint it on directly with burnt umber acrylic paint. I could've also primed it again with clear gesso, but I didn't think of that until later. 

Here are the four mistakes that I made and unpacked in the YouTube video:

Mistake No. 1: Not Knowing the Dry Time of Your Oil Colours

If you're an acrylic painter, the idea of some colours drying faster than others may seem absurd, but in the world of oil painting, knowing the dry time of each colour you're working with is C R I T I C A L.

Let's just say you're working with yellows, and you're waiting for the painting to dry before adding the next layer...you could be waiting five days or longer before that paint even begins to film over. Meanwhile, if you so much as leave burnt umber on your palette overnight, the next day it's lumpy and tacky, if not outright hardened.

Oil painters may have heard the concept of fat over lean, which is essentially that you want to paint thinner underneath and heavier on top, in order to prevent the painting from cracking. But dry times play into this as well.

Oil paints dry through a process called oxidation, and when they begin to harden, a film forms over the colour and makes it tacky.

If you try to blend into a colour that has already started to harden, you could lift the entire layer off by accident. 

You may have experienced this with acrylic painting too, and it leaves a divot in the canvas that's pretty noticeable. 

With oil painting, you have some options. This mistake occurred when I was working on the sky, and I expected to have a few days to blend the cloud into the sky before it started to harden. However, because I used Prussian blue and Cobalt blue, both of which have very fast dry times, my sky started to oxidate overnight. 

Because I was blending the cloud into the surrounding sky area, I decided to continue blending even though the sky was starting to harden, simply because I was just skimming the edges of the drying layer. I could still see that some of my blue sky was starting to lift off the canvas, so I had to be super careful, and gently feather out the cloud, barely applying any pressure. I was majorly sweating off camera. 

You can also wait until the layer is fully dry, then cheat it by mixing a colour that's close enough to the sky onto the edges of your cloud to blend it out. 

Mistake No. 2: Trying to Get the Colours Perfect in the First Layer

I almost never get my colours and values exactly right in the first shot. I do my best, and sometimes I overly intensify my shadows just so I have some nice depth in my painting, but I still catch myself obsessing whenever I miss the mark (which...is often). 

When I first began my painting journey, I didn't understand this principle. I thought you had to get the painting right on the first shot, and that subsequent layers would look bad because my colours would be different. Which is not true at all. I actually love the look of multiple, slightly-different colours layered on top of the original layer, it adds depth and nuance. But let's get back to the mistake I made with this painting in particular.

I like to work from a printed reference photo, which often winds up being quite different from the digital copy. Depending on the day and who happens to be working the machines at Staples, my printed reference can wind up lighter, darker, more colourful, or less colourful than the original. Even the crops seem to wind up different, and I have to pay attention to make sure that the printed version doesn't get cut off. 

In this case, my printed version was waaaaay darker than the original digital copy. So when I was following my printed copy, I wound up making my focal mountain super dark, so much so that when I finished my painting session and took another look at it, I considered starting over the next day. 

Here's what experience has taught me: just keep going and leave it alone.

You cannot read values and colours properly until you have more information on the canvas. This is where I see emerging painters and artists err all the time...they give up too soon, or fixate on an area of the painting EVEN THOUGH there is still tons of blank canvas that is preventing them from seeing clearly. 

Fix your colours and values in subsequent layers. If it's reeeeaaaallllllyyyyy bugging you, stick a piece of painter's tape on it when it's dry to reassure yourself that you will return to it. That's how I trick my brain into letting it go temporarily...by giving it a visual cue. 

Mistake No. 3: Inventing Colours that are Just Plain Wrong

Okay. I tried to create some imaginary colours in this painting, and it looked AWFUL. 

In my defence, I was trying to tone down all the blue by adding in some Prussian blue/burnt umber trees that looked like a gorgeous teal on the palette, but when applied to the context of the painting...looked like I stole them from spring and stuffed them in a winter painting. 

Which leads me to my next mistake...

Mistake No. 4: The Reference Isn't Always Right

Wait, what? Didn't you just say not to invent colours???

Sort of. I said not to invent the wrong colours. Because when I continued the treeline with the correct colours from the photo, it also looked terrible. Boring, dull, and monochromatic. 

Sometimes, when we stick too closely to the reference photo, we miss the rich opportunities for colour play that will make a fantastic painting. I like to think of James Gurney's book, Color and Light, which teaches you how to add colours based on the lighting available. 

Photos will expose for the available lighting, and often turn shadows into black smudges. The human eye and paintings can extract rich colours from these shadows, and the same can be said for other areas of your paintings.

For my trees, the ones that I invented with the Prussian blue were wrong, and the ones I put in that looked like the reference photo were also wrong. 

BUT. When I layered them on top of each other...boom. Suddenly, it worked. 

So the solution to both mistake no. 3 and mistake no. 4 is to create a new colour, BUT ensure that it makes sense within the composition. 

How do you do that? Trial. Error. Experience. If you're not heavy on the experience because you're just getting started, you can do a test study in a sketchbook or on a spare canvas to experiment with different options. 

I also made one more (almost) mistake, which I've included as a bonus...

Mistake No. 5: Misreading Colours that have Sunken In

When I first started oil painting, I was baffled by sinking in.

I'd apply a rich layer of paint, only for it to appear dull and flat when it dried. The colours would always come back to life when I varnished, and for the longest time, I thought that varnishing was the only way to restore a painting's lustre. As such, I would sometimes create additional layers of paint, because I was misreading the colours that were already present, just sunken in.

All you need to do to fix this is to oil out your painting.

My formula comes from realist painter Lauren Pretorius. I use 3 parts gamsol, 1 part linseed or safflower oil. I apply it with a brush, then wipe it off with a lint free cloth. It instantly restores all of my colours and makes the painting look the way it will appear once it's varnished. 

Doing this saved me the trouble of applying a second layer, because it turns out that I already had the right colours present in certain parts of my painting...I just thought they were wrong because they had sunk. 

These are just a few of the mistakes I made when creating this painting, and there are certainly many others I can cover in future blog posts. What's a mistake that you've made while painting? How did you fix it? Or are there any common errors you're encountering that you'd like me to help with? Let me know in the comments!