Speaking of Art Blog

Buckeye, pastel, 8x10"

This is my newest pastel painting, of a Common Buckeye resting on a staghorn fern in a butterfly house at a nature preserve in Michigan.  I photographed it in early June this year.  Buckeyes are plentiful outdoors in summertime in the upper Midwest.  I think their patterning is so intricate and beautiful.  Over the past few years, I’ve photographed many of them in the wild.  Here is an example of one such picture I took.

My problem with using this kind of photo to paint from is that it’s descriptive and nothing more.  Yes, it features the butterfly, but the context is so minimal and sterile.  White gravel, big deal.  When I consider whether to create a painting of a butterfly or bird or flower, I want the context to be almost, but not quite, as interesting as the main subject.  The staghorn fern, the overall color scheme, and the design of the entire picture plane of my newest painting are so much more interesting than that photo I took that includes the white gravel.

My first point is this: Context matters when featuring a single butterfly or bird or flower.  It needs to be intriguing enough that it holds the viewer’s interest while not being too distracting from the star of the show.

The second reason I wanted to create a painting based on this scene is that the shades of green are fascinating.  I immediately noticed when I snapped the shutter on my camera that the fronds on the staghorn fern are cool while the blurry background greens are quite warm.  Oooh, built in interest value right there.

Green is a tricky color.  It’s got more shades than any other color in the rainbow.  While that seems fun to me, it is downright intimidating to many artists.  They veer away from green altogether because they cannot seem to find the right shade they are looking for.  Well, guess what?  I have that same problem, but I think it’s fun to layer several greens to achieve the shade I want.  Even though I have literally hundreds of green pastels, all slightly different shades, I rarely find the one shade of green I’m looking for.  I honestly believe that’s because each shade of green we see is already a combination of lots of subtle shifts in the combinations of blue and yellow.  I tell my pastel students all the time to try using ALL the greens they own if there’s a large area in their painting that has a patch of green grass or a grouping of plants.  The more shades the better to work with because that’s what we see in nature.

With this painting, though, I had to be more deliberate about my use of green.  Yes, I wanted to keep the fern fronds mainly cool (think shades of blue-green) while my background colors needed to be mainly warm (olive and yellow-greens and then that luscious deep warm red to bring out the colors of the butterfly).  But I quickly discovered that I needed to use at least a small amount, an outlier, of warm green in the cools and a little bit of cool green in the warms.  Otherwise, the foreground and background would look disjointed, like they were from two different scenes altogether.  Using a small amount of an outlier in each area worked well.

BTW, if I try to use equal amounts of both warm and cool green in a single shape, it doesn’t go well.  I have to choose.  Is this shape going to be mainly warm or mainly cool?  What about neutral greens?  They can swing either way and should be viewed as such.  It all depends on what they are set down next to.

Tricky stuff, that green.  It’s complicated.  Experimentation is the best way to go.  There are no hard and fast rules.  But when green works, it can make the whole piece sing…..and show off some beautifully patterned wings too.