My ability to capture the painting the way envision is sometimes a little hit or miss . There are people who enjoy them but sometimes the paintings are not conveying the feelings that I want. I am not always sure why ‘the miss’ but these paintings just don’t work. It not the technical drawing part as that seems to be accurate enough for what I like. The values are also within the right range.
That only leaves colour and brush work. To better understand why and improve my abilities I though I would do a series on clouds as I know from experience these can be difficult and what a better way to learn that to challenge yourself with something hard.
In the first painting I undertook was of some stormy clouds on Britannia Bay in Ottawa looking west with the sun almost setting and peeking through the lighter clouds near the horizon. The photo image I took is shown below the painting.
16X20 oil on stretched canvas
I had decided not to make the cloud colour realistic but to have a cooler hue (red-blue) in the darker areas and gradually progressing redder as they lighten up.
The painting was painted in one-session but upon looking at it the next day I felt that some cloud areas did not look correct and it also lacked some punch. I touched up cloud patterns and added deeper blue to the very darkest parts and some red-orange highlights to parts of clouds, sunlit sky and water which then seemed to give it more life and tied all the pieces together.
There was another quick painting I tried but it didn’t work at all. I went with realistic colour representations and I just didn’t like it. I will try the same scene again with another approach until I can get to interpretation I like.
As a photographer artist also, I created the B&W photo below and with Photoshop tools added more emphasis and contrast to the lighter parts and gave a slight warm tone.
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Niels Henriksen













