Plein air painting, or from life, will make us better painters. Following are twelve things to consider…

During this outdoor workshop are goals were to:

1. Discover the main idea or motivation — the inspiration.
2. Find the primary and secondary compositions. (The circle, triangle, cruciform, diagonal and so on.)
3. Create small, quick pencil sketches and to choose the best design. 
4. Mix 3-shades using a neutral paint such as raw umber, burnt umber, burnt sienna, or black. Click here for more on this.   
5. Paint a small, one-colour study using the three shades. Accents of black or white can be added at the end. 
6. Then begin the colour version with a ground of transparent red oxide or burnt sienna. 
7. Use the same colour for drawing using a small flat or other drawing brush.
8. Block in the shades closely and get close to the right colour. The value is more important to get right in terms of design and this type of painting method.
9. Think in terms of warm and cool colours.
10. Create a dominance of temperature, intensity, value, brushstrokes and colour.
11. Keep the lightest lights and darkest darks until the very end. 
12. Ask the right questions about what we do during the process. How dark/light is it, how bright/dull? Does it add to the painting. Does it support the design and original inspiration? Are the brush marks consistency and confident? Do I need to remove anything? Is there an escape out of the painting? How does the eye move around the canvas? How can I simplify? Are there lost, transitional, soft and hard edges? 

Here are some images from the artists.

By the third day of this disciplined practice, I could see the growth in each person’s work.

Plein air painting is not for everyone. It can be smokey, buggy, windy, hot, dry, cold, or wet. Yet plein air painting puts us solidly in the moment. That’s wonderful!  

Suggested reading: Composition of Outdoor Painting by Edgar Payne and Carlson’s Guide to Landscape Painting.

For how Mirja sets up for plein air, click here.

My husband Marc built a wood pochade box with hinged side panels (the lid) into which I can place a 10 x 12 inch sta-wet palette. The side panels are used to place medium, shop cloth, paints, palette knife and brushes. A bungy cord keeps the panels open in case of wind and holds a paper towel roll. Two L-shaped wood ‘handles’ slide onto a camera tripod. The vertical canvas holder is attached to the camera tri-pod via a quick release tripod plate. This type of system can be purchased at Art Box and Panel.  The Best Brella plein air umbrella works well (except when wind is greater than 15 km per hour). It has a nifty device for attaching the umbrella to your tripod and includes extension bars.

For surfaces, I bring canvas if not hiking too far. Canson’s Plein Air Art Canva boards are surprising good for both acrylic and oils. The boards can be peeled off the pack or left in ‘book’ form. Otherwise I use canvas boards or door skin. Canvas paper works nicely for quick practice studies.

For pigments it is helpful to have cool and warm version of each of the primaries, along with transparent red oxide and titanium white. I like to have some transparent paints as well as opaques. If I have room, I will bring yellow oxide, Mars black and chromium green oxide. For acrylic medium, a mixture of 3 parts GAC 500 to one part Acrylic Glazing medium works well. For oils, walnut alkyd medium and gamsol. Click here for an interesting article on limited palettes for plein air painting. When using oils, we need to have a way to carry our paintings and not smear the wet paint.

For brushes, 1/4 to 3/4 inch flats plus a drawing brush (1/8th inch flat) are all I usually need. A small round or a liner brush can be useful for delicate lines.

Other things I bring: blue shop cloths, a ViewCatcher, a small sketch book, eraser and 2b pencil, a tube to hold brushes, a zippered plastic bag for paints, a garbage bag, my camera or cell phone (the camera is also useful as a weight to hold the easel setup in wind – or a bag with a rock), brush soap, plastic water bottle for cleaning acrylic brushes (for oils, a metal container for gamsol) and a small container for medium, and lastly a small mister bottle. Phew! It is a lot to carry. The option is to bring a watercolour pad or gessoed paper, primary colours plus white, a couple of brushes and containers and sit on a rock to paint. 

I wear a sunscreen shirt and a wide-brimmed hat, and am prepared for a variety of temperatures. It can get cold on a hot day if painting beside a waterfall in the wind and all that jazz. In the winter, it’s indoors for me!

To pack all of this, I bought a used knapsack. The older designs have a wider width at the bottom and fits my pochade box.

Once you have everything organized, keep it all in one place in your studio. You can keep separate tube paints for plein air painting to keep packing simpler.

Why bother doing these? This way of mastering composition by painting three-shade studies gives you freedom. This practice gives you insights into how to simplify masses, treat edges, and choose elements worth keeping. In addition, it is a great method for developing personal style. Better yet, you learn to use elements and masses for stronger compositions. Lastly, you have already done a plethora of problem solving before beginning your masterpiece,  which frees you to paint with panache.

Three-shade study using raw umber:

Paint a study using three shades using no white or black.

First, premix three middle shades as shown above, noting that the lightest shade is not white and the darkest shade is not black. Do a quick pencil sketch on paper or canvas paper. Then block in where you think your shades should go. Keep it simple and avoid getting icky picky.

To simplify a photo,  I make a two and / or three-shade notan using Photoshop’s posterizing tool:

Use your three-shade study as a grisaille underpainting:

An option is to use your three-shade study as an underpainting on which to glaze or paint opaquely, matching the shades of the underpainting, plus adding the accents of white and black. Below is a partly completed study showing the addition of a global glaze of nickel azo yellow and opaque violets and blues. See how the yellow glaze creates a dull green colour on the raw umber. If you decide to use your underpainting as a grisaille (meaning shades of grey in French), paint lighter values if you plan to glaze as glazes will darken the values.

Use sets of colours, premixed into three shades each:

Following is another study based on the original three-shade raw umber study, this time using a complementary pigments on a coloured ground.

Here are the steps:

I prepared a canvas board with a transparent ground of  pyrrole orange. To dull the orange, I glazed it with dioxazine purple.

Using the quinacridone red and phthalo green plus titanium white, I mixed two sets of three shades onto my palette.  I made each set of three shades to have one redder and one greener pile (warmer and cooler). Why? Having a warm and cool set of shades allows you to change your colours within a tonal mass. Plus it keeps the tonal masses intact. Learning to read shades of colour takes a lot of practice. Compare against your raw umber study to ensure that you are mixing the correct shades for your colour piles. Like the raw umber study, the shades did not include white or black.

The light accents and darks were added as final accents.  Whites: titanium white plus a tiny amount of nickel azo yellow, and also very lightly glazed with nickel ago yellow in some places. Nickel azo yellow is a very transparent and bright acrylic paint. 

As suggested by David Langevin, I use fluid acrylics when painting with transparent and heavy body for opaques. Blacks: quinacridone red and phthalo green mix were glazed where needed. Carbon black works as well. Mixing your blacks gives you the choice of warmer and cooler. Alternatively, you can add colours to your carbon black. Acrylics dry darker, so I like to glaze in layers rather than adding too much at the get go. 

Add more colour:

When painting your masterpiece, you can further add colours to your palette. Keep in mind the goal of maintaining the composition created in your study. As shown above, you do this by keeping your mass values intact. As in all paintings, decide whether your painting is dominantly warm or cool, bright or dull and dark, and mid-tone or low or high key. 

Mastering composition takes a willingness to do the work. It is a fun process. Enjoy!