Painted Floor Cloth-Part 2

Completed floor cloth.

The floor cloth looks a bit better after I did some more painting on it.  For the most part, I added shadows under the leaves.  That helped a lot.  Before the shadows were added they just seemed flat.  Now they have more dimension to them and gives them more an appearance of floating on the water.  The shadows help the rest of the painting recede into the background, giving it more depth.  I also added highlights in spots.  I still have a lot to learn about adding highlights and shadows.  Sometimes they were too bright and other times they looked like I did not do enough. 

I also lightened the reflection of the branch on the water.  I also cast a shadow from the branch over the leaves that were in the reflection.  I'm not totally sure that it gets the idea across of a shadow, but it does add some more coloration to the leaves, which looks nice.

Once again, the blog platform will not allow me to place the pictures where I wanted to place them.  I was trying to do a side by side, but it isn't going to happen.  In fact, until I added this paragraph, it would not let me add a caption to the second picture       

Before shadows and glazes.

unless the picture was sitting in the space taken up by
paragraph.  Some days I just have to post them and let go of
how I want the blog to look.

I used an acrylic extender to make a very thin wash of burnt umber.  This was painted across the entire painting to tone down the brightness of the under painting.  I think it looks better now that the colors are slightly muted.  The thin glaze of brown added a bit of depth to the picture as well.  It adds a slight haze, which makes it look more like you are actually looking down through water.

Once the paint was thoroughly dry, I coated the painting with a satin varnish.  

The bottom picture is a picture taken before I did the additional painting.  I'm not sure how well the subtle differences will show up on a computer monitor, so I don't know if you will be able to see a lot of difference between the before and after shots.


Anyway, I'm calling this picture finished.  I feel I could do more on it, but I have found in the past that I have not learned when to quit.  In some of my earlier paintings I ended up putting in too much and the picture ended up with too much detail.  Sometimes, less is more.

I feel I learned a lot from this painting.  For one thing, I had never painted on canvas before.  As I have very little painting experience, I had been reluctant to purchase expensive canvas to use for practice.  I was surprised at how much more paint it took to cover the canvas.  I was also surprised at how much extra push you needed to get the paint to cover the canvas.  It is very different from painting on paper or smooth boxes.  I liked it though.  I plan to try more paintings on canvas in the future.

Next blog post will be about some other quick project to finish
out the year.  I'm not sure what it will be at this point.  I don't want to get too involved in anything because the holidays are coming and we have lots of things going on.  Also, after doing a couple of long projects I just need to piddle around and play to keep from feeling burned out.