I did these two sketches of the arbutus in Lighthouse Park, West Vancouver. They helped me paint “Arbutus”.
Paintings and screenprints
These are the colours I used to screen print Spawning Salmon. They are a triad of brighter colours on a dulled yellow ground. Orange dominates this pattern. with blue and green accents. Triadic colour schemes use colours that are evenly spaced on the colour wheel. Vibrant colours can be used in harmony. This particular triad is a tertiary triad.
These two sketches helped me choose colours and lines to emphasize in my painting Milford Sound. The first sketch uses a bright blue on top of a dark blue to show the sea. The second sketch uses a bright blue on top of a dulled green to show the colours of the sea. The sky in the second is lighter to emphasize the line of the mountain that falls to the sea.
The top colour chart is for the second sketch which became the colours of my painting Milford Sound.
Mitre Peak is a mountain in the sound that is a very strong national symbol. I was more interested in the meeting of mountain and sea than that icon. I removed photographic details of that mountain to emphasize that relationship.
This image is closer to my memory of a sunrise on the Routeburn Track, New Zealand, than photographs I took on that hike. It is a composite of two photographs. The colours of the foreground came from a photograph exposed at 1/30 of a second. The colour of the background came from another photograph exposed at 1/1260 of a second. I think what happens is two glances are joined in my memory. Colour memory is maleable and weak.
I photographed a creek running through the trees on the edge of a cut block. When I painted “Through the Trees”, I exaggerated the lines of the photograph to create angular patterns. Those repeating patterns help give the hillside a sense of steepness and movement.