en plein air cow painting – super quick impressionist sketching techniques
In this week’s video, I show you how I go about creating colour painting sketches in an impressionist style using a herd of cows as my subject. You can see the finished painting here: https://mike-jory.pixels.com/featured/rust-red-poll-cows-two-steer-impressionism-en-plein-air-sketch-painting-mike-jory.html Working en plein air at the edge of a field in Devon, these rust red coloured steer were considerate enough to gather next to the fence to see what I was doing. I start sketching with a black sharpie marker pen on A4 mixed media paper to quickly and loosely define the outlines of a couple of the cattle. Having got the basic drawing in place, I then use interactive acrylics to apply washes of colour to capture the sense of light in the sky and the colours of the distant hedgerow, trees and field. Next, I paint the two cattle using a wash of mid-tone, some deeper shadows and then deep blue highlights. The final sketch painting of the two cows is left without any further detail to give the viewer an impressionism style picture of the scene.
Materials: Daler-Rowney mixed media paper, Sharpie marker pen (black), Atelier interactive acrylics (burnt umber, titanium white, permanent alizarin, cad yellow deep, phthalo blue, cad yellow light), flat synthetic brush, water spray bottle
