Montana Road Trip (12 x 18 watercolor) Available
This is the descent to Butte, Montana coming from the east. Crossing Montana on I90 the views alternated between narrow rocky places and expansive high plains, true big sky country. I wanted to capture the feeling of the decent from the narrows to the wide open space below. I took a number of photos through the dashboard trying to get that feeling. This one came the closest:
Reference Photo
As you can see, the four lane interstate dominates the picture. Also the road looks much flatter than it actually was. There are other problems too. The end of the road is almost dead center in the middle of the picture. Trees hide the expanding vista. There is nothing about the vista to draw the eye in.
Adobe Photoshop to the rescue. I don’t have a professional edition, just Elements 6. But it’s fine for my purposes. I began by using the lasso tool to select the right hand cliffs. I then copied them, flipped them right to left, and wedged them in over the left hand two lanes of interstate. I selected and copied some of the left hand cliffs and slipped them in behind my newly transformed right hand cliffs. I used both copying and the clone tool to remove the trees from my opening vista. I lassoed the right hand cliffs again and stretched them upwards. I enlarged the canvas and stretched the whole image to the right. I added a band of sunlight in the vista:
Altered Reference Photo
The result was quick and dirty, but it gave me a good idea where I was going. And it gave me a workable photo to draw from. I used the bottom of the concrete barrier still showing in my altered photo to help me plot the new guard rail. The feet of the unaltered cliffs helped me imagine the feet of my new cliffs.
Here’s my working drawing:
Working Sketch
I left out the mountain range on the left as it would detract from the center of interest at the foot of the road. I also pulled the right hand cliffs even further to the right than in my altered photo, thus opening up more of the distant vista.
I did the painting itself quickly beginning with the sky, filling in the road while it dried and then laying in the trees to establish the dark values. The trees are phthalo blue, french blue, new gamgee, and Winsor purple mixed mostly on the paper. For the cliffs I used cerulean blue, cobalt blue, and yellow ochre, and purple. I added more purple and blue to the right hand shadowed side and more burnt sienna to the sunlit side. Rather than using burnt sienna to dull the blues, I used hansa yellow deep. The sky is phthalo, cobalt blue, burnt sienna, and more purple. I used the same pigments for the road. The result is bluer and stormier than the photo, but more like the day itself with was dark and threatened but rarely delivered rain.
