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Learning to Paint Impressionism: Sunny Day block study

I am in the pursuit of color. That means that I am doing what is considered a basic study in art school: block studies. Because I want to learn impressionism (a la “Charles Hawthorne” method) I am following the suggestions in Lois Griffel’s book, “Painting the Impressionist Landscape”. So, I decided to do the sunny day block study (after all, the sun was out and shining yesterday). First I will share a photo of the setup, and then the painting (in acrylics).

sunny day block study photo of block setup

As you can see, the camera records this as pretty dark, since there was a lot of light contrast.

Here is the study I did, where you can see that the human eye can see a LOT more light than a camera:

sunny day block study painting by Yeshuas child art

This was a quick half hour study. I was interested to see that the blue block in the light looked violet instead of blue on the light side; that the red block had a lot of orange in the light; and the green block had a bit of orange in it in the sun. But when I painted the shadow sides (using cool colors), they read true. The cream cloth they are on had a bit of reflected orange, so I went with that.

I am learning a lot from this, and will use it in a real still life in the next day or so, and share what it looks like. I want to learn everything I can about color and how it works. I hope that what I am sharing is helpful to you as an artist.

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