A Guide to Plein Air by anettepower

There’s nothing like being in the middle of the elements, sensing the sun and the air, fully alert and present with a limited amount of time to wrangle the light, shadows, shapes and colors into something slightly recognizeable on my canvas,to feel fully and gratefully alive.

Anette

Power

First Printing May, 2024

This book was created as a passion project for my Graphic Design class. A Guide to getting outdoors to Plein Air Paint. Many thanks to: Professor Luke Matjas for encouraging bold graphic design choices and creativity for this guide. My children Ben and Sam for honest feedback, and my mother for igniting my love of art and creativity.

Printing by Blurb.com

Fonts:

Gill Sans Ultrabold

Myriad Pro Regular

Minion Pro

DIN Condensed Bold

Caviar Dreams Regular

Grenadine MVB

You can find my artwork at: anettepower.com

@anettepower

PAINTING Plein Air on location

A guide to

Welcome

- Seeing Materials Set up & Getting Started Seeing Table of Contents 4

16 22

Histor y

6 10

Step by Step

Locations Values Resources

Process Contents 5 44 26 32 40

and welcome to this llittle guide to outdoor painting in our local area. I’m excited to share some of what I have learned along the way and I hope to meet you painting out in the “wild” in the near future!

— Anette

WHY paint outdoors?

Welcome 6

Outdoors

I grew up close to nature on a Swedish island so when I started working in animation in the mid 90s, Plein Air painting was a nice way to get out of the office to paint in nature.

Since then it’s been a great learning experience, a wonderful way to put things in perspective. It’s provided opportunities to meet a lot of great artists and a chance to travel and paint in beautiful and interesting places.

Come Paint

Painting outdoors lends itself to learning quickly, being very present, learning to trust our instincts as we are forced to make decisions under time constraints.

This guide is an introduction to the history of Plein AIr painting, tips on supplies and steps to get started along with some There are many ways to approach Plein Air Painting and with practice you will find your own unique process.

Painting is in essence, figuring out the visual short hand for describing the feeling and experience of what we’re seeing. How can I simplify all the information and put enough on my canvas so that it reads as the scene, without worrying about all the details. Less is more.

with me

Afternoon Tea by Anette Power, 2015

En plein air is a French expression meaning “in the open air”, and refers to the act of painting outdoors with the artist’s subject in full view. Plein air artists capture the spirit and essence of a landscape or subject by incorporating natural light, color and movement into their works.

Sargent painted this picture en plein air – outdoors and in the Impressionist manner. Every day from September to November 1885, he painted in the few minutes when the light was perfect, giving the picture an overall purple tint of evening.

History

Carnation Lilies by John Singer Sargent, 1886

Impression Sunrise is the painting by French artist Claude Monet that gave the name to the Impressionist movement.

The plein air approach was pioneered by John Constable in Britain c.1813–1, but from about 1860 it became fundamental to impressionism. The popularity of painting en plein air increased in the 1870s with the introduction of paints in tubes which meant they could more easily take their paints with them. Previously, painters made their own paints by grinding and mixing dry pigment powders with linseed oil, a much more laborious and messy process.

French Impressionists

The high point of plein air art came with the emergence of Impressionism in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Artists of that period who painted outdoor landscapes included Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Cezanne and Van Gogh..

A snapshot of the rugged shoreline of the northern coast of France

Beach in Pourville is an 1882 Impressionist painting by leading French artist Claude Monet.

California Impressionists

“Though the painter may have the greatest possible talent, excellent training, and the most noble ideas or concepts, he is dependent to a great extent upon Nature. To her he must always go to for ideas to be translated.” —Edgar Payne, Composition of Outdoor Painting, 1941

Edgar Payne and Sam Hyde Harris have been great inspirations to me. Payne for the way he so masterfully interprets and lays down his color and for his book Composition of Outdoor Painting, 1941

Sam Hyde Harris with his amazing capture of atmosphere , and the way he compositions using a very high or low horizon line.

Sierra lake ca 1920, by Edgar Payne

Bay and Shore by Sam Hyde Harris

Set up & Materials

Everything in nature takes its form from the sphere, the cone and the cylinder.

Paul

Cezanne

And if we add man-made objects there’s also the cube and the cuboid. Me

My Plein Air Set Up

List of Supplies :

1. Oil Paints

2. Paint Holder

3. Surf aces/Panels

4. Brushes (in a carrier)

5. Mineral Spirits & a container

6. Paper Towel

7. Trash Bag

6 1 7

2 1

Palette 19

COLORS COLORS

bring a lot of colors, to have choices, but I do still use a limited palette when painting.Here’s a good palette to start with: 20

Limited Palette

Titanium White

Lemon Yellow

Cad Medium Yellow

Cad Red Light

Quinacridone Red

Ultramarine Blue

Phtalo Blue

Ivory Black

COLORS COLORS

Burnt Sienna

Getting Started

Before I start to paint ( as I’m setting up)

I usually make some decisions about what I will paint and how to proceed. This includes:

Composition

A study of where the light and shadow falls.

Started - Seeing

Light Shadow

Which will change first?

Paint that in.

Picking a subject matter/focal point.

Deciding how to crop what I see..

Where to put the horizon line

Noticing the light and shadow patterns.

Seeing how I can improve the design.

A Focal point is often the area with the highest contrast, hard edges, and/ or most saturation. A figure naturally becomes the focal point - as our eyes are drawn to humans before anything else.

Point

Camarillo Candid by Anette Power

It’s nice to have a primary focal point that will grab the viewers attention, after that I like to have enough visual interest in the painting to lead the viewer’s eye around.

Summerland by Anette Power

As artists we are designers; and to borrow from abstract principles, creating variety makes our work visually interesting.

Using different sizes of shapes, thick, and thin marks, different amounts of values, all helps to keep our viewer visually intrigued.

COMPOSITIO Squint Simplify

About Simplify COMPOSITIO

VALUES All

OMPOSITION Sha pes Squint SHADOW Simplify Se e Light

Simplify OMPOSITIO

VALUES

Examples of

A simple but interesting value structure makes for a more dynamic painting. If you can organize your values into light medium and dark; a lot of one, less of the next and a tiny sliver of the third, you can assure more variety and visual interest.

varying values

When you get used to looking at your scene and recognising the value structure, even if the 3 values are equal, you as the artist and designer can make decisions to mass values like your darks or the lights, in order to create a better painting.

Value Studies

Are a great practice and really helpful in making decisions before starting a painting.

Any color works for value studies. I try to stick to 3 or 4 values in varying amounts.

A Step by Process

An artist is an explorer. He has to begin by selfdiscovery and by observation of his own procedure. After that he must not feel under any constraint.

Henri Matisse

I picked this subject as it had a clear set of values. Mostly middle value, then the darkest value in the row of trees and the lightest pop of value in the light building. Plus... I only had an hour before the sun would set.

DRAWING

Drawing

you can use a pencil or charcoal for your drawing. I simply use paint and a thin flat brush to draw in the basic shapes as a guideline. I also use mostly straight lines for my drawing to not get too detailed.

Underpainting

I brush on a burnt sienna (or another color) mixed with some mineral spirits and wipe it off with a paper towel in order the it will dry quickly. It helps to get rid of the white canvas and to create a middle value.

After the drawing is done you can block in the shapes of the general color you see or...

Here I’m working on top of my value study. Starting by putting down my darkest value in the trees.

I finish by adding that lightest value of the building. Notice how I changed the design of the tree shapes by cutting in with the blue of the mountain so that I would have more variety of tree shapes.

TIP:

I then laid in the large bluish mass of the mountains and then the lighter green in the trees and the grass.

Lay your loaded brush flat & drag the paint to avoid picking up earlier layers.

123

Session 2

I picked this scene because I thought the darker values with the light umbrellas lent itself to an interesting design.

A Notan is considering the 2 value light and dark pattern.

Using the app Notanizer. Using Procreate or PS.

Underpainting with drawing.

Laying in light values in the umbrellas & the roof.

Laying in first patches of darker value color shapes.

Adding some people and shadows.

Painting the people - Squint to see what basic shapes you see

Here I’m using a basic silhouette shape for the palm frawns and then a light value to show where the light is hitting.

For this large area I went back in with some lighter strokes to show differences in the building structure.

This is where it ended up at the end of my session.

When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you - a tree, house, a field.... Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives your own naive impression of the scene before you.

Claude Monet

Staying Loose

This

plein air

study was really enjoy- able.

I didn’t have a lot of time so I had to work fast, like Monet said...to put a mass of dark here, and a streak of blue there. Just focusing on the impression of colors I saw. Nothing finished or perfect.

Painting LOCAL

33 150 101

Ojai Moorpark Simi Valley Fillmore Ventura Oxnard Santa Paula Camarillo Thousand Oaks Newbur y Park Malibu 33 150 150 23 101 101 1 118 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 2 3 LocationsPainting 41