The UFO Has Landed!

     I've been teasing this for the past week so hopefully your interest is piqued.  One fall night back in 2004 we had the thickest fog I have ever seen.  visibility was lower than it is in some snow storms and every street light and headlight was turned into a disembodied glowing orb.  If there was a night it would be safe for aliens to fly around unnoticed it was that night.
     Despite the extreme eeriness of the night air and the danger of being hit by a car that wouldn't be able to see me until I was 2 feet in front of them, I grabbed my camera and tripod and tried to capture this weird phenomenon.  Despite playing with different exposures and aperture settings (my photo skills are limited to the one intro class I had in college) I wasn't able to get the hazy thick quality of the lights filtering through the fog. Upon reviewing my shots from that night I did discover that something else cool happened.  The light carried out through the fog a lot farther than normal when I left the shutter onthe camera open and almost every shot looked like a UFO landing.

I chose the coolest, most UFO-y one and I'm going to try to recreate the eeriness in a watercolour.  I'm purposely choosing to use watercolour over oil because it will be more difficult to make this light effect work with watercolour where I have to start white and add darks as I go instead of painting all the trees and be able to add in the light and haze afterward like I would do with oil.  I want to have a luminous quality to my watercolour, so maybe this exercise will help me achieve that.

I start by artographing this photo just like the last two paintings but since I had such success mapping out my lights and darks in my last painting, I will try something similar when I artograph this one.  My plan is to work this painting in three basic layers.  The back layer, closest to or even the light which will only be a few shades darker than the background, the middle layer and the foreground which will be the darkest objects in the painting. I'll plan these out in advance by using three different colored pencils that vary in darkness, yellow, orange, red.

I hate it when I layout a drawing or painting and it turns out cool enough to hang on the wall at that step, one of these times I'll learn to just call it done and start another one to ruin by completing it!

  I began laying in the lightest layer and then going over all of that with the darker layer and building from there. 

Yet another step that looked really cool if I'd have been smart enough to stop here. Oh well.

     I added some dark washes to the outside to frame the "landing sight" and then laid in the foreground tree and foliage.  I found that the variance between the dark orange I used for the middle layer and black I was using for the foreground so I darkened up the middle layer.  The definition of the black was too clear also, so I spritzed the whole thing down with a fine mist of water from a spray bottle and let the paint run in whatever direction it liked.

OK, definitely stopping here...seriously, it's done now...for real.

 I trimmed the branches on the right side of that front tree because, to be honest, I lost track of my layout lines and wasn't confident I could make it look right.  Once I got looking at it, I think the composition works a little better than if I'd left them in.

Dislikes: I really feel like this is missing something.  (and not just those branches I left out) I planned to simplify the scene and not include every little weed, but I think my 3 layer approach may have over simplified it.  I may have gotten a better depth of field with a little more variation in color and worked a little harder to blur the lines and contrast toward the back and keep it sharper in the foreground.

 Likes: As a stand-alone painting I think it works pretty well.  If I wasn't so enamored with the original photo and built it up in my head for 8 years I probably would feel better at my attempt.