I took the photo that inspired this painting many years ago on a tour through Virginia wine country. There is a thriving winery scene that extends from south of Charlottesville up to Northern Virginia near Leesburg. Not all the wine is California level, but you can find some nice dry whites and reds among all the wineries selling sweet wines. I believe the photo below was taken in the vineyard of Veritas Winery, which is one of my favorites.
I always liked the colors in the photo and so when I started painting last year, I put the photo in my photo album aptly named Things To Paint.
I had recently toned a 11”x14” canvas panel with a maroon background so I decided to start with this panel. It is always best to start with a canvas in a color other than white so that when you start to put in your colors, you don’t have that stark white canvas fooling your eye into thinking your colors are darker than what they actually are. My rough drawing of the scene is below.
My next step was to block in the big color shapes and try to get the shapes to the correct value, an appropriate level of dark or light in relation to each other. In hindsight, the value of the farthest mountain and the hill on the left in front of it were a bit too dark, which I later wiped off and reworked those two shapes to lighten them up just a bit. One thing I didn’t care for in the reference photo was how the sun washed out that far mountain, so I was trying to find a happy medium that was give the painting depth, but also not have that washed out look in the background.
Below is the current version of the painting. With the paint still wet, there is a lot of glare in the photo. I might tweak it a little more after I’ve looked at it for a couple of days.
Final version after some tweaks.
