How I paint

I don't usually make a record of my painting process. I'm usually too engrossed in putting paint on the surface to take the time to stop and photograph each step. But since I teach landscape painting, I decided it would be helpful to my students to see how I go from a sketch to the finished painting. So, for what it's worth, here's my process....

Step #1: the pencil sketch on a gessoed Ampersand hardbord panel.

Step #2: the first big defining washes of color using Holbein's acrylic gouache -- over-bright because I know I will tone them down with subsequent layers. I find it's easier to tone down intense color rather than vice-versa. Besides, bright color is fun!

Step #3: the addition of the warm earth tones to play off against the cool blues and greens.

Step #4: More definition in the rain puddles and some initial layers of grass texturing.

Step #5: Ooops, big jump here. Well that's what happens when I get deeply engrossed in the act of painting -- I can't stop. But you can see I've added lots of layers of warm tones over the green under-painting, as I defined the grasses with long vertical brushstrokes. Voila, the finished painting.

Grasslands in gouache

"Bear Mountain Road" - acrylic gouache on panel, 12 x 16

Here's another grassland scene, from a trip we took to New Mexico several years ago. I love the way the low afternoon light turned the autumn grasses into spun gold. The medium I used here is acrylic gouache, which is sort of a mix between acrylic paint and gouache, a kind of opaque watercolor. Next to watercolor, this may be my favorite kind of paint. For more details about this paint, check out my description here.

SketchCrawl #24

Peach, banana, red pepper in ink and watercolor. © Marilynn Brandenburger

Yesterday was "SketchCrawl," the international drawing marathon in which artists -- and aspiring artists -- all over the world go out and sketch. It's a hoot to see who was drawing, what they drew and where. Here in Atlanta it rained all day, quashing our plans to go to the Botanical Garden, so I stayed home and raided the produce bin for subjects.

More grasslands

"Toward Laramie," Wyoming - watercolor on panel, 12 x 16

"Autumn in the Tallgrass," Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge, Iowa - watercolor on panel, 12 x 16

"Prairie Poem," Big Prairie, Montana - gouache on panel

Our Colorado vacation really got me pumped about grasslands. I find the rolling hills of sensuously waving grass to be extremely beautiful. Did you know that only about 1% of the original grasslands -- from the Tallgrass prairies of Illinois, Iowa and Kansas to the Shortgrass of the Great Plains states -- still remain as they were after the Ice Age? Efforts are being made to restore prairie grasses and the richly diverse ecosystem they offer, and I plan to visit as many restored grassland preserves as I can.

Memories of Colorado

My husband and I spent a week along Colorado's Front Range in July, checking it out for retirement. Here are two watercolors of Soapstone Prairie, a 28-square mile Natural Area just north of Fort Collins. Enormous sky, brilliant sun, wild wind, soaring raptors and gazillions of wildflowers -- my kind of place!

The Chair Journal

I've started a new journal -- about chairs. Chairs we spend time in can become good friends, and many of them play a role in our lives. This chair nurtured my musings about drawing and painting when I was a resident artist at the Ragdale Foundation in Chicago a few years ago. I'll be telling its story, along with that of 15 other chairs I have known and loved, in this new "Chair Journal."

Handmade journals

I have used store-bought journals for my sketches for years, but they've always fallen short of what I really wanted, which was to be able to bind pages with a single theme together. Last year I started taking book-binding workshops so I could do this. Here is a selection of my handmade journals to-date. Where I learned to do this was at the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, NC, where I teach Illustrated Journaling.