Cemetery Statuary

12" x 9" Oil on Panel

This is a painting I made at a local cemetery in October. The plan was to use it for a Halloween post on this blog but that didn't happen. Maybe it just wasn't Halloweeny enough, but I think it's worth a spot on this blog. 

Besides being an experience painting something I haven't before, in a place I haven't painted before, this was also another practice using only three colors. This time those colors were cadmium lemon yellow, cadmium red, and ivory black, plus white.

The Day's Palette

I started by toning the panel gray and wiping out the light areas of the statue. Those areas were kept basic and kind of rough at this point. The focus was on keeping general shapes in correct proportion to each other. Details would come later.

Then I worked on building up the dark tones. 

As you can see in the previous two photos, the background is bright behind the statue. I wanted that dark evergreen on the right to be behind the statue in the painting. That would make the lighter statue stand out more, but I wanted the angle of the statue from this viewpoint. So - I moved the tree!

The last image shows some more progress on the painting.

The finished painting is shown at the top of this post.

This was a fun opportunity to paint something different. It was kind of a combination of plein air painting with figure painting. Hope you enjoy seeing the painting and the process!