Mount Kazbegi

Most painters will be able to tell you that getting the colour right is the key to a successful painting. I have been using my iPad Pro with ProCreate over the last couple of months with great success to duplicate other paintings or to paint from images. This morning was my first attempt to use ProCreate to do an oil-like painting from real-life. My subject was Mount Kazbegi in Georgia as seen from our guest house. I have not done many plein air paintings of mountains, so I had to play with value and colour. I have a couple of pre-set palates in ProCreate, which helps to create some boundaries and so that everything is not going all crazy. This is actually exactly what successfull landscape painters such as Scott L. Christesson says. Here suggests using a limited palette to reduce the amount of colour decisions you have to make and ensuring that you focus more on the right values than on mixing millions of colours.

Overall the result is satisfactory for a first attept. I think I should try to perform a grey-scale or sepia plain air paintng of the mountains to train my eye to see the correct vales.

Gergeti

We are currently in Stepantsminda in Georgia. It as an area of magnofocent mountains with Mount Kazbegi with a peak altitude of 5047m towering over the town. I quickly reliazed that watercolour is not going to give me the definition I want to capture the mountains, but still did a quick watercolour study during a hike we did yesterday. The building is one of three buildings at the Gergeti Trinity Church. I am not a church fanatic (I am serious about my faith, but not about churches), but I really appreciate the effort that the Georgians put into these hundreds of years’ old buildings. It is built from raw limestone and the material had to be elevated by more than a 1000m from the town of Stepandsminda to the site of this church.

Tabor Monastery – Tbilisi

The rundown and neglected state of the Old City Tbilisi is shocking and I am concerned what should happen should a strong earth-tremor, or (may God spare them) a real earthquake hit this city. Some of the buildings have been restored, but the majority is in an advances stage of collapse.

Always looking for an opportunity to sketch, I took my iPad with me while walking about the Old City. We sat down at the Café Canapé at the suphur baths and I took a moment sketching the Tabor Monatery. It is situated on a high hill and overlooks the Old City and the Narikala Fortress. I took some time to put some proper guidelines in place and I am quite satisfied with the result.

Jvari Monestery

Yesterday we drove out to Mtskheta, the old capitol of Georgia and to an old cave-city called Uplistsikhe, passing through Gori (Stalin’s town of birth) along the way. It was a beautiful drive through the Georgian countryside, but it was sad to see the poverty and neglect of the houses.

Mtskheta is the traditional capitol of Georgia and it contains numerous monastaries and churches. Most of these date from the 11th century. I did not have time to sketch on site, but managed to work on this one from a photograh I took yesterday. This building, the Jvari Monastery is located high on a mountain overlooking Mtskheta.

Narikala, Tbilisi

So this morning I sketched the Narikala fortress in Tbilisi. It dates back to the 4th century AD and is truely a magnificent structure. It sits on a hill in the middle od the city overlooking the old town.

I am a bit rusted when it comes to sketching buildings, but I think I captured the essence of Narikala. If I ever decise to make a living out of painting old buildings, I could consider coming to Tbilisi. There are enough old buildings to paint here for many years.

Tbilisi sketching

We are currently on holiday in the country Georgia. It is extremely beautiful and it feels like we have been transferred to the middle ages. The city is filled with churches and buildings that are 100’s of years old with the mignificent Narikala fortress the centerpiece of the “Tbilisi time capsule”.

My objective is to sketch something every day while we are here. The Narikala fortress is on the cards, but this morning I sketched the old houses across the valley from where we stay. The bottom af the sketch contains the bushes in our garden and the houses are built on the cliffs on the river running throught the city.

The sketch was performed with my iPad Pro and Apple Pencil with ProCreate. It was the first time I tried to do some urban sketching with my iPad and the result was really satisfying.

Dimensioning my clouds

One of the fascinating aspects of human sight is our ability to see in three dimensions. I think the mosy striking cloud experiences I have ever had was where I could observe 3D cloud formations towering over me such that I could observe the depth in and the shape of the clouds in an almost tangible way. This 3-D appearance is very difficult to obtain in paint. I thinks the attempt below is a good step in the right direction.

And more clouds…

If you look at my gallery page on this blog you will see that I did a number of cloud studies some years ago. I stopped painting clouds since I just could not get repeatable results. I now realize that I may have been overthinking if. Clouds want to be painted in simplicity with large brush strokes that are gently merged on the canvas, even on the iPad. Here is a recent attempt.

Clouds… again

While I was on a role I also did these clouds. Here I mixed my cold greys and warm greys. I like it! It makes me think of my beloved Karoo back in South Africa.

Created using Procreate on my iPad Pro.

Clouds on my iPad

Whenever I get artistically stuck I revert to greyscale / monochrome paintings. Too much colour options get overwhelming at times. In real paint I never use black. I always mix my darks using ultramarine and burnt sienna. The result is that I may have a range of true greys, or, mixing in more blue, I get cold blue-greys. By mixing more burnt sienna, I get a warmer sepia range of colours.

Well, I do not have much time for real paint at moment, so I prepared some monochrome palettes in Procreate on my iPad Pro and painted the clouds below using a cold grey value scale. I am quite satisfied. It does not seem to be a digital painting, which is good. It took me less than 40 minutes to complete. I used a reference photo.