A week or so ago, I started working over the underpainting I’d made for this scene. This one is different from the other two in a significant way. I didn’t have any reference photos when I started working on it again. So I improvised. The shoreline doesn’t look exactly the same, even though even if I’d had the photo with me, it wouldn’t have looked exactly the same. The trees I’ve added are in different locations and there’s not much greenery in mine, yet. Maybe there never will be. I’m undecided about that at this point. What I AM doing is enjoying the process of going forward without a reference.
Progress on Kings River in Autumn
I’ll add progress photos to this space as I get them done. I have no idea how long it will take to finish this series. Eventually I’d like one for each season.
The Canvas
It’s on a 9 x 12″ birch cradle board. But it’s one of the early boards I’d started on, and it has no gesso for the primer. So you can still see the wood grain behind it. I may or may not add enough more paint layers to make that go away, but it isn’t bothering me all that much, so I may leave it like it is. After using a white background for other paintings since I’d started this one, I like the white backgrounds better.
The pigment I used in this one’s underpainting came from a red colored sandstone.
See all of the season’s progress pages:
(the rest of these buttons will go live as I get each progress page started)
About the Series
I made a blog post the other day to show all of the scenes that I’m intending for this series. Hopefully, I can get enough differentiation between the seasons to do all four. But if not, I’ll just call it something else than ‘Four Seasons’, haha. My plan, at this point, is to paint the underbody a different color for each season. Maybe that will help give enough variation between the seasons. I think spring will be the hardest ‘look’ to capture because I just don’t have the yellows and light greens I’d like to have. But maybe that has changed now, since I’ve discovered that a lake pigment from thyme makes a great and lightfast yellow.
I don’t know. It’s a grand experiment and I’m having fun figuring it all out. I hope you are enjoying the journey, too!
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Author/Artist Info
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Madison Woods is a self-taught artist who moved to the Ozarks from south Louisiana in 2005. In 2018 she began experimenting with watercolor painting, using her local pigments. She calls them Paleo Paints. In 2023 she began her journey into the world of oil painting with those same pigments. Her paintings of the Ozark-inspired scenes feature exclusively the lightfast pigments foraged from Madison county, Arkansas. Her inspiration is nature – the beauty, and the inherent cycle of life and death, destruction and regeneration. Wild Ozark is also the only licensed ginseng nursery in Arkansas. Here’s the link for more information on the nursery end of life out here.
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