Cimarron Mountains

Starting with a light blue sky, painted on the backdrop, I started dabbing in white clouds. A half inch round brush, is dabbed into white tole paint, and then dabbed onto the backdrop, outlining the upper edge of the cloud.  Start at the lower edge of the cloud and dab on the paint in a irregular, lumpy cloud outline. Moving up and to the right as you go.  The brush will run out of paint as you go, letting the cloud fade naturally.  Continue with this technique, either where you left off, or a little to the right of the first starting point. In this manner, the cloud layers are built up, going from bright to faint areas.  More clouds can be added, but always build them from left to right. The clouds can be made as large as you want.  Go back over areas that don't look right.  For this scene I then used a navy blue, that had been thinned a little, with water, to darken the area just below the clouds where mountains would be added.  This will make the lighter coloured mountains stand out. With a light tan tole paint loaded on a flat, angled, half inch brush, the tops of a ridge of mountains, was painted over the bottom edge of the navy blue clouds. The brush was pulled down from the top to the right, to define the slope of the mountains. Then, just tapping the brush edge into the white paint, it was lightly touched to the top of the ridge and feathered down and to the right.  This makes the ridge look snow covered.  The brush edge was then tapped into the navy blue, which was feathered onto the bottom of the slopes.  The blue and light colour of this mountain ridge makes it receded into the distance, while the snow reinforces the height of the mountains.  Next a large butte was added using much of the same technique. The left side was darkened with blue and a darker brown colour, to indicate shadows. Thin black lines were added to define ridges and cracks.  This butte was made to slope off to the left where yet another butte was added. Then trees were added along the bottoms of the mountains.  A small flat brush with stiff bristles was loaded with dark green and tapped on using a downward stroke, making a pointed blotch which looks like a distant tree. Tap along to the right until the paint fades and then reload and continue. The lines of trees must be naturally irregular.  A lighter green is also used to hint that there are different trees and to build layers of light and dark areas. This small area took 2 hours to paint and the rest of painting will be covered later.

layers of clouds added

mountains painted in



distant trees come next