Ruth Soller » Blog

You may be wondering what steps I use to accomplish a large oil landscape such as Dream Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park. Here I began by collecting relevant photos of the scene taken on a couple of prior visits. Each of these five views included some aspect that was important to me to express my vision for this piece. Next I drew a colored pencil sketch on paper with dimensions proportional to the 24x30 canvas on which I planned to paint. Here I realized I needed to create background for the right edge behind the primary pine tree. To test my composition and color choices I painted an 8x10 oil study. I decided that one major tree was better for the foreground than two and that my reflections in the lake were too foreshortened and needed to extend further into the foreground.

I toned the larger canvas with transparent red oxide and gridded it into thirds and fifths before I drew major shapes with watercolor pencils. I painted the sky first and liked the look of it with only one layer of paint. The mountains and background trees were painted with two layers of paint before I covered the water and foreground with a first layer of paint. Now I decided that the reflections looked too much like a mirror rather than water. In the second layer of the water I added more blues on top of the water and blurred the edges in the reflected areas. Still I felt that the water was competing with the mountains which were to be my focal point. I added a third layer of paint to the lake in which I added more ripple action as well as a curving path of highlights leading the eye from the foreground up to the focal point of the mountains. I hope you enjoyed learning about the evolution of Dream Lake RMNP.