Playing with atmosphere

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Lakeside Garden  © 2013 Karen Mathison Schmidt

5 x 7 inches • oil on museum-quality, archival GessobordTM
private collection • Ogden, Utah

I interrupted my work on the painting of Andy to work on a couple of commissions this week, but I'll be getting back to that one very soon!

Meanwhile, before working on a larger garden painting today, I loosened up by painting this little one of a different garden scene. The composition is based on a tiny photo I saw recently in English Gardens magazine, advertising Inverewe Gardens in Scotland. 

I wanted to have an abstract kind of feel to the painting, so I tried to keep the detail to a minimum and the shapes basic. I remembered the light colored path beside the lake, and the smooth green lawn, like velvet, on the lake side of the path. I wanted more variety of flower sizes in the foreground, so I plopped some large sunflowers in beside the smaller wildflowers. Playing with the atmospheric perspective, I made the distant mountains, lake and trees lighter and mistier looking than the colorful garden down front, and tried to keep the distance smoother looking while playing up the texture and contrast of the different sizes and colors of flowers in the foreground. 

Now that I’m finished, I think I want to do it again. LARGER. Like 24 x 36 inches. It would be interesting to see how that would change the feel of it. A beautiful experiment.

After I finish with the current projects on my list, that is.