Art and My Vacation

I went to Michigan and Wisconsin on a trip with my wife that took us completely around Lake Michigan and touched on 3 of the 5 great lakes.  I had planned on doing some art work along the way, but between the pace of the trip and the swarms of hungry, biting skeeters, I contented myself by taking reference photos.

First day back, I picked one of the reference photos that I really liked and started my usual preparations by cropping and griding the photo.  Here are the steps:

Raw photo - my dogs on the Michigan / Wisconsin border

Tightly cropped and moving from vertical to a horizontal orientation

Gridded 5x4 - translated to 4" grids with a roughly 22"x18" painting planned

My approach towards sketching and underpainting is to work in big masses while reserving finer details for later.  I gridded some Uart 600 sanded paper (it has a tan tone) and sketched in some rough outlines all with a pastel pencil.  Then I came back over it with opaque watercolors (also known as gouache), getting some base colors set that will act as a guide when I start to work with pastels.

Gouache underpainting in progress - about 65% done

One thing that I like about the underpainting is that it allows you to evaluate the composition very early and this one seems to be working even without many of the details being in place.  I should also mention that it is my intention to make this quite a bit lighter than the source image.  The darkest that I plan on going is around 7 or 8 on a 1-10 value scale.

I'll post more as this progresses toward completion or the landfill.