First Light 6x8 Oil Painting

Hello, welcome to another tonal landscape oil painting demonstration. This is your painter in residence, M. Francis McCarthy, and the painting I’m bringing you today is called “First Light.” It’s a six-by-eight that I painted recently.

First Light 6×8

The Setup and Why This Painting

We’re starting with hardboard that’s been primed with two, maybe three good coats of house paint to give us a really nice color called “Deep Earth.” I think this supports us real well. You see me oil out the board there—the reason I do that first is so you can see I’ve got a more accurate representation of that color. A lot of that’s going to peek through bits of the painting where I didn’t cover things completely. What I’ve been doing lately is working on this project of big scenics from out here in New Zealand, the area where I live—designed to appeal to tourists. But we all know my heart is really more in the Tonalist camp. So as a little treat after I finished a very good painting earlier in the week, I did this one. Kind of a little reward for myself—a little six-by-eight. What I like about the six-by-eights is I was able to do this all in one day. I came in in the morning, did just what you see me doing here, and painted the underpainting with burnt umber on that board color.

Compositional Decisions

You see me lowering the horizon line a little bit there. That’s really actually very key, very critical to the whole landscape—where that falls. The problem I was having was you can see where that ridge of the slight hilly ridge underneath the trees was hitting. I needed to make sure that lake was down below that, and then I had that little ridge of distant hills that needs to be in the right spot too. We’re working into the grid—you guys see me do this all the time. I call this the M. Francis grid, although God knows I didn’t invent it. It’s a very simple grid where the board’s divided in half each way. I don’t get real exact about it, but it’s great to have a couple more places where you can kind of measure where things are in the scene. I have a corresponding grid on my reference image. Like I say, I will change, move, do whatever, but it’s just good to have those bearings early on.

The Sky Strategy

The sky that I used for this scene I’ve used a lot, and I really love it when I have a bunch of color in the sky—a bit of blue as well, some real light color clouds. For me, that’s just a big win. Though I’ve used that particular reference a lot of times, I flip it, move it—every sky comes off somewhat different. There is a sort of buildup over time where you go, “Well, that’s an M. Francis sky.” Why? Because you put clay tones in there, taupe, and in this one I put a little of that dioxazine purple up in the top. I was feeling bad because I had to scrape off some dioxazine purple off my palette that had gone dry—it’s an expensive pigment too. But fortunately it doesn’t dry that quickly, and it makes beautiful colors like that up there. It’d be very hard to make that any other way, I think. The reason it’s on my palette is because it 100% says “I’m purple.” It’s not one of these kind of half-hearted “you mix the blue and you mix the red, yeah okay I’m purple, I’ll do what you want.” No, it’s solidly purple. It’s as purple as a purple crayon.

The Great Blue Tack Disaster

You’ll see the painting fall during this session—I use blue tack to hold the paintings up on my board, and it’s been a long time since I had one fall. Well, you can see what happens when it goes wrong. A couple things about blue tack: First, you stretch it out prior when the board is dry—no painting on it. You stretch it out and you don’t over-handle it. Don’t use tiny pieces—you can see I used quite big pieces, and that could have been my problem here. Maybe a bit smaller than that and I probably wouldn’t have had as much problem. Then you apply pressure against the board to make it stick to the easel. You got to do that all in one go—you push and you hold, that’s it. If you keep pushing and releasing, that doesn’t work. The blue tack will give away. I’ve been using blue tack for years to hold up my boards. Give me enough blue tack, I can hold up almost anything. That’s where I think people have gone wrong with it—they try to use tiny pieces to hold up large things and it doesn’t work. I got very lucky here—I didn’t mess up much painting.

Digital Reference Work

This reference image was created digitally. It doesn’t have much of a photographic basis. It was based on some old painting and I ran that through some digital methods. Then it went into a folder and I just sat on it. Yesterday morning I was thinking, “I want to paint a six-by-eight and I want to make it a today painting because I’m just coming off this big major amount of work.” I came up with this, and it had some kind of water in the foreground. What I did was use some tools you can use in Adobe now to modify things—you can select an area and remove it, and it uses AI generation to do that. I use that a lot of times to add paths or streams. There was already kind of a stream there; I just sort of reinforced it. Honestly, what I ended up painting was quite a lot different. It’s not always amazing looking, but it gives you something to look at. Having a little something to look at which you can then finish and complete using your creativity and imagination—that’s a proper use of the digital tools if you ask me.

Process Philosophy

Just to recap: we do the sky, then we come in with the darks from the land, then we bring in the middle tones and the lights in the land and come up to meet the sky. It always works really well. But that doesn’t mean—that’s the same process I use for a good painting or a bad painting. What I’m trying to say is that the process helps me move through the painting in an efficient way that supports what I’m doing. But it’s no guarantee that the painting is going to turn out well. It’s just helping. Any little help you can give yourself—because painting, you know, if you’re tuned in here looking for education, painting’s not that easy to do and you need help.

Members Area Updates

The members area has the whole mixing session, full transcripts now—a readable transcript of the video painting session. You’re going to see the premix, the palette labeled, the reference image—it’s all there for you, all laid out. We’re moving into Substack now as well, and I’m really digging it. It’s just so neat to have a post where I can do the text, transcription, a summary—everything, every little insight that was discussed in that live painting session is there for you.

The Book Update

I’ve been shipping a lot of books lately—quite gratified for that actually. I think we hit number 180. Each book goes out signed and numbered in the back. It contains a good solid 12 years of knowledge of me trying to figure out how to paint in this tonal manner. I couldn’t find any real instructions, so I basically dug deep into the masters and stuff, and that’s all documented on my channel. The channel has been going gangbusters since 2015—this is basically our 10-year anniversary and we just hit 6,000 subscribers too. Maybe doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s all based on me just sharing what I do. I’m pretty happy with that. It’d be one thing to build up your channel with a bunch of “super secret to doing this and that”—you see it all the time and I think we’re all getting tired of it. I’m into authenticity. That’s my game. That’s what I like to do—sharing what I do and helping people that want to paint as well. Real world painting beats the digital hands down, but you can use the digital to support that and help you create some inspiring reference. That’s the main thing I think it’s very good at—you can be very creative with it, and I’m really into it.

Thanks for joining me. We will be live this Friday—take care and stay out of trouble.

Mike

Full painting session, reference materials, and palette information available in the members area.