After the Stonehenge on the left side of the painting is situated, it is time to build on the rest of the points of interest on my reinvented Columbia River Gorge.
Vista House sits on top of Crown Point in the Gorge and is a popular scenic vantage point to visit. From there one can see the Gorge and the river some 700 feet below. If one tries hard enough, one can see the towns of Washougal and Camas to the west on the Washington State side of the river. The architect of Vista House described it as "a temple to the natural beauty of the Gorge," I am borrowing it with certain amount of faithful realism to fit my Red Cliffs invention.
Working with the outline I laid down with light ink, I am building up the landscape. I am using "dot" chuen to account for vegetation growing on top of the precipitous cliffs, along their crevices and at the bottom of the rock formations. An occasional writing of lines on top of the dots give an impression of branches. The rocky shore is done with the "folding ribbon" chuen brushstroke.
Supplying small doses of light values to give a three-dimensional feel to the landscape:
I realize that I am making the Vista House bigger than it should be, scale wise that is. I trust this is a subconscious behavior, since I am preoccupied with that structure as the focal point for this segment of the painting. In actuality I need to make the cliff as the main character. I suppose the discrepancy is only for me to know since not everybody is familiar with this part of the country. At the end of the day, this is my construction of the Nostalgia, and the Vista House is a prop in the scenery, albeit an important one, since it helps to show people this is actually the Columbia River Gorge that they're looking at. I suppose a smaller Vista House will make the cliff more imposing. Oh well!
