It is time to compose my counter-melody, i.e. the bottom half of the wild wild west. This is the part where the desert scene of Painted Hills in central Oregon would fit in.
There really is a place called the Painted Hills in central Oregon. The spot is actually not a desert so to speak, but a gathering of dunes of claystones that display stratified layers of different colors, from rust to gold to black. I picked this theme as my counter-melody because I think the stripes are very different from the clouds. The exception is that they are both layered. Yes clouds are amorphous but a sea of clouds certainly has structure. In my painting they are layered. Thus I believe it would be visually stimulating to compare and contrast the clouds with striped dunes.
I started out with a small dune. I needed this to be a reference point for my darkest tone for this half of the painting.
I then painted in the foreground. A nondescript stretch of real-estate.
Chuen are brushstrokes used to describe the texture of the soil or rocks. I've touched upon techniques like the
axe-chuen,
hemp chuen in my past blogs, and I had also alluded to the
dot-chuen. This is done by writing dots in strategic areas; either to help with shading, or to hide mistakes. In my case, I used this technique to texturized the entire foreground. Sort of like pixels from yesteryears newspaper print. Or perhaps what the western world called pointillism. Isn't it interesting that the East and the West are really not that different.
My next chore was to construct the main theme of this counter-melody; the main dune that occupied the greater portion of the lower half of the painting.
I had written in the shape of the dune, and the contour lines of the lopes of the dune. Thrusting my brush backwards such that the brush tip lined up with the contour line was my way to achieve the proper shading. This was done in lieu of the traditional chuen technique because I found shading to be more effective in describing the lobes. A void in the middle of the lobe suggested a bulging structure. My goal was to create these fingers running down the slopes of the dunes.
Stripes were written to illustrate the striated features of these painted hills.
The lower left portion of the landscape was left open on purpose. This is what we Chinese brush painters called "breathing". It helped to open up the scene. Had that void been filled in, the painting might look somewhat claustrophobic.
