Sierra Splendor – Landscape Oil Painting Demonstration

About Mike

Nationally recognized, award winning artist Mike Callahan is a fourth generation Nevada native who counts himself privileged to grow up in what he believes to be one of the most beautiful places on earth, the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains near Reno, Nevada where he still lives today. While he has been painting since childhood, he has only been painting in earnest for about the last 5 or 6 years.

Says Mike, “The topography of this area is simply phenomenal; one can go from the high desert to mountainous alpine settings in less than an hour. It is this beautiful and varied landscape that ends up being the subject for a vast majority of my paintings.”

However, if you look through the paintings on Mike’s website, you will quickly see that the Sierra landscape isn’t the only subject Mike typically paints. He also enjoys painting Western themes as well as figurative and portraits.

As you look at Mike’s work, you will notice a great color harmony throughout. While the colors in his paintings run the full spectrum of color seen in nature, harmony is maintained by Mike limiting himself to only three colors plus white on his palette. Instead of referring to this as a limited palette, Mike thinks of it as an unlimited palette as he has not found any color he desires to use that he can’t create from those primary colors.

Mike’s work has been featured in numerous solo, group, and juried shows including the 54th Juried Exhibition at the Haggin Museum in Stockton, California, the second 100 in PaintAmerica’s 2008 Paint the Parks competition, and in May of 2008, Mike received national honors at the Oil Painters of America’s National Juried Show of Traditional Oils winning a coveted Award of Excellence for his painting “Wild Mustangs.”

Mike’s work can currently be seen firsthand at the Artistic Viewpoints Gallery in Minden, Nevada and the Truckee River Gallery in Reno.

Please click here to visit Mike’s website to learn more about him and to view more of his work.

Click Here for a One on One Interview With This Artist

Sierra Splendor – Lanscape Painting Demonstration

1.) In the fall of 2007, I was contacted by clients who needed a large painting for their home. They weren’t sure of exactly what they wanted, but they knew they wanted something that captured the majesty and grandeur of the Sierras…I have many reference photos from hikes I’ve done in the area, so using the two photos shown above of the majestic Sierra Buttes from a ridge overlooking the Sardine lakes, I set out to paint a study…

2.) After consulting with the clients to get an understanding of what they liked, I painted the study shown above as well as another one of Long Lake (see the January 13th post on my blog) as a couple of proposals for the project. They immediately gravitated toward this one and we agreed upon it. I looked forward with great anticipation as I thought this would make a great painting…following is the chronicling of it.

3.) The painting will be 40″ x 60″, the same size as “Mt. Washington” shown hanging in my studio behind me.

I assemble the heavy stretcher bars and install a center brace for added strength before stretching the canvas…

4.) With the canvas stretched as tight as a drum (or at least as tight as I could stretch a drum), I’m now ready to begin…

5.) It’s 4:45 am and I begin to paint by mixing up a nice burnt orange color and apply it to my canvas with a large brush…this is just to tone my canvas so ultimately I’ll even it all out to the edges with a towel wetted with a little thinner…

6.) Once my canvas is toned, I use the same burnt orange color to draw in some of my major elements…shown next to it is my original study which will aid me as I progress in the painting.

7.) Here you can see the extent of the detail I give myself…not too much at this stage…

8.) My sky is broken up with clouds, so using a light blue color I define the area of clouds and sky…

9.) Once I’ve defined the areas roughly where I want the sky and clouds to be, I can begin painting that area…

10.) I start with the lighter area of the sky (generally the area nearer the horizon) and work toward the darker…

11.) I pretty much complete the sky before beginning the clouds…

12.) I usually paint dark to light, but both sky and clouds are typically exceptions for me, especially clouds because of their nature…usually the dark part of the cloud is nearer the viewer as it represents the shadow area and is often times somewhat back or top lit by the Sun…

13.) To finish the clouds, I paint the “dark” areas into the light, blending to various degrees depending on the shape and texture of the clouds…

14.) Here’s a view of the right side of the painting with the sky mostly done.

15.) Once I’m satisfied with the sky, I move on to the main focal point of the painting, the buttes. I start by thinly laying-in the dark area of the mountains. In this photo, the darks look quite dark, but in actuality, the dark areas aren’t super dark. I want these mountains to recede a bit and as such I must be careful not to go too dark in the shadows in this part of the painting.

16.) I come back into these shadow areas and work in a little texture with an even lighter “dark” color before moving on to the light side of the rugged buttes. I alternate between knife and brush in the mountains to give them just the amount of texture I want.

17.) I begin to paint the lit side of the mountains using the same general approach, I block-in using essentially only two values…

18.) I like to keep my palette very simple…at this stage of the painting you can see I only have my three basic primary colors, yellow, magenta and blue, one secondary, red (used mostly to mix the brown) and a very dark color I call “blackenough”. Through combinations of these and Titanium white I’m able to mix the few warm and cool earthtones that I use on the mountains.

19.) And so, essentially I procede in this manner across the mountains alternating between knife and brush…

20.) The difference in progress shown between this photo and the one above is about one painting session’s progress…I have a long way to go!

21.) The detail in mountains like this can be overwhelming to the painter, but to keep myself from being overwhelmed, I work in sections paying attention to the values and colors in each area as they relate to each other and the whole…

22.) Here’s an “up close” shot showing the degree of brush and knife work that make up the mountains…

23.) And here it is standing back a bit…

24.) I’m nearly done with the rugged buttes and will soon be moving on to the mid-ground part of the painting…

25.) To finish off the mountains, I have to paint in a bit of the remaining snow that usually stays on them year round…I begin with the snow in the shadow areas – though shaded, still quite light value-wise…

26.) And the light part, though quite bright isn’t really close to pure white (even though it looks so in this photo) I usually paint both clouds and snow with a fair degree of yellow mixed in…

27.) Ah, that snow is just the thing to really give some depth to these rugged peaks…

28.) Here’s a shot of the main part of the buttes in their near finished state…

29.) The tree covered mountainside in the middle ground is barely beginning to receive light as the Sun moves east to west across the sky. Being still in shadow quite a bit, I underpaint a fairly dark area before painting any of the trees that cover it. Mind you, this is still quite a bit lighter than black though it’s hard to tell that in the photo without anything to compare it to…

30.) This photo shows the actual value of that dark area a bit better than the one above…

Continue on to Part 2 of this Landscape Painting Demonstration >>