A Fogggy Day on Lion Creek

Cindy and I were out for a ride on this particular foggy day just exploring the area between Ojai and Santa Paula . We had just climbed over some hills shortly after leaving Ojai and were descending down the hill on the old Ojai to Santa Paula road when I saw a lovely oak covered swale that might be a good painting.  I stopped the car to have a look and took a few pictures. I took a few different shots and noted the colors and the light and overcast sky with the fog creeping over the distant hills.  I got back in the car and we continued down the road and drove over this lovely gorge, but could not stop because there was no safe place to pull over. I drove a little further and found a place wide enough to turn around and went back across the bridge and did a u-turn into a turnout just a short distance above the bridge and parked the car.

Our navigation unit in the car indicated the gorge was Lion Creek. Lion Creek flows through a gorge that it has cut in the sandstone rock of the beautiful valley that it cuts through. Like many streams in southern California, it likely drys up in the summer, but during the rainy season it flows fast and furious carrying runoff all the way to the sea. Where the bridge crosses over the little gorge that Lion Creek has cut it is probably 20 feet deep. 

I walked down the hill to the bridge and looked at the gorge from the bridge and was amazed at the rocks and trees, and color I saw.  There were so many shades of green, ochre colored and rust red stained rocks, dark green water and some water worn granite boulders.  I decided to climb down into the gorge and see what it looked like from below. My painter senses were on high awareness, and my eyes were filled with this beautiful scene I was seeing for the first time. My ears tuned into the sound of the water rushing through the rocks, tumbling and twisting over and around obstacles it had gradually worn down over many centuries of time. I could hear birds tweeting and talking to one another in the trees. I stood on a rocky sandstone outcrop above the stream and drank in the beauty of this place. The fog creeping over the distant hills, the stillness of the place, different songs of the many birds and the sound of rushing water. The oak trees and vines that dangled down the walls had fresh green leaves, broken here and there by dappled sun. Contrasting colors everywhere, and even emerald green grass on a sloping hill the stream had cut through. This scene spoke to me and cried out to be painted.  

I made mental notes of the colors, the lighting, and took several pictures with my Canon camera so that I would have some good reference photos to use when I got back home. My easel was in the car, but there wasn't time nor a safe place to set up and paint right there. 

A week and a half later I had cleared time to begin the painting of Lion Creek. I chose a  20" X 16" RTISTX board for the painting. I also decided that I would block in some basic undercolor areas using some of my Nupastels. I did a rough sketch of the scene on the board and then carefully laid down the undercolorss of blue where the mountains would go, green for some of the tree areas, brown for the ground under the trees and maroon for some of the rock undercolor. Once these colors were in place I brushed them with Turpenoid and allowed the colors to run a little. This was a new effort for me, I had wanted to try this technique on one of my pastels after watching a Richard McKinley DVD. I was very pleased with the result and it took about ten minutes for the Turpenoid to dry. I had a nice even color distribution over the areas and then began to apply the sky, clouds and some of the mountain detail with both Rembrandt and Winsor Newton pastels. Things moved along well in the early stages and I began working on the tree trunks and also the rocks lining the streambed.

The painting seemed extremely busy and detailed and as time went by and I moved further along I got to a point where I just seemed to block. This may surprise you since I am so much of a detail person in most of my paintings. I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to complete this painting and get it to look right and capture the wonderful scene I had viewed. My reference photos were good, but I was having difficulty getting the rocks to look realistic. They had such unusual roundness on some of them, they looked like someone had dumped a truck load of cement and smoothed it in humps and swirls, and then covered parts of it with vegetation. The bank on the one side was cut more sheer, and the vines trailed over it, so there was a lot going on there. I was also concerned that there was so much green from so much vegetation, I didn't want it to all blur into one color. I decided after getting to a certain point to just stop, and take a break from this painting, and start another completely different scene. I started another wine country painting, since I had been doing a series of them. I would periodically stop and just stare at my Lion Creek work and wonder if I would ever have the confidence to continue with it.

Taking a break and not forcing the painting was a good idea. One day while we were at lunch with some friends on the patio of Appleby's in Auburn, I had a break through.  I was looking at the trees bordering the patio. I noticed the shadows on the branches, and the many shades of green I could see in the leaves from the sunlight.  Just seeing the trees and the way the light played on them helped me to realize how I could continue the Lion Creek painting.   



A Foggy Day on Lion Creek



When we got home, I set my easel up outside on our back deck and brought my pastel box out and put it on a table. We have many trees that border our deck, and based on the light I saw on them, I knew I could separate the trees and their color values so that they could stand individually, and not all merge into one green mass.  It was a beautiful day, comfortable temperatures and I was charged to dig into the painting. With the new found confidence I was able to complete the canopy of trees by separating the values of different trees. I was also able to work on the shading and colors in the rocks with better light. Being outside in good light was a much better alternative than my poorly lit studio environment. The light helped me to chose a sunlit color for the grass in the meado that bordered the stream so it enhanced the feeling of depth in the painting. Natural light is so important to help one get a good true color value balance.

The last piece I worked on was the water in the stream. Little light filtered through the tree canopy to play on the water. It was deep in shadow, and so I chose to keep it the dark green I had viewed on site, and just put some light blue sky highlights in the ripples and in the froth it kicked up going through sections with rocks under the surface. I was pleased when I got to the point where I could stand back and know that I had captured the little Lion Creek Gorge I enjoyed so much on that visit. I hope you enjoy too.