Butte States - stage 14

Have been working on the right hand side landscape today. I wasn't happy with all the cloud shadows and painted most of them out.

Butte States - stage 13

Slow progress at the moment due to distractions with moving my elderly parents near to where I live. The foreground butte is finished bar putting in the suspension bridges and have pretty much painted in the right hand foreground landscape.
To me the whole place looks deserted which I like even though unintentional and adds the extra subtext that all these city states could be abandoned due to maybe water issues...

Butte States - stage 12

Just have the bridges and buildings on the arch to put in and the foreground butte is finished. I can then start on the canyon and landscape as I work my way towards the horizon.

Butte States - stage 11

I am still working on the foreground arch and butte city so I thought that I would show the relevant detail of this area

Butte States - stage 10

Worked again on the foreground arch and butte, finally working out how to do the city in the butte to which end I have started to put vertically ascending windows in the rock face.

Butte States - stage 9

Spent more time today on working out the shapes of the rocks etc of the nearest arch and butte, so not really a stage just progress on day 7 of the painting.

Butte States - stage 8

Pretty much finished the sky and have made a start on the landscape. Unusually for me I have started on the foreground as I need to work out in my own mind the way I'm going to paint the rocks and buildings so I will work this out first here and then work my way towards the horizon, completely opposite to how I normally go about things. I will need to introduce some other colours into the landscape too as I don't just want it to be all reds and oranges.

Butte States - stage 7

OK I think I've pretty much finished the sky barring a few tweaks later on. I wanted a Big Sky with clouds typical of the South Western deserts of the USA, the colour scheme of the painting based on the red orange/ green blue complementary axis.
I have also made a start on working out the lighting design of the landscape, which areas are in shadow, which ones are in the light using a transparent Violet/Burnt Sienna mix. 

Butte States - stage 6

Worked on the sky again today but I think I will need tomorrow to finish it to my satisfaction - it's a matter of the right distribution of clouds and placement in the sky as well as getting the colours right, I think I need more lemon in the clouds for instance...
Below is a photo of the colours I have used so far.

Butte States - stage 5

I gave the sky a second pass of colour and hope to finish it tomorrow. Later in the day I put in some tonal underpainting detail into the landscape itself - I can see already that there needs to be good variety of colour within the sandstone landscape and will plan accordingly.

Butte States - stage 4

Today I painted the first colour pass on the sky. In the old days as an illustrator if there was a blue sky I just airbrushed a gradation of something like layers of acrylic Phthalocyanine Blue from dark at the top to light at the bottom. Now I work in oils I like to have more variety of colour in the sky so there are greens and purples there too, all modified by dashes of Permanent Orange to take the saturation down a bit as well as to have some of the land colour in the sky for harmony of colour across the painting. "As above so below" being the motto for this way of using colour.
The paint mixes are made up of Zinc White, Manganese Blue, Phthalocyanine Blue, Kings Blue Light, Emerald Green, Manganese Violet, Permanent Orange and Lemon Yellow - mostly Michael Harding paints with a couple by Winsor and Newton.

Butte States - stages 1 to 3

Stage 1

I am happy to report that I am now based permanently at home after two years of living between here and my elderly parent's house in Leicester. I have moved them to within five minutes walk of where I live and can consequently get on better with my work, mainly in the mornings. This means that I can get back to posting pretty much daily updates on paintings in progress etc.
"Butte States" is conceived as a companion piece to "City of the Sky People" in that it's another fantasy landscape painted in relatively real colours. This one is an imagination of a South West American desert landscape such as New Mexico whereby each mesa and butte is an individual city state kind of like there were in Italy in the 1500s, each one fortified with towers etc - sort of a futuristic Medieval fantasy landscape/cityscape!
Stage 1 was "drawn" up with a small bristle brush using a mix of Burnt Sienna and Winsor Violet thinned with Liquin and turpentine.
Stage 2 has a layer of the same paint mix applied to the landscape with a flat brush and rag as the beginning of the tonal underpainting.
Stage 3 has the sky painted in by giving the whole area a wash of Burnt Sienna and Winsor Violet thinned with a lot of turpentine and then areas for the white clouds erased by a rag dipped in turpentine. A second layer of the paint mix has also been added to the the landscape.

Stage 2

Stage 3