Jacaranda Trees – Acrylic Painting Demonstration

About Don

Don Jusko is a very talented and knowledgeable American Artist and founder of the website: RealColorWheel.Com. RealColorWheel.com is by far the most comprehensive website on the topic of color. It is jam packed with free information, lessons and tips on color that Every artist should see. Don is very excited about sharing his painting demonstration below as well as getting the word out about his site.

Here is Don’s recommendation on how to navigate through his website:

“I suggest you start on my end page (reverse to forward pages). All my pages have links backward and forward and I think my last 6 pages are very important. Especially the page that shows the colors the children used and the secondary colors they made.”

Don also stresses the importance of the following:

“Well I think this 3 color watercolor palette of mine that uses the same 3 Transparent colors that I use for printing four color process images on my 50” giclee plotter and painting what I see on location is VERY important. https://www.realcolorwheel.com/rcwplotter.htm”

Two printing passes, one primary color over one secondary mixed color will print a black hue neutral dark. just like mixing the pigment in clear media.”

Jacaranda Trees – Acrylic Painting Demonstration

15×22, acrylic on panel –
May 20, 2002

This is two hours from the start. Using a 3/4″ sable filbert. I wet the whole support and washed in the sky. While the sky was drying I captured the grass, I went with the big areas blocking in the foliage, big branches background trees and the road. I see the tree as having a foreground, middle ground including the trunk and branches and inside background. To get ready for tomorrow I cleaned up the posts with two coats of white.

Day 2

What a great day. A dreams come true kind of day. This morning I set up my solar power to run my computer with an inverter. Hee hee, happy camper. By 12:00 I was on location setting up. On and off all day I had to laugh, the sun was shining, the wind was blowing and it was raining. My umbrella was set so low I had a two foot space to see my view.

I’m up in the clouds tonight, 4,600 feet, Chillier … It’s great, country radio on the van’s radio, the computer on the extra battery. Alone at the top of the world. I’m a hermit at heart. Speaking about hearts, I’m staying beside an image in our mountain, The Busman’s Heart, w/c. I made a computer coloring book page from this painting.

The Jacaranda painting coming along well, not quite 100% coverage yet, but no hurry. Every day more blue flowers bloom!

This little 5×8 ink cross hatch drawing with a Pigma 01 is all I have to show for the next day.

It was to cold for me so I dropped down to my favorite spot on the mountain at the 4,000 feet elevation. It was so pretty I stayed here for the day. I need the brake after 6 mos. in the hot Lahaina sun.

I removed the painted in hi-way sign by sanding and repainting the area. I had added it in too early.

Painting Notes

Sit down and point your nose at the direction of the center of your picture. Set up your easel and be sure your support is level. Move your eyes when you look at different areas of the view, not your whole head. It’s best to look with one eye only. Follow one concentric ring across the (support, panel, canvas). This and visually marking the left and right sides of the image should give you your final painting image width.

If your painting for more then one day on location, mark everything about your easels position.
When going after accuracy not speed everything must stay in the same relative position.

Day 3

I changed the pitch of the green middle ground slope and fixed all the fence posts.
I’ve given up on trying to catch the sun so I’m spreading the cool around with a glaze of Cyan..I considered it 100% covered by 3:00.
I still haven’t got the shape of the main tree yet but I will right after this break.

I would say there are 30% more flowers today. Soon the petals will blow on the hi-way, I’ll have to be here at 6:00 in the morning to catch that. The day after tomorrow I hope.

4:48 finished for the day, ten to five, I thought I was out of that rut.. It was a perfect day, and it just happened to be my 61st birthday!

After such a great day I left for the higher levels, the 7,000 foot level of Hosmer’s Grove. Now were in the cold. I think I’ll stay here a day and give the flowers another bloomin’ chance. See the inside of the creator and another small painting.

Day 4

6:30, on the paintings location. There are petals on the road and more flowers on the tree. It’s perfect. Shortly it will warm up. A young kid on a road luge just whizzed by, it looked like he had a school backpack on.
No breaks and going 35-40 mph, kids..

I’ve taken out the left post, my perception was wrong, when I got back to basics and looked at the whole painting and viewed it with one eye and applied paint with one eye, I saw I had missed on the foreshortening.
Here it is with the white outs and the enlarging of the tree, pulling it more into foreground.

It’s 10:57 and the sun has gone for the day. Perfect timing, I got all my correction work done in the paintings with the 4:00 colors by using the same colors that were already down. Now the colors are here and I can go forward. 1:17, Got to take a break, the suns back out again. It really is a beautiful day. I won’t get cloud cover for another couple hours.
It’s 4:00, I think I’m done for the day. I never got the cloudy day. It was good for the flowers though, tomorrow should be the one where I can glaze in all my colors, I have all the shapes right.

The Geneva International Middle School bought my CD of the color course and likes it. I’m so happy. I spent the rest of the daylight hours watching polo practice, this area of Maui is cowboy country. The night was spent at the 5,000 foot level.

This is whiting out corrections, it will take two coats for a clean start.

Day 5

To catch each pattern of the tree correctly, look at the tree and paint it with one eye.
Just relax yourself, you can do it.

Using one eye to view the painting and the image, which are stacked over one another is key, the most important drawing factor.The other 🙂 is to paint with two eyes open after you have mentally found your marks with one eye only 🙂

It’s been a great day, just the right amount of overcast. My strokes are getting smaller so I think I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

There is as much character in a tree as on a face, and much more intricate.

3:00, I’m adding the little branches that make the larger branches look real. A #3 script liner now that I have the patterns in place. I’m looking for the details that make the character of this type of tree. The petals are usually darker green underneath. that’s because they are pods of flowers, each pod sticking out from the green leaves. that always casts a shadow in the sun and even in cloudy weather. the green leaves are very small on a shaft like a feather.

I’ll try to mimic that in a stroke.

The tree is 30% covered now, way up from when I started. The petals are bluer purple in the shade and redder in the sunlight. The leaves go from a purple-green split complementary to a yellow-green opposition to the purple. It’s Great the way nature works that way.

The colors remind me of the first transparent yellow Giotto’s painted with. Arsenic, his green would have been an iron green. He couldn’t use the copper sediment which would have been better and more transparent because lead turned copper black. If he had Egypt’s tin white it would have been easier. We have come a long way since than as far as poison pigments and compatible colors are concerned but today we don’t have a transparent yellow acrylic. It’s that old Church-Ostwald Color Chart where manufactures match their colors to. We really do need an overhaul on how we use color pigments.

Here is the day 5 image.

Finished. Jacaranda Tree at the 2,000 Ft. Level

All content and images in this painting demonstration are copyright of Don Jusko and may not be copied, reprinted, published, reengineered, translated, hosted, or otherwise distributed by any means without explicit permission of Don Jusko.

To learn more about Don and view more of his work, please visit his website by following the link below:

https://www.realcolorwheel.com