Painting Devil's Kitchen

In Devil's Kitchen- 8" x 8" Oil on board by Greg Newbold

Over the weekend, I went camping with family which is always fun. I managed to coerce my wife and kids to let me go paint a unique geologic feature located along the Mount Nebo Scenic Loop where we were camped. Devil's Kitchen has been described as a "mini Bryce Canyon" and when I saw it, I agreed that this description is pretty accurate. The hoodoos in this rather small rock formation (only about 700 feet across) resemble what you would find in the Bryce Canyon and Goblin Valley areas of Southern Utah and yet this tiny gem is only about an hour and a half south of Salt Lake City. I tend to want to paint all day long when I get the chance, so I agreed to limit my painting time to just an hour and forty minutes.

I knew I was under the gun time wise if I wanted to finish my painting, so I picked a small 8" x 8" panel and dug in. The first thing I realized was that I would have to zoom into a small area in order to make it look like anything. I spent the first few minutes establishing my composition using a dark rusty purple color thinned with Gamsol. I then laid in the sky and the receding mountain ranges at the top of the picture. As I began to paint the salmon colored hoodoos, I realized that there was not much color or value separation between the rock columns and the surrounding canyon walls.

I made some critical decisions in color and value in order to create separation including making the foreground rock columns darker and shifting the color of at the top of the hoodoos toward a cooler gray (they had a much slighter neutral shift in reality). Overall, I was pretty happy with the effort and it was a lot of fun. I also kept the peace with the rest of our campers by not making everyone hang out forever while I painted. I think I got plenty of information for a larger studio painting should I choose to make one and that is also an important consideration when doing outdoor studies.

More pictures and a write up of Devil's Kitchen at Art Wife Needs a Life