 God's beauty is all around us and my goal as an artist is to capture and interpret that beauty on canvas and to take you the viewer along with me on this painting journey. Hello and welcome to Painting Journeys. My name is Kitty Lynn Klisch and I'm going to take you on a journey today. We're going to go to County Claire, Ireland. This is the second time I've been to Ireland and it was a lot of fun the first time so I decided that we would go back. I'm really glad you joined me today. I started on my painting yesterday and in my studio in the lower level of my home and I wanted to show you the viewer how I go about changing things on a painting that I'm not quite satisfied with and also I wanted to show you that a finished painting today. So I'm hoping to get this finished during our time together. I'm really glad you joined me. Once again this is Painting Journeys and my name is Kitty Lynn Klisch. I'll show you my palette. It is pretty much just the basic colors and I don't get too fancy with don't use too many colors. Some of this muddy looking stuff down here is what I have left over from yesterday's painting. So now without further ado let's get busy here. We've got a lot to take care of. First of all I notice the most that this fence right here is not as high as it should be here. This line it should be a little straighter. So I'm going to take my wipeout tool and I'm going to wipe from here out going up just slightly there. And when I paint that now that will make that fence and that fence by the way is not wood. They have very little wood in Ireland and they don't make their fences with it. They make their fences with stone. So this really should be a stone fence and I will be making that look more like stone for us here. Now on the top of this it's going to be just a little bit lighter as it's coming across here. And this was kind of an interesting place that I happened on driving through Ireland, traveling through Ireland. I came upon so many different areas and the scenery varied so much. I was really surprised at that. Ireland is a rather small country and so I kind of thought that the whole thing would look the same but it doesn't. It's quite different as you travel from one region to another like the east where Dublin would be where we flew into is completely different than the west coast. In central Ireland is quite lovely with lots of trees and rolling hills with the you can see the little rock fences that were built many many years ago by the farmers, the tenant farmers. Most of the farmers were part of an estate land was owned by someone else and they had the tenant farmers that that farmed the land for them. So anyway now we're getting that to look a little more like rocks and see here. And that looks a little better because it's a little straighter so that that takes care of that. Anyways I was telling you so in traveling over to western Ireland it was very sparse and barren looking and you could just feel the water coming off of the Atlantic ocean and it was so windy and just barren and land with rocks, lots and lots of rocks. And of course the national, I would almost say the national flower of Ireland. I mean it's not really but it's in a very invasive plant called gorse and they have it everywhere. It just has invaded Ireland and the people would like to get rid of it but it has such a strong hold. I don't know if that's going to be possible for them but you see the gorse. Now in the middle part of Ireland gorse is very green and lush and full of yellow flowers and quite pretty but when you get over to the other side, the western side of Ireland, it's not that way at all. It's quite, even the gorse is very sparse and sickly looking. Okay so now this looks a little more like a could be a boulder fence. Then the other thing I was looking at about this painting that I wasn't too happy with was it it looks so perfect. It looked like it needs to be messed up. I think I need to go in there and actually mess things up in order to give it the feeling of reality. We don't see everything so sharply as I have it painted here. So I'm going to take a big brush and I'm going to go in here and I'm just going to take some strokes and just try to mess it up a little bit. Now of course this is always risky. It's very risky because you know you have the chance of that you could just ruin it. I want this green to come down over here a little bit. I don't want that to be so pronounced over here and this right in here. I want this to come down a little bit in there. I want to soften those edges. I'm just softening these edges and bringing the back with the background into over the foreground there and that little bit of softening is going to knock down the sharpness of this and make it look a lot more natural, more painterly. That's the word I'm struggling for painterly. We want it to look painterly not like it's a photograph. If we wanted to photograph we have one up here that we're painting from and we know we can always paint like a photograph but then why would we want to bother? I think this is a little too wide here. I don't like the way that looks so I'm going to come in here and I'm going to just come over here and bring in what's behind this. Bring it in a little bit and lose that edge a little. We do have all the tree that's going to be coming around and over here and that's all believe it or not coming from this huge tree right here. You see that? That is the tree right there so okay perhaps I'll take the wipe out tool and just wipe this out here. There we go. Isn't this slick? When your paint is wet you just wipe it out if you don't like it and we'll bring this in a little bit over here and and then we have the darker blue-green in the background there where it's a little bit further back and that'll look nice there. Now that's that's much more soft and much more natural looking. I do have a little problem right in this area here so I have to soften this edge and bring it out just a little bit so that this post that's right there is is okay. Another thing that I noticed is that the house seems to be going up too much this way. We need to bring that down just a little bit here right across here and straighten that up a little bit and we'll use some of our grayed blue a little bit of black in it. Actually it's Payne's gray. I'm gonna come over here. There we go. And see I want that much softer going along there. This right here we'll grab some light and put in there. Now I like that much better that looks a whole lot better. The only problem here now is that these doors aren't straight so we just straighten them up. This has got a lot of you know it's kind of a funny material it's it's like they've stuckled over the rock. This place when I came along upon it I was really I just thought it was just so pretty. Such a quaint little place I don't really know if it was you know habitated by anyone inhabited by anyone or not. It just seemed to be there. It could have been forsaken, abandoned or it might have still been someone's home. In Ireland it's very difficult to tell if I see this is a little too wide here so I want to narrow it up. It's very hard to tell with a lot of the places that you go by if there actually is anyone that lives there or if it's been abandoned because so many of the places are really very very old looking and they can look abandoned and yet they're not. You know like I thought possibly this place was abandoned and then I went a little further down the the road along the fence line and there was this most gorgeous sheep. He was just a beauty. Okay now is that looking a little more painterly that's what I want a more of a painterly look. Don't want everything to be jumping out at us. Yeah I think I like that better. I think that looks much better. Mm-hmm and I like my dimensions better. Yeah okay maybe we overdid it a little bit in this area. So anyway you know the reason I mentioned that sheep is because I thought when I got to Ireland that there would be sheep everywhere well I was very surprised that there's pastures absolutely full of cows you'd think it was Wisconsin there's tons of cows over there of which I found very surprising because I thought they would only have sheep and in fact I want to show you this picture now of the cows and the pasture there and if you'll look beyond you'll see how the pastures are all broken up into different segments from the little rock fences and it's just it's very it's very beautiful very peaceful scene and then and here's a picture of my sheep and as I was saying he was about a block well not a block but just down going to the left of the building here maybe about a hundred hundred and fifty feet and he's just standing there just beautifully posing I mean he was like he was like the star of the show he really was a beauty and he knew it and so I took his picture because I painted him I wanted to paint him okay I better quit piddling and diddling around here and do something constructive kitty all right okay I think that looks a lot better I hope you can see the difference there it's it's it's a lot looser and now I think what we'll do here is we'll put this we'll make this fence we'll straighten up this fence right here because it's not going in the right direction either I don't know where my mind was yesterday when I was painting because I was really off kilter this should be going a little bit more like this to go up or down I think it should go up I think the camera fools the eye and makes you think that you're seeing things that you're not this is kind of a dark rocky like area in here behind that fence there okay you know I just I wanted you to be able to see how I go about finishing a painting now I see on the on the photograph that my line on my fence is going like this okay but here I have it straightened out now the difference here is that I have the photograph the size of the shape of the photograph does not correspond with the shape of the canvas the canvas is actually wider and so I am filling in that's why there's so much more fence over here and I look at that and I think that does not look really that looks like a photographic kind of a thing that's where it's distorted and I just seems to me that as I was looking at the place I was looking at it more frontal and so that's why I'm going to straighten the the fence out there we go there yeah I think that will be nice and I think what I'll do back here is come in with some of my dark so that you get a kind of a feel of how this is going to be when I start putting the the leaves on the tree back here this has got a lot of dark over it and it even comes way out and over and on top of the roof a little bit I'm just kind of blocking in some shapes you don't want to paint every individual leaf that's for sure you know what is so interesting when you travel through Ireland is that the you'll go by a place like this and then just down the road you'll see a brand new beautiful home very modern looking and they're all sort of mixed together you know it's just it's like here we seem so conscious of our neighborhood our quote-unquote neighborhood where in Ireland you know they just if they purchase the land they build what they want to build and if it happens to be next to a little a little tiny cottage that's a couple hundred years old that's okay you know that's I found that very interesting it's quite a contrast it truly is you know yesterday when I put all this stuff behind there I knew that I was going to do this over it but this gives me good base on the canvas to apply the leaves and everything on this tree because this is a huge tree just humongous so I just keep fighting along here I want some of this really dark because without the dark we don't we won't be able to to show the the the light I'm not going to bring the leaves over as far as they are here because that would be out of out of context I think I don't think that it looks okay on the cat on the photograph but I don't think it's gonna look good for my painting that's the nice thing about being an artist you can choose pick and choose what you want in the in the composition and that's really quite important because without being able to do that then you have you you don't have the control you you want to have the control of the brush and of what's happening as you journey across your canvas that's very important okay let's see here should we maybe we'll make a couple of little tiny lines that look like little I'm dipping into a medium here that will kind of thin my paint and make it go on a little easier these little things here I don't usually use a medium but today I am I since I'm painting over wet paint this really helps the brush move and you can see these little branches you don't want to make them go straight you know or curly q you want them to be more shaped like little pipes coming they're jointed branches are jointed you don't want like branches that look like wet noodles bring that down a little bit there come a little bit further bring this down over the house here just a little bit to kind of tuck that roof back consciously thinking you know you some you subconsciously as an artist you subconsciously know what you should be doing but you have to consciously be aware of what you're doing because it's so easy just to stick that group that brush and gear and just keep going and before you know it you've overdone it right let's see a step back I'll take a look okay when we put some leaves in on top of that I think that'll help a lot now this area right here as I'm bouncing my eye around the canvas evaluating everything this area kind of bothers me here it's a little too pronounced I think we need to lighten that up a little bit and make it not so important and I think that'll make it look a lot better okay now then we'll take the little thin brush and we'll see if we can just barely make those little lines on there again with this thin down paint okay I'm thinking really hard trying to do this I guess I didn't make it any better did I well when that happens then you always have the option of taking a little bit of tissue in your hand and just blotting it there we go you take off that extra paint and it softens it right on down there I think that's pretty good maybe we'll just do that again just a little bit on this side right here there that's much much better not nearly so and I and this door here you see my eye is always moving always looking at everything as I'm as I'm working I'm always comparing one value one shape to another one value to another that not so much the color as the value this right up here is a little bit darker and it comes down there there we go yeah that now see the how that set that back that looks much better right okay and then I get really excited and I start talking real fast okay all right let's let's do something with this before we go back to this let's see here I think what I'm going to do is I think I'm just going to kind of mask that all in with some dark I use my big brush and I'll mask it in with some darker paint that will kind of be the base and then I'll come back over it because I don't want to paint each brick you know I don't think I do anyway but maybe that isn't going to work either let's see here you know see everything on the canvas is a it's a each new painting presents a new problem to solve and that's why oil painters well that's why all artists love what they do so much because it's there they it's always that challenge of solving that problem how are we going to solve the problem what to do what to do okay this goes up and so this is golder back here a little bit golder back in there and then this is a little higher right here I don't want the fence to be too much detail I really want to try to get that you know that block look and rock rather rock look that it has this is going in the other direction right in here and it's a little warmer it's going like this and I have to just kind of paint right over my my lines here for my gate but that's okay I know where they are and I'll just put them right back in there and you notice how the brush is going in the direction that the that the stone is going that's how you describe form there okay see already it doesn't look too bad it just needs a little bit of more detail and and it'll look just fine so now we'll come over here and we'll try to accomplish the same thing on this side okay we have a big big one up here and then it's a bigger one underneath it then it kind of comes down right in there and it's going to go let me see here this is about this wide and that is coming there there we go so this is coming down this way I get some dark in there I think it's coming down this way a little bit of light isn't this fun I hope you're enjoying our journey today as we're journeying and journeying across this canvas depicting a quaint cottage I would say a farm certainly not a hobby farm I think that this one has been around a lot longer than hobby farms maybe a gentleman farmers do they still have those gentlemen farmers don't know okay this seems to be going back there and something's wrong right in here we'll have to come back with some more paint and bring this green in right here because I think it needs to be put right in there I think that's a little bit brighter right there and it's probably a little bit brighter right in here and here okay this is a bright painting I like that I love I love the juiciness of the colors okay so now we've got a nice little top that we're going to show and that's going to have and then we have these rocks here and this is dark right in here where that is coming and I'm just gonna just scumble this in for the sake of getting it on there I'm gonna scumble it in and then I'm gonna come back and make rocks grabbing a bunch of colors big mist mixed mash of of colors and we'll just put this in here and using our brush in a kind of a violent sort of way to describe the movement of the rock I want to just kind of get that blocked in there there we go and there again we're trying to keep it soft too we don't want it to be too realistic looking okay now we can come back and we can grab a few places and make a few rocks then a lot of this will be finished work that I have to do back in my studio I can see that now seems like the time that I have with you is is never never enough time to to show you everything I want to show you okay we've got quite a few gray rocks here and we've got some pink ones you would not believe how the people in Ireland over the centuries have gone out and picked up the rocks from the fields and made these gorgeous rock fences and it's like it's like a quilt pattern everywhere you go there's these little tiny like areas that are some you know some maybe a quarter of an acre that are outlined in rock and you know you you know that well that was probably where they had their garden or maybe that's where the cow or the a couple of sheep grazed or something but just a little small small places that that I have to go back into that and make that a little bit better but I just want it to be now then we'll come back to that if we have time we'll come back to that area at least now you can see what you have a good idea what it's supposed to look like now I'm going to take a clean brush and we're going to go in find that deep rusty red that we have back here and we see that it's echoed here in the fence in the gate rather you see that here it's echoed it's brighter here and it's brighter down in here okay and of course that's over there a little bit so you see it flowing through the through the painting and that will help keep the eye in the painting because your eye is pulled to that red color I think this fence is mostly looks like it's pretty well rusted I'm mixing up several different colors here to try to get something that I that I think will will work okay so now I have to take the wipeout tool again and wipe out where this fence post is see how slick that thing works it's really awesome we'll widen that and widen that then over here on this side okay now that is all set now we'll just put this center post in first for the most part right now I'm just trying to get the blocking in does seem to be a little bit redder gonna come in with a little bit redder right in here there we go and now this other post is narrower and it's gonna be right there oops it looks crooked isn't it all gonna say it's okay and see what we can do to straighten it up here there we go that looks pretty good you know I I really appreciate you being with me today as we are painting and talking and sharing I without you there would be no need for me and I thank you so much for tuning in today and watching my show okay is this gonna is this gonna seal the deal here or mess it up what do you think huh I hope I'm hoping to seal the deal I really am I wanted to just write for you so that you can share this journey with me see what I saw in an artistic sort of way something better than a photograph photographs are nice in their place but that's nothing like being able to create art the act of creating no matter what you create no matter if you crochet or knit or sew whatever you do you know cook whatever you do whatever you're able to do whatever gift God gave you you know rejoice in it and use it okay right that needs a little help and then we have this so we have a thin black right here coming down and then we have it coming right down here too and then there's a brighter red about it okay I just got I have a darling little camera girl here today who is working with me for the first time Leslie and Leslie has just let me know that I have 15 minutes left so we still have we still have time we'll see what we can accomplish here okay now I think it needs to be made to look a little bit older you know me I want to mess it up now that I fixed it I want to mess it up I think that looks a little better maybe this should be a little bit darker down here there we go and then this right here needs to come down is this the brush I was using yeah okay we'll have this come down just a little bit more right here and that's going to go back there we go all I'm liking this yes we do have some areas that we have to fill in here with the yellow green from the from the background so this is what I call painting from the outside in when you have these little spots like this you have to very carefully just kind of come in and fill them in and keep it nice and soft and there was you know what they actually have dandelions there and that surprised me too that they had dandelions but no mosquitoes they don't have mosquitoes but they did have dandelions wonder who had them first us or them you know what would have really been lovely I like to paint outdoors and it really would have been lovely to have had the time on this trip to have actually been there with you and have you see me actually working in the on-site painting that would have really been lovely to put some little dark green in there to make it look like little little things are growing or it doesn't look like things are growing it looks too plain there we go okay all right now then let me see here hmm I think we need some some blue in the foreground a little bit of blue with the green in the foreground to kind of make little things look like they're growing here I mustn't tarry too long because Leslie is going to show me a little sign here in a few minutes and it's going to tell me that I have even less time and I do want to get back to those to those leaves but I think I think you can kind of get the idea I hope you're feeling the excitement that I'm feeling over it I think it's getting getting there we'll just darken this side just a little bit to make that show up just a little bit more and a little bit on the back there we go yeah all right now we'll take I think I'll take this brush and I'm going to put some nice lovely lighter colored leaf formations up in here a little bit too bright I think too much yellow to step back and make sure that it's not getting to be too much in here too this is the exciting part because you have to be so careful that you don't overdo you don't want to overdo I do want this one to come down in front of that corner there that certainly changed the look of it from when we began and they we did not have that darker green on there yeah that that is looking considerably better I think this really balances it out nice to have the dark in the back and the light in the foreground of the tree and I don't want it to be too picky so I have to come and kind of smush it isn't that a nice technical term smush will smush it kitty and that will make it better there we go and I think this back here even though it's it kind of like a dead area in the photograph it needs to have some balance with all this vibrancy that I have going on down here so I'm going to do it just kind of go in here nothing ventured nothing gained and I'm just going to come back behind here and have a little bit of of a that tree it back there be just a little bit more there see and now it gives it a nice balance that's what we want yeah and then we'll grade a little bit as we go out a little bit there we go okay now I think we have a few minutes left I'll try to show you a little bit more on this fence what I would like to do on this rock wall I would probably take and try to define a little bit of the of the stone a few little not everywhere just a few little marks and the the stones are different shapes so oh I see I didn't get this covered either I don't want to see that yellow in there that should be a darker blue well Leslie has just told me I have five minutes left can you tell me where this hour has gone I have no idea it just seems like it has flown by for me I hope that you has gone by pretty fast for you to I don't want to quit I want to stay here and paint right let's see here okay so I'll work out just a couple more minutes on the on these and maybe try to get a couple of lighter colors in there just just to give you a little better idea of what they're going to look like when they are all completed okay this is this is kind of a bright yellow one right here kind of a bright yellow rock and there's another kind of an orangey rock over here now I'm not going to pick out every one but I will pick out some shapes to put in there and then we have some nice blues the blues are very pretty there's a little bit of blue in here down in here and this up here has got a little bit of blue in it a little bit of blue there okay now you see how that's starting to look a little more nice it's not the idea is not to make it look exactly like this we're not going to paint every every rock as it's been stacked there we're just going to do a suggestion hopefully that will be convincing enough to represent a rock fence I do want to make this a little bit darker right in here so that we can see that that is the where the top is the top of the fence that we're seeing there so we would have we would have rocks going this way and then these here would be coming like this and then over here a couple maybe that where it goes in behind there right in here that should probably be a little bit darker in there because that's behind and this is sticking out you see that just with a little bit of shadow that's what we can do okay it's not completely done I had hoped to finish it for you it's not completely done but it's very close to being done and you see me make the corrections in it that I wanted to make and I do believe that it looks a lot better now than when you first saw it today so on today's show so I hope that you will join me next time when we journey I'm not sure where we'll go next time maybe we'll stay in the United States and maybe we'll go to oh let's see let's go to Washington State that is a gorgeous place and you're really gonna like it yeah I think we'll go to Washington State and we'll look at the Pacific Ocean while we're there we'll journey to Washington so do join me next time my name is Kitty Lane-Klisch this is painting journeys and this is County Claire Ireland thank you so much for joining me and we'll see you next time bye bye for now