Midnight Sun Diary 3 - Outskirts of Yellowknife

After Great Slave Lake was completed, focus moved to the foreground shores of the lake, located just outside of Yellowknife.

The first step was determining the colors and tones of snow, whether in bright sunlight or deep shade.  Photographs and other media of snow laden forests and hills were assessed, and a blue color pallet emerged.  This pallet was necessarily different from the blues in the sky to reflect the different qualities of each.

Once the snowy shades were extracted, the hills and undulations of the foreground present in the source photograph were represented in the painting.

Careful notes on exact shades allowed these same colors to be replicated on the three dimensional elements added later.

The final components of the painting were the trees.  Trees in the Northwest Territories have a distinct appearance.  Contrasting with the tall gray barked trees of Alberta evergreen forests, or the rich green abundance of the coastal forests, trees in this area showed the challenges of growing in the north.  They have clusters of small branches from top to bottom, with larger branches extending in clumps from the center.  These trees reflect the harshness of the landscape they grow within.

This form, along with a simplified pallet of colors, was extracted from the photographs, experimented with, and resulted in templates used for the piece.  The final position of each tree was tweaked extensively before paint was applied.  Due to the complex background and foreground shapes, the trees could not be adjusted after application, so considerable care was taken to ensure positioning was correct.

The final step was creating and applying the three dimensional elements to the bottom left and right.  These hand carved and processed elements were given the richest blues and deepest greens to pull them to the foreground.  They were also the final component needed to create the sense of depth and size of this spectacular Canadian vista.