Aloha! It has been a while since my last posting and here is the why. This newest painting represents over 1000 hours of meticulous detail work. This post will include a time lapse video of the process at the bottom.

The Sketch

Here is the starting sketch. More detailed than some, less than others. At this stage I check the composition and make sure the main elements are represented.

Here I have painted in the base colors.

More base colors. There a number of ways to approach a given painting. I usually work from dark to light. In this painting, I do the opposite for the cloud portion.

Now I've started laying the groundwork for the clouds.

Here I've done a lot more work in the clouds. From the start I wanted the clouds to be the main focus of this painting, which would mean they would be highly detailed.

Close up of a portion of the clouds at this point in the painting process.

Close up of the horizon line at this point of the painting process.

I've put in a lot of detail work into the clouds at this point. There will be some more finishing touches done on the main cloud body after this, but it is largely finished. I've also done more work on the foreground elements at the bottom.

Here you can see a little more work has been done on the lower foreground elements but most of the work has gone into the sky and starting the god-rays.

A few more touches in the main cloud body, more work on the lower foreground features, and a lot more work on the upper sky. At this point I've started adding in the secondary clouds.

Close up of some of the secondary clouds at their initial stage before final detailing.

Now, I've moved down and focused all of my efforts on the lower foreground features. I painted in the jungle textures, highlighted the lake, and started painting in the very fine details overall. Most of those are very hard, if not impossible to view, when the painting is not viewed at its full size.

Here is the finished state. When I paint, I typically track my time using an app on my tablet so I can know how long certain things have taken. As I got to the midway point of this painting I knew it would be different. I stopped tracking my time once I passed 1000 hours as it was basically pointless for me at that point.

I knew where I wanted this painting to end up and the level of detail I wanted it to represent. The time and effort paid off in the end. Unfortunately a lot of that detail is difficult to display on an internet blog. I have included a few closeup images which may be closer to full size, depending on your viewing device, in order to give some idea of what the overall image is like in person.

Below, I've also included a time lapse video of the painting.

And that’s it. I hope you like this painting. If you would like to have this artwork in your home, you can buy it in the store.

Mahalo for reading and as always.

Painting "The Morning Breaks"

The Sketch