"Morning Hills"
9" X 12"
Oil on Canvas Covered Panel
I live in an area surrounded by rolling hills. In Winter it looks like we live in Ireland and in Summer it has that classic golden rolling hills look of California. I'd say it is my area only but these hills are found all the way up into Northern California. I decided to try and capture early morning light diffused with the haze we get a lot from cold ocean air drifting into the valley from the Pacific Ocean.
Our distant valley mountains to the north are the same dried grassy golden color but due to Aerial Perspective turn a great shade of pale light blue...this makes for a great contrast against the foreground oaks and eucalyptus trees with their dark greens and browns. The colors used here are my normal palette of Ultramarine Blue, Cadmium Yellow Pale, Alizarin Crimson, Yellow Ochre and Titanium White. A limited palette that keeps color uniformity in check and has enough colors to produce most of the landscapes I paint. The key to doing a painting like this is simple, keep your background and mid-ground colors less intense than your foreground colors. To achive this I use a mix of light grey that I add to the background and mid-ground colors. You can either use Paynes Grey mixed with white to get a light grey or you can mix it with spare paint off of your palette....some white, UBlue, ACrimson etc.... I use whatever is handy or available at the moment.
A detail of the painting....
Here you can see a side view sitting on the easel. The painting is just sitting inside the frame waiting to be mounted correctly with screws. After that I'll wire it up and see how it looks hanging. I'm going to take this to the vineyard show at Tres Hermanas this friday and see what the wine crowd thinks of it. 
I then applied the glue pretty evenly with one of those throwaway brushes that was wet to ease spreading the glue out. 
Then you just lay your canvas on top of that and smooth it out with your hand....I also rolled a brayer over it to roll it as flat as possible. Not necessary if you don't have one but if you do it helps. If you buy one get a wide one. Mine is pretty small but did the job.
Then you let it dry. I do a bunch at one time, stack them and put a scrap piece on top with whatever weights I can find...you can use books too. The Elmers dries in an 1-2 hours but you can leave it overnight for extra measure. Then you just trim it. Lay the panel canvas side down and use the edge of the panel as a guide while you cut off the excess canvas with a utility knife.
These have a great tight bond and look very similar to a very famous brand of panels that cost much, much more.
Cool edges huh? If I had tons of money I'd just buy them but since I don't making them is a very practical alternative....and it is very easy!
I then cut the length into 4 pieces. Then cut the width for the sides and back and then cut miter cuts where the 2 pieces will join at 90 degree angles. The miter cut is a 45 degree cut.
The next step is to assemble the four sides of the frame with wood glue and either small finishing nails or brads. I used brads shot with an airgun (fast!) but a hammer and finishing nails would work fine. If you used an epoxy glue you could probably skip nailing altogether. I was working alone so having this little clamp to hold the corners is great! I should have bought two though.
This is a crummy picture of the next step...nailing the back to the sides but you can see how the miter cut works. It gives you a nice joined edge
That is the basic assembly. Let it dry overnight and then sand all the sides and edges. I sand a smooth radius around the front edges and corners too. After that you wipe it down to get the sawdust off of it and then start rubbing in the wax. I used a wax with an orange oil in it to protect the wood. I love this step because now the oak really shows it's beauty.
Here is the whole frame waxed up....nice! From this point you just drill holes in the back of the frame and then place your painting in there...get the sides even and then screw into the back of your strecther bars to hold it all together. 
Here is the frame and painting mounted together.
Here you can see the gap between frame and canvas. Also, the corners and edges. Notice the side nails are placed at bottom and top of frame so you can't see them. The back is nailed from behind so you can't see those nails either.
It looks like a ton of work but this second frame was much easier to build than the first...all of the figuring out was spent on that first one. I've seen versions of framing paintings where they built the frame flush with the edges of the painting and made no back at all. I've seen one like that made that was simply built of pine and then sprayed with black paint and it looked pretty cool too. Just a matter of what results you are looking for. 
Here is the reference photo I worked from....
Here are some of the items to be left out of the scene which include the house on the hill, phone poles, fencing, the street, car and palm trees which were not native to California back then....
Basically, I left out all man made objects and inserted the trail to represent the future road...I figure if the road is there now then back then it was a route of travel and must have started as a trail...maybe it did maybe it didn't but since this isn't science class I'm going to go with "it did". Part of this painting is imagination, my view of how I percieve the past at this location. That grass on the right handside going into this small canyon was not there back in the 1800's. Pasadena and much of the rest of southern California was arid. Water for lawns and gardens and drinking water to support the millions of people who live there now came from up north via the California Aquaduct. The valleys below the mountains were strewn with boulders washed down from the canyons from heavy rains. I imagine the landscape in the valleys was laden with runoff ditches from the flood waters of rain and snow melt from heavy winter snows up in the San Gabriels. Pepper trees and palms were brought in by the spanish missionaries. If you look at the works by the early California Impressionsists starting around the turn of the century you can see painted records of what the land looked like around the San Gabriel and San Fernando Valleys...nothing like it looks today.
Here are some details...why? because they look cool and you can see my mistakes up close! hahahaha.
