Using a second set of reference pictures from my print- er, I cut out the outlines of the mountain ranges to cre- ate a quick paper stencil for each side. I taped the sten- cils in place, carefully lining them up to the transferred sketch. I mixed an airbrush bottle of Beige with a little bit of Medium Gray and a couple drops of Red Brown. (You could use a blend of Light Brown and Medium Gray light- ened with Brite White.) I then laid in the base color of the mountains in several passes, heat setting in between.


Next, I filled in the shadow areas in the mountains on both wings, starting from the background to the foreground. Normally, background scenery has less detail and more muted colors than foreground scenery, to give a sense of depth and atmosphere. However, I wanted the focus to be on the mountains furthest away, so I used more contrast than normal in the background. Also, more detail in the back mountains with plainer landscaping in the foreground made the background most noticeable. To shade the moun- tains, I used a mixture of Red Brown with a little 4283 Cobalt Blue (4214 Midnight Blue would work as well, just use a little less as it’s significantly darker). Using the paintbrush, I quick- ly filled in the shadow shapes using my brown/blue mixture thinned with just enough Reducer to make a mildly transpar- ent wash. This could also be done with an airbrush, but I want- ed the rougher texture created by the paintbrush strokes (to imply rocky terrain). To do this, I used a “scumbling” or scrib- bling motion with the brush. I laid down a heavier layer of paint at the top edges of the mountains (to define them and draw your eye somewhat upward). Where the shadow needed to be bluer on the two mountains for the starry section of the US flag, I just added more Cobalt Blue. (You could use Midnight Blue with a few drops of Brite White.)


Using the same scumbling wash method, I filled in the sunlit parts of the mountains with a thin wash of Red Brown and Reducer. The wash was laid on thinner than the shaded areas, since I wanted a lot of the beige base to show through. This was done lightest on the background mountains and a little thicker/darker on the foreground mountains, to give the hint of depth I mentioned before.Once all the exposed rock terrain had been more or less roughed in, I added the snow, one mountain at a time. Because it’s so easy to get off scale when reproducing work this small, I was very careful to study the shape of each snow field, and paint just the shape that I saw, not “snow” as I thought it should look. This also helped me stay truer to the original artwork, although I did have to “fudge” in some intermediate mountains to smooth out my cut-n-paste imagery. The snow color was a mixture of 50% Brite White with 50% leftover aqua blue-gray sky color. This will look “dirty” on a palette or in an airbrush bottle, but will read as snow white once added to the mountainsides. For the shaded snow, I used mostly the blue-gray sky color with a few drops of Brite White and a drop or 2 of Cobalt Blue. The mixture needed to be just a hair lighter in value than the sky.


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