Petrified Forest Residency: Favorite Colors

With each step, another piece of petrified wood comes into view, and every shard is a unique tapestry of color, pattern, and fractured stone. This story shares the unexpected color mixes I came to love for this unique place.

I wrap my fingers around the edges of my sunglasses to protect my eyes and hear the wind-blown sand patter against the glass. I lean into the next gust and hunch forward, my attention fixed on the incredible landscape unfolding at my feet. With each step, another piece of petrified wood comes into view, and every section is a unique tapestry of color, pattern, and fractured stone. I know I should be heading back to the car before the wind gets any worse, but it is hard to pull myself away from the joy of stumbling on yet another rock that looks like a crystallized rainbow.

When I finally look up from the ground I am briefly disoriented. I know I am only a few miles from the trailhead, but my landmarks in the badlands hills now all look the same, and I am suddenly very grateful my GPS device was tracking my meandering route.  This is my 7th day as the artist in residence at Petrified Forest National Park, and I am relieved that I didn’t get lost because I was too distracted by all the amazing rocks.

Petrified Forest National Park is unlike anywhere I have ever been. The landscape feels about as different as you can get from my home in Western Washington where mountains end in snowcapped peaks and where the foothills are riotously green with trees hundreds of feet tall. When I first arrived, I was overwhelmed by the feeling of expansiveness. The flat tableland stretched to the horizon, and I could see distant hills over 200 miles away. After driving a few minutes into the park, the grassland suddenly dropped out of view, and I was on a cliff above rounded hills the color of sherbet ice cream. 300 feet below me a dry wash stretched into a maze of mesas and water-carved badlands.

Here, there were no trees reaching across the sky to their neighbors. Just a huge expanse of blue stretched tight over the dry grasses and scrubby bushes. It was barren, yet beautiful in that starkness.

Unlike other parks, Petrified Forest has very few developed trails. Most of the short loops take you to see the massive petrified wood logs (some many feet in diameter) or a fenced viewpoint. And once you reach the end of the path - if you are comfortable with navigation, desert hazards, and know how to avoid stepping in the delicate cryptobiotic soil - then you can wander as far as you want.

Today, I find myself hiking somewhere near the Jasper Forest, which has quickly become my favorite region of the park. The colors of the petrified wood are just mind-bogglingly beautiful, and the sheer volume of wooden stone is even harder to wrap my mind around. I walk for hours looking at the pieces of rock that range from huge rounds to the tiniest pieces that - I swear- look just like woodchips you see at a playground. If those woodhips where made from quartz and silica crystals that form a truncated rainbow of reds, blues, blacks, yellows, and even purples and greens!

Observing and then learning to paint the petrified wood was a highlight of my residency. For the majority of my first week in the park it was too windy and hot to paint much outside except tiny sketches (95 deg F and 55 mph wind is simply too hard to paint in. It feels like a giant hairdryer is running at full blast, and my paper, paintbrushes, and even palette kept trying to fly away). So, I started hiking as early as I could, usually shortly after sunrise, and I planned routes that took me to new terrain and back before noon when the wind really picked up. This routine gave me time back in the historic residence to experiment with and troubleshoot how to paint the incredible patterns of petrified wood I saw earlier in the day.

In some ways, figuring out the colors was the hardest part. Sketching the rocks was a challenge at first, but I committed myself to simplifying what I saw so the watercolor to do the hard work for me, and this made the sketching easier and less intimidating. And in the extremely dry conditions (the humidity was around 5%), I could paint extremely quickly and try more ideas than at home. This rapid-fire experimentation allowed me to quickly develop a painting strategy that uses blooms, granulation, and intentional white spaces to convey the unique curvature and patterns expressed in the wood.

Here is a list of the favorite colors I used in most of the paintings, and a more in-depth description of each is below! In addition, if you want to learn how to apply these colors in a step-by-step painting lesson, the June Adventure Art Academy class focuses on petrified wood! In the lesson I show you how I approach creating the extraordinary patterns in the wood.

Favorite Colors for painting petrified wood (more notes on each below):

• Perylene Red

• Quinacridone Gold

• Monte Amiata Natural Sienna

• Quinacridone Violet

• Sodalite

• Ultramarine Blue

• Cobalt

• Indanthrone Blue

• Lunar Black

Perylene Red- this delightful primary red was the perfect base color to mix the myriad shades of reddish stone, from purple mauve tones to delightfully orange-red mixtures.

Quinacridone gold- I started many of my painting with this as the base color applied in light washes. It also mixed really wonderfully with the perylene red and cobalt or ultramarine blue to make subtle greens or slight greys

Monte Amiata Natural Sienna- at first I didn’t like this color as much, but as soon as I tried it in these paintings it was a perfect addition. It is a bit more opaque than quinacridone gold, and it also made less orange-y mixtures than the gold as well. It ended up being my go-to for combinations with the perylene red if I wanted a more red-orange without making a color that would take over the whole painting.

Quinacridone Violet - this color was a new addition to the palette, and it was a surprise favorite. I had been having a hard time figuring out where this color would be useful, and then as soon as I arrived here I was so excited to realize that it was the absolute perfect color to make the purples I saw in the petrified wood. This was really important to me, because the purples and blues were the colors that really stood out to me, and are apparently also the most rare colors to find in petrified wood anywhere in the world.

Sodalite - another new addition to the palette for this trip, I loved the granulating properties of this paint. In many of the paintings I did a lot of juxtaposition of the patterns made by granulation vs the patterns made by blooms moving pigment around. And sodalite readily created amazing textures without trying to dominate the painting.

Ultramarine Blue - this is probably the blue I used the most, as it granulates and also separates when mixed with other colors, which made a lot of amazing and unpredictable patterns.

Cobalt - I reached for cobalt when I wanted a blue that would stand on it’s own more, as it is a much less vibrant color at lower concentrations compared to ultramarine, and also leans more toward green than purple which is what I often wanted for the blue colors of the petrified wood. In mixtures, cobalt is a bit harder to use because it just takes so much more paint to get it to be the dominant color.

Indanthrone blue- the absolutely perfect base color for the shadows and darkest cracks in the stone. In every painting I made the shadow by combining Indanthrone blue with usually at least two colors from the rest of the petrified wood, as this helped the shadow harmonize with the rest of the painting, and also made each painting have a unique shadow color.

Lunar Black - I used this color in some paintings, but not all. It tends to take over mixtures and really moves over the paper a lot when applied to a wet area, so I had to be ready for it to do really unexpected things. More often than using lunar black, I would mix a bunch of the other colors already used in the painting to make a really nice harmonious dark.

what are your favorite colors for painting in the desert?