I’ve rejoined Claire Giordano’s Adventure Art Academy, where each month Claire posts on-location painting tutorials from beautiful places. (Read what I learned the first time I was a member two years ago!) She’s one of my favorite teachers, and what really spurred me to rejoin when I did was learning that she was going to teach a three-class sequence on one of my favorite subjects: alpenglow! Here is my work from that class.
Palette
Before the class debuted, Claire posted a color mixing video on Youtube showing her palette for alpenglow.

She uses the following Daniel Smith colors:
- Hansa Yellow Medium (PY97) – used in dilute for the sunny side of mountains and the yellow shades of skies, and mixed with Quin Rose for soft corals and intense coral-orange rocks.
- Quinacridone Rose (PV19) – multi-useful mixer that mixes vivid violets and oranges that are intense but slightly on the coral/brown side (perfect for sunlit rocks). I generally used Daniel Smith’s Quinacridone Red, which is a slightly warmer variant (more similar to WN Permanent Rose or DV Red Rose Deep).
- Cobalt Blue (PB28) – soft midtone blue that’s great for shadows and skies. I occasionally subtituted Ultramarine Blue (PB29), which gets darker, but I tend to prefer the gentleness and brightness of Cobalt Blue, using Indanthrone when I need darker colors.
- Indian Red (PR101) – This violet-toned brownish-maroon is a super convenient mountain color, useful to mix into rock mixes to tilt them from coral orange to mauve-brown; adding either blue bring them to a deeper shadow space. I have typically used Da Vinci’s Indian Red in the past, but I did use Daniel Smith’s here as it is more violet-toned which is slightly better for this use case.
- Neutral Tint – I used Holbein’s Payne’s Gray, which is very neutral gray, on the rare occasions when I used a gray/black.
I also used a few more colors in the class:
- Naples Yellow Deep (PBr24), my personal sunrise favorite yellow; I found this easier to keep natural-looking for sunglow than Hansa Yellow Medium.
- Quin Coral (PR209) is overall is less ideal than PV19 rose as a mixer because it tends to make brighter oranges and less vivid purples, but it’s great for coral-oranges in skies and on its own I think it is the exact color of a certain moment or alpenglow.
- Indanthrone Blue (PB60) – Claire used this several times as well. One of my favorites, this dark dull blue is excellent for shadow glazes and making dark mixes.
- Phthalo Blue Green Shade (PB15) – Claire used this occasionally to create more cyan shadows. I found Phthalo Turquoise (PB16) worked just as well.
Class 1: Sunset Ridgelines

The Class 1 tutorial was a mountain range with gradual color shifts across layers, warm in the back and cool toward the front, due to dawn light.
Many artists paint mountain ranges by painting each visual “layer” of mountain in a separate painting layer, with the lightest in the back and each subsequent closer layer glazed over (e.g. Shelby Thayne). Claire chooses a more expedient method optimized for on-location sketching, and paints only the parts of the mountain that show. She skips around the page to avoid touching adjacent sections while they are still wet.
A big focus of this tutorial was creating intentional blooms for morning mist. I struggled with the complex water control, but it’s a really cool effect.
Class 2: Shadows
At this point I created a “notes” page that collates the steps Claire outlined for the various alpenglow paintings.

- Sketch the ridgelines and major shadows or rocks.
- Sky. Turn the paper upside-down to paint the sky gradient. This allows you to more precisely use the end of your brush along the edges.
- Snow. Generally this will be a lightish-wash gradient from subtle yellow to pink to blue.
- Rocks should be bright in the lighter, sunny areas of the mountain (we used a mixed orange made from magenta and yellow), but dark mauve in the shadow (mix the orange with increasing amounts of Indian Red and blue).
- Shadows can alternately be painted as step 4 if they are more dominant than rocks.
- Details e.g. trees or other landscape elements.
The tutorial in this class was a shadow-dominant scene.

Crucial lessons:
- Plan for contrast, the sky should not be the same as the mountain color where they touch.
- Make the rock mix a different (bluer) color mix in the shadow areas than the sunny areas.
I made this my own by dropping a bit of Cobalt Turquoise into the shadows to make them pop with cyan-ness.
Class 3: Rocks
For the final class we dove into two tutorials of rock-dominant scenes.

I really like the way this one turned out. I used some variations on Claire’s palette, with Naples Yellow Deep instead of Hansa Yellow Medium and Quin Coral instead of Quin Rose in the sky (I did use PV19 for the mountain rock orange mix though). We (including Claire) used Phthalo Blue Green Shade for the cyan shadowed snow in the lower left.

The blooms come back here! I was too conservative with the colors in the underlayer; I could have risked going bolder. There is something off about the shadow geometry, but I need to observe mountains more to understand how to fix it.
Conclusion
I really enjoyed this class and found it useful that Claire both gave use a repeatable “formula” for alpenglow paintings, and led us through several demonstrations to make it stick. Rock Layers on Mt Rainier was definitely my favorite painting that came out of the class, the one where everything seemed to come together like magic and at the end I thought “I painted that???”