Month: May 2015

This painting was done last weekend while we were camping at Cloudland Canyon state park. There are miles of trails in the park and countless places to paint. I was making mental notes the whole time about places to visit again.

So, with this one… I packed all my gear, hiked until I found just the right spot, set the easel up, put all my colors out, reached for the white paint, and… I had forgotten it. Blerg. I was incredibly frustrated and debated packing it back up but I thought it would be a good learning experience.

This made me think back to a demo by Clive Aspevig I attended in the spring. He had forgotten his Viridian and someone in the audience offered to go get some out of their car. He said something to the effect of “no, it happened and that’s a real part of painting. You have to learn to work with the circumstances you have.” So I plowed though.

The process was a little crazy but it was fun to try and use what I’ve learned to try and make it work. The painting was still a train wreck, so I finished it after we got home.

We recently visited my sister-in-law’s for a family event and as we were leaving I had to stop and grab a few photos of the amazing light on her driveway. The image is quite a challenge and I kept pushing more and more color into the grass and driveway to warm it up.

No. 284 is the third and last one of these trees. I was really excited about this one because I’ve changed up the way I paint and it felt much more natural. The biggest area I was focusing on was the tops of the trees. The edges on 280 and 282 felt like a mess and they feel so much better in this one. Now I’ve just got to remember what I did…

There is nothing like May in Georgia. It’s as close to perfect as you can get with the weather. A big storm blew out early in the morning and by mid-morning there were some fantastic clouds and light to work with.

I was happy with elements of No. 280 but wanted to dig deeper and try it again. It felt like 280 was another case of getting the underpainting perfect only to screw it up when color was applied. So for this one I blew through the underpainting and tried to get into the color sooner. It was fun to loosen up and let it fly.

We had a beautiful sunset over the mountains in North Georgia and wanted to capture this on canvas. It was a beautiful evening and a real challenge to try and communicate the light.

Here’s a view of the Blue Ridge Mountains and Brasstown Valley. I attempted this scene on-site but it was sort-of a mess. When we got back home I attempted the view again and used the original for info about the real colors I had seen while there.

Last weekend my family visited Brasstown Bald in North Georgia, and I managed to get in some painting while we were there. It was supposed to rain all day Saturday but by mid-morning the storm had blown out and left behind some really nice clouds. It was a beautiful day to be outside and painting!

Here’s an in-progress shot of the view. I forgot my brush holder and resorted to sticking my brushes in a gap on the Versa lid.