Plein Air in the Backyard!

Yesterday after I got to the Truckee house, I set up in the backyard. The fall colors are nice and it was a gorgeous day.

Getting close to finishing Lion Pride watercolor

Sometimes life interrupts! But I squeaked in a couple of hours today between preparing my horse for the horseshoer, and packing up the bunnies and heading out to the Truckee house for the weekend. The lions are getting very close to being finished. Next time I work on them it will be a touch here, a bit softer there, an accent here. Yay! I'll be glad to be finished with them so I can move on to something else.

They trapped two house-raiding bears in our Truckee neighborhood. They are in "time-out" for a few months then will be released somewhere else. So now I can bring my bunnies and not worry about them being hors deurves (spell check doesn't know French - neither do I!).

Back to the "Lion Pride"

Today I did watercolor day with my friend. It was good to get back to the lions. I did a lot of work on the lower half of the painting today. It is taking shape.

Fall Grasses in Sunlight

Today we are having quite a bit of rain. Actually, that is very good. I'm glad our plein air workshop was last week and not this week!

I painted another painting of this scene in Hope Valley. This time I took out the tree branches draping over the rock to see how it would look without them. It opens up the picture and the important thing now is the sun hitting the grass and surrounding willows.

This painting was done on blue-green La Carte. It was an adjustment to go back to my usual papers! At first I felt like I was lost and didn't know what to do. But as the painting progressed I no longer felt like a foreigner.

Hope Valley Plein Air Workshop

I'm back from Lorenzo Chavez's plein air workshop. It was a great time for all 10 attendees and we learned so much. A special thanks to our organizer Thaleia. I was one of the lucky ones who got to stay at her cabin. Hopefully, by helping feed the "starving artists" with my lasagna and apple pie, I will be asked to come back!

Painting en plein air is a special challenge. You basically have only two hours because the light changes. Add to that - I decided to only work on the surface our instructor uses - Canson paper - which I normally don't use. All the artists tried it, then went back to their own favorites. But I was stubbornly sticking it out the whole 5 days. So, let me explain that my paintings start out wimpy and get stronger toward the end of the workshop. You really have to push and scrub the pastel into this paper! So much fall-out into the tray!

I haven't done plein air very much, so my paintings are not something I would do anything with. I consider them "field studies", from which I can do a studio painting from that might look great and I'll frame! So, please view my paintings here with a grain of salt! But, I learned some great techniques and lessons to do this kind of painting. If I try to do a little plein air each week - I will probably improve.

If you want to see an accomplished plein air painting - see Lorenzo's website at http://www.lorenzochavez.com/ .

"Queen Anne's Lace" Watercolor Painting

This was a fun class. Jan taught us how to place medium size salt crystals on the moist painting to make Queen Anne's Lace. Only problem was, I seemed to drop crystals other places where I didn't want them! Another thing I learned was that you have to babysit the painting and when the salt sucks up the paint to the desired shapes and sizes, you have to dust off the salt crystals. I must have been yacking with the others during lunch hour and some of my flowers bloomed a little too much!

This is the last of the Jan Foss Watercolor Workshop pieces. You can visit her site at http://www.watercolorsbyjanfoss.com/ . Hopefully I am back home and have lots of plein air paintings from Hope Valley I can post!

"Wild Roses" Watercolor Painting

This was done in Jan Foss's class. We learned how to use liquid mask to paint the pistons and stamens to save the white. Then, after the painting was done, we lifted off the mask and painted them the appropriate colors and details.