20th painting, so far so good

Doing pretty good with the painting a day thingy, but, so far not much else, that has to change, tomorrow I am going to work on a larger painting besides the small one. Promise! Now, I did finish this last night but you'll remember I did say that sometimes on Saturday I would do 2 just in case I get to spend the day with my husband, and he appreciates it (at least I think he does), anyway, I decided to try a landscape on that clayboard, well, I really like it, now of course, I'm painting with those opaques again, can't leave them alone, and when you paint with a lot of water, this clayboard does strange things, but when you paint thickly, it is so smooth you really get clean lines, so, knowing your support is paramount to good paintings, figuring out what happens is just, paint, and paint, that's the intent of this blog, to get me painting more than in classes, and so far it's working, hope that keeps up, just trying to paint everyday will really improve my work, I'm sure.

since you really can't do wet in wet with this board, I just jumped in with a mix of sky blue with some purple in it and added a bit of gray to keep it from being too intense. I then went right in and started with the dark area in the tree line, and put some greens in. The water is the most fun, I laid in a wash of a light gray called Fog (an American Journey color), and some blue charged with a bit of green and some of that luscious golden color that I haven't figured out what it is yet (I'm going to have to, 'cause it's all gone in the palette now), and some brown with purple in it toward the bottom, now these are just basic under-painting, I am going back into all the areas with more paint (all except the sky), and add information, next I started with the trees and put in trunks and then some leaf definition, and the right side with some pale greens and some darker greens to indicate dense forest, here, the water is pulling me in, so I just start working the water, it's movement and reflection is paramount to this composition, so I work back and forth with the blues and greens and browns with violet in it and then jump into the white to pull up those sparkles, I painted the white pretty thick and let it skip over the spots to create the sparkles, then fine tune the trees on the right with more leaf definition and darker values on the trunks of the trees. The branch at the bottom is, of course, last and was fun to turn it in a direction that would pull you into the focal point (of course the branch was there, and of course, it was not pointed that way, artistic license you know).

That pretty much sums up the painting, hope you like it, I sure do, and I'm the one that counts (at least at this point, lol)