46 days of painting, this one was tough

I worked on this painting off and on for 4 days, it shouldn't have taken me so long, I guess the trouble is like most things (cleaning house for one), if you look at the big picture, it's a bit intimidating. I saw all this stuff and had a really tough time nailing it down to just a portion, I believe it was complicated and, thus, didn't want to work on it, it really took a long time for it to come together for me, I am fairly happy with the way it turned out, so I guess it was worth it.

I also believe that the other thing that I have on my agenda was weighing me down and I really had a hard time concentrating on the blog painting. I am doing this workshop tomorrow (Sat. March 12 in Coldwater), I have also been dragging my feet with that one, I am the worlds worst (or best, which ever), at procrastination, I always put it off until the last minute. Once I really jump in it usually takes me along and I do fine, but getting my head in the right direction, sometimes takes quite a bit, this is one of the reasons that I decided to do this blog, to get me into better habits, whether it does that will be a tell at the end of the year and see if I can maintain the painting every day after the year is done.

Ok, the first painting I'm going to show you is the painting I worked on for the workshop, this workshop is to introduce most novice artists (or non artists)to art, to show them what you can do with a few paints and what ever, and make a painting, and hopefully feel good about it and possibly do some other art stuff, this painting is an acrylic, done in a unique way, hardly any actual painting. The fish are stamped on a background color and the only painting part is some of the colors applied over the fish and then some detail on the scales and the eyes, I think it's very interesting. Here it is, tomorrow I will work on another one, to show them how I did it.

Ok, now on to the blog painting, this scene is very complicated, as you can see, I think one of the problems with it is there is really no actual light direction, the sun was out but this is a very dense area and in order to get this photo I had to pray that there was enough light to get it, I have several others that the light wasn't so good. This is the Fumee Creek site again, you've seen a couple of them, I know of one for sure (not looking at my paintings I have lost track), imagine how that will be in a few months, my watercolor society wants me to do a talk and demo the blog, that will be interesting, anyway, the background is so dark, I really had a time getting it to look like it wasn't a hole, I think I pulled that off, the leaves were all over, if you didn't know, that is what all the orange stuff laying on the ground and rocks is. Then, I put in trees and the rock shapes, I put light blue where the water was, even though it wasn't blue, I had to have something so I could lighten it up later (I'm using those opaques again), I just kept working the rocks, that was the longest process, as you can see, there are a lot. I put the falls in at the very end, and then the foreground water, it was hard to see where the actual water was, there were many more rocks than I put in the painting, I made the water much flatter than it really was, so it would look like a small pond at the bottom of the falls, there really wasn't a pond, it was all rocks. This particular site has about 4 or 5 falls, we climbed and climbed, and that was fun, I am now enjoying this painting, mostly because it finally done, whew! Hope you enjoy it too.