Painting #81, the weeks just seem to fly by

Well, I don't know if it's because of this blog, or if it's because I'm officially old now, but the weeks just seem to be evaporating. Seems like only yesterday it was the Monday, wow, hope this whole year doesn't go like that.

Well, this is the painting that I started in my class on Wednesday, I didn't have energy to finish it Wednesday night, I was exhausted, today I'm great, but, I had to go to Battle Creek to try to get copies of the pictures I'm planing to submit to the Ireland residency., Well, the Staples in Battle Creek didn't seem overly excited about helping me, and their machine was messed up, had a line in it, and I can't submit photo's that arn't perfect, so I have to investigate someplace else, hope I can find someplace soon, got to get that done.

Well, this is really a sky painting, I was trying to show the girls how to approach a sky with clouds in a couple of different ways, one strictly transparent, and the other with transparent and then charge in with opaque white, it really works for me with these little ones, but, I was happier with the transparant one, so then I decided to put a small farm landscape at the bottom, so here it is, the sky was done first wet in wet with thalo blue, skipping across the paper with the blue and leaving the white spaces for the clouds, then while it is still wet, on the shadow side of the clouds (the bottom), charge in with a mixture of cerulean blue with a touch of burnt sienna to gray it, the granulation of the heaver pigment (the cerulean/burnt sienna mixture) will keep it fairly close to the place you put it if you have the mixture thick enough, the thalo blue is a mover, and by that I mean when you paint wet in wet, the wash really moves quickly, the cerulean blue mix is a granular wash, so it catches in the little dips in the paper, I'm pretty sure that this type of sky wouldn't work with the clayboard, since there are no dips in the paper. The little farm at the bottom is opaque (again, because that is the palette I utilize at home), and self explanatory, don't know if you can tell, but one of thos little figures in the foreground is a horse with a rider, don't know if that was what it really was, too small to tell, but it looked like a rider and horse to me, so that's what it is. I like this little painting, and hope you do to.