Painting #97 and a second one too (very small)

Today's paintings are fairly simple, by the time I got to painting today I hadn't much time, I spent the morning cutting those mats, and as a result, my shoulder hurts, shouldn't do so many at one time, but I don't have much room, and the mat cutter is big and heavy, I teach china painting classes on Thursday's, so I have to keep putting it up and down off the table, it would sure be nice not to have to lift it on and off the table, maybe someday. the first one I did is just a little landscape, I got a sample of textured clayboard in the mail a couple years ago, didn't know if I liked it then, I found it a few weeks ago and decided to paint something on it, may as well use it, it's only about 2-1/2" x about 4", so you see, pretty small. I started this at one of our Blue Moon gatherings, but never finished it, so decided to give it a try today, hope you like it.

Now, that was just a small thing, so I started this other painting, the one I'm calling #97, yesterday, I actually started another one too, but I didn't have time to work on that one, maybe I'll get it tomorrow, but, on with this one, This little ditch was taken on a trip we took to our friends home in Gillman, Illinois, it's a very small place but big farms, you could go for miles and miles and see just little tiny houses on the left, and then maybe on the right, way far away, and very flat. Anyway, they took me on a photo expedition while we were there and I got lots of farm stuff, you've seen a couple, the cows 5 or 6 weeks ago and the barn doorway, just a couple, I have some other photo's that you will probably see too.

This is one that I really liked because of the water and the ditch and I just liked the composition and simplicity of it, the sky was wet in wet, I added opaque white for clouds and then dashed a bit of purple with brown in it for under the clouds, I put in far away trees and painted around the small shed there in the background, the rest was just the green, I left the water in the ditch for later, when the green was dry, I put the blue in for the water, and then I filled in the pile of rubble (I'm presuming that it is either a fence row or junk they took out of the ditch), then I put darker green to indicate the ditch sides and then the grasses in the foreground and the bushes. I fine tuned the shed and then spattered a bit in the foreground and put some branches on the bush and called it done, I like this painting, and hope you do too.