Painting #99, a wonderful day

I really got enthused about today's painting, I think part of it is because I prepared this board a few days ago, I, in my ignorance, purchased a couple of sheets (30" x 40")of illustration board, hot pressed, I thought I was getting hot pressed watercolor board, sending it back was more trouble than it was worth. When I first got it I attempted to paint on it, boy, was that a big ugly mess, well, the paint doesn't really work well on this, it's so smooth, it's even worse than using Yupo, if you can imagine that. So this is what I did, I coated it front and back with gesso. Now, you might say that painting on gesso with watercolors isn't much better, but I disagree, painting on this was almost as fun as painting on the clayboard. Now, I think I will be preparing the other boards that I have in the same manner.

I'd like to mention that this photo was taken at a workshop in Hillsdale a few years ago, I'm not sure, but I think this may be my friend Lynn's photo, I know she did a painting similar to this one, and she was much better at getting the scenes then I was, I was so wrapped up in close up for detail and I thought that I wanted to do panorama pictures, so I took lots of photo's just a little overlapping so I really appreciate Lynn sharing her photo with me.

This painting is the full 10" x 10" size, so I will have to mat and frame this one to about 16" x 16". I started it by sketching the rough shapes, I wanted to make sure that I left the figures unpainted since I'm using a basic watercolor technique for most of this painting, it's painted with the opaque paints but translucently, I wanted to leave the whites as the unpainted, so I painted around them with the green and pink thrown in, a light color at first and then went back in with the darks to pop the whites, then I painted the path and the trees and the shadows, I was having so much fun with those figures that I really didn't want to stop for lunch, but I did, then I had to put the watercolors away and paint china, so when I got home, I finished it, this painting took me between 4-1/2 to 5 hours to finish, I probably won't get this detailed and this large again for a while, I can't afford to spend that much time on one painting, but this was a lot of fun, I hope you like it as much as I do.