Painting #219 - Aug 31 - A beautiful day to hang a show and have lunch with a friend!

Well, as you can see, it was a full day, The Tibbits Opera House Gallery (lower level), a part of Arts Alive in Coldwater hung the show "Bare Bones and a Full Moon" today, the plan was to get the show hung and then to have some lunch, then sketch and go with Susan to Hudson so she could get her paintings in the competition she was accepted in, it didn't quite work out that way, instead of the 3 of us (Carol, Susan and I), it ended up just Carol and I, we were late getting the show hung, so that we didn't have time to go to Hudson (Sue had to be in Bronson at 4:00 p.m.), so she canceled out and it was Carol and myself that had a lovely lunch at Applebee's, we then went out to sketch, but alas, we couldn't find people at home to get permission to sketch their barns, 2 places and 2 lovely barns that didn't get sketched, by this time it was 3:00 and we were both tired, so home we went.

Now you'd think that I would have gotten right after my painting, but, no! I decided to take a short nap, these 6 hour nights have been catching up with me, I do have to do one more painting for the show at Tibbits, but I chose a slightly simpler composition again tonight, I had a very busy evening trying to find the photo's that one of my student's loaned me (this is the Alaska photo I painted tonight, she spent 2 weeks up there with her daughter and was kind enough to share her photo's with me, unfortunately, I lost track of where they were, but I did find them, so all is well.

I love painting these long simple landscapes, I got this one done in about an hour, and I love that, and it was fun, I painted the sky first, of course, I'm using the opaque watercolors, so I laid in the blue for the sky then floated in the white and then on top of that the gray for the bottom of the clouds. The mountain range (I believe is Denali), went right in while it was wet, and I just kept moving down until I got it all painted once. I let that dry, and then went in with white for the snow capped mountains and some blue for the small streams, I'm uncertain if the white close to the mountains is snow or water, but it was there. I then put in the pine trees and the short bushes in the foreground, I really like this little painting and I hope you do too.