Painting #239 - a very nice painting day

I enjoyed my painting operation today, some days I do more than others, of course part of the reason is some new photo's. These photo's are from my friend Pat's collection, she graciously loaned me these and I do have a couple more that I'm going to try painting here directly. Yesterday's painting was of the Kalamazoo river at Battle Creek, the photo was taken from the Emmett street location, this particular place I'm very familiar with, I grew up in Battle Creek, less than mile from this particular location, I've taken some pictures of this same location, but it was years ago and they were taken in the fall, that one was taken in the spring or early summer. Today's painting is from a location in North Carolina (I think, maybe not), so I'm presuming that's where it was taken, and I'm sure these are some of Pat's family (well, who knows except her, maybe she will tell me).

So, I started this painting yesterday, this is one of the tree that I started at the Demonstration, I still have one more of those to finish and then I can work on something else, I will be trying to get some of the matting done tomorrow, I'm so far behind, I knew if I let it get ahead of me, that I'd be in trouble, and that's where I am. I have been selling my blog paintings, I decided, at the beginning, to keep them all until the end and then I would choose which paintings I wanted to put in the show, not considering the amount of space that 365 paintings would take up, I'm changing that concept, I've already picked out the ones that I think may (and that is still debatable whether I will use them for my show or not), so, now I'm trying to sell the others, I know that I have several people that have mentioned they would like some, so, I'm going to sell them if I can.

This painting was a demo (I mentioned that before), what I mean is, that my friend Jean was having trouble figuring out how to make the color flow on this claybord surface, so I simply took a blank one and floated the color of the sky on so she could see how I would attempt it. I really didn't want the sky as dark as she had hers, so I've altered that sky, to this much lighter one, by taking a brush load of water over the sky, when it was wet, I dropped some of the lighter blue at the top, so it looks like a mass of clouds, that worked for me. Then I floated in the farthest background trees and worked my way forward to the water and then the close bank, I let that dry, once I had that in, I pulled up a bit more information in the background across the water, and the bank on the far side, then I worked on the water a bit, once I got the water fairly good, I worked on the trees in the foreground and then the figures sitting on the bank, I had originally put a thin wash of light brown for the bank and then at the end, I put some grass shapes in, I like this little painting and I hope you do too.