Prairie Cloud study - revisited

I am in a revisionist mood so I pulled out the block in of Prairie Cloud Study.  Besides taking a better picture, I darkened parts of the clouds to give them volume and some structure.  I modified the sky patches with more varied blues, and finally I better structured the darks in the tree and the tones in the grasses.  I think this is a good study for when I plan to work on some of my South Dakota Badlands photos.

Plains Monarch - second approach

I went back and worked on this study of a lone three on the Plains.  I had blocked in the basics and tonight I ran across this while considering what I wanted to work on.  I made minor changes to the clouds and the tree.  I did a lot more brush work on the grassland in the middle and fore ground.

Green River, Wyoming

Sometimes I feel a need to do something different so I worked in watercolor and brown Pentel pen on tan paper.  This is modeled in the style of artist Thomas Moran's watercolors from 160 years ago.  So I enjoyed this as a break tonight.

Arctic Circle - Northern Scandanavia

Sometimes the painting fights you and nothing works as you see it in your head verse what you end up putting down on the canvas.  I worked on three starts this weekend and all of them annoyed me, did not work or will need more work to even be half way presentable.  This simple study based on a photo and some other images I had from a trip to the Arctic Circle 25 years ago made up this study.  It went together in about 2 hours and worked pretty much from the start.  It is too bad more don't go this easy.

Cherry Blossom Festival - part 3

This is tonight's work on the Cherry Blossom Study I have been working on for the past few nights.  I have put in the foliage and worked on the water.  I am going to work on the water, the foreground, and add some additional color for depth in the foliage.  After I work out the water the way I would like I am going to add a reflection of the blossoms in the dark water near the tidal pool retaining wall.

Cherry Festival revisited - part 2

I added some of the cherry blossom foliage to the study for my larger Cherry Blossom painting.  Tomorrow, I will address the water shadow, and the monument's shadow in the reflection of the water.

Cherry Festival revisited

I have had some interest in my small study of the Washington DC Spring Cherry Blossom Festival.  I got home a little late so after messing around a little with some sketches of Cherry Blossoms, I started in blocking in a larger and slightly modified version of the original study.  This gives me a chance to keep what I liked from the original study but I can change and experiment with things I did not like so much.  This will need a lot more work but I will post tomorrows progress.