Big scene and a close up

Two paintings, started outdoors in Southern Utah and finished indoors. One, the big picture, the other a detail.

Spring! and painting again!

Had a great weekend in St. George! 3rd annual "Creative Accountability Group" Plein Air outing. The other painters are oil painters so as the odd-man-out in watercolor, I had the goal of painting large, fast, loose, and colorful. Last fall I tended to paint smaller and more realistic and decided to go big on this trip. The first image "toward Zion" 7"x 9" was a 45 minute warm up sketch on Friday evening to get ready for the paint-out on Saturday. The other two are larger, 16"x 22", painted in the morning hours and evening hours about a half mile apart.

Last of the season in Park City

Here are four more, done in Park City before the weather turned too cold to watercolor outdoors. More to come when I get a chance to visit warmer climes!

Painting above Park CIty

A friend and photographer, Tom Clark, took pics while I was painting at Gaurdsman's Pass above Park City. Spectacular light, and starting to get chilly in the late afternoon.

Plein air festival at Thanksgiving Point

This week I participated in the Plein air festival at Thanksgiving Point. It was good to meet and connect with some local artists and to see their work. There are always fewer watercolorists at these events but interesting for me to see how other people work. The constraints of having timed paint-outs then submitting the work for judging was intense.

Another week of painting

Park City is an amazing place. Just 20 minutes from Salt Lake and the conveniences of a city, but a quiet spectacularly beautiful place in the tops of the mountains. There is the one drawback of the 20 mile mountainous freeway drive at 80 miles an hour which is usually filled with slow semi-trucks and broken down vehicles going up and white knuckle speed demons going down!

Still working this week in my small notebook, I am going to start painting larger now. I feel like these small sketches are trying to contain too much info in too small a space. Also I want to get a looser feeling and I can't seem to do that with little brushes.

Little Postcards

Using my new Sennelier half pan palette and a handmade unsized-cotton watercolor sketchbook, I've been thinking about postcard images. These all measure approx. 7"x 9". The weather has been spectacular and I paint at about 8:30 each morning for a couple of hours.