Sketches in Higley

Started painting at 5 AM this morning and painted for about an hour and a half. These are the results. Each painting is about 3x5 & took about 20 - 30 minutes.

Fast Color Sketches

I've been trying to get out every morning and do a painting. It's not been easy as I am still in the final stages of finishing the illustrations for "The Tomb Robbers And King Tut" (the book I am illustrating for Viking Books). I often find myself in the position of having a finite segment of time with an infinite amount of things I would like to paint and wanting to make the best use of my time and not waste it on a lousy painting. I often thereby paralyze myself with indecision. Then I was looking through Kevin Macpherson's book and saw this little 3 x 5 color sketch he did. It inspired me. So the last few days I have been going out and doing 2 - 4 little color sketches/notes in about an hour. They are 4 x 5 inches. I am using a #6 bright for a brush, which is fairly large for that size of painting. This of course speeds up the process and forces me to really simplify.

Monday I went out to the Salt River basin just NE of Mesa. I arrived early and was all set up by 5:30 when the sun was beginning to peak over the horizon. This was my first painting. It had the moon getting ready to set.

I then drove down the road a ways where Red mountain was getting the early warm rays of the sun.

Turning about 90˚ to the right was this view of the layers of mountains.

Utah

Landscape

Although where I live is very suburban, less than 2 miles away is an area of gilbert that still has some rural flavor. 

Sonoma Plein Air

On a whim, I applied to be a participating artist in the Sonoma Plein Air Painting event. This past week I received notification that I have been accepted. So in September I will be in beautiful Sonoma County painting away. I don't know too much about it and have never done one of these events before. However, I was just reading Terry Miura's account of his experience a few years ago which makes it sound pretty good. As a result of this, I will be doing as much plein air painting as I can over the next months. Here are a couple I've done this week.

This first one, I tried something compositionally that didn't work out so well; the placement of the post in the center. However, I do like the sense of light and atmosphere.

 This second one is some silos in the early morning, not far from my house.

More Utah

Farmhouse in Utah

Working in a palette of purple, green and a little blue, red-orange.