Across the Field

Saturday morning, I went for a long drive.  It took about an hour to drive around the countryside around Leiper's Fork looking for scenes to paint.  I was specifically looking for barns and fields - something similar to what we did in Kathie Odom's class last week.  It was too cold to paint outside - plus I was by myself.  So I was armed with a camera.  I took a bunch of photos, and after I got home, I decided to paint the scene below - which is actually about a mile away from my house on Carl Road.

I first did a wash of brown on the lower 2/3, and a purply-pink on the upper 1/3.  The image below is after I blocked it out and applied the first colors.

The photo below is where I ended things last night.  The issue I see is that I have the trees wrong.  I have it looking like evergreen trees when they aren't at all.  I deliberately cropped the photo so that there was a bunch of sky.  I wanted to do some dramatic clouds to practice what I had learned in Rachael McCampbell's class this past November.  So I made it a very cloudy day.

I have appointments all this morning and into early afternoon (dentist and hair dresser) - and then Disciple Bible study is tonight. So I will only have maybe a couple hours later this afternoon that I can work on it. Three things to work on:  Make the main barn bigger and more squatty - actually mostly just the lower right roof line, make the trees more realistic (not evergreen - although if it becomes too complicated, I can just leave them as they are - artistic license), and work on the sky to make it more interesting and dramatic.

I will take this painting with me tomorrow when I go to Knoxville for Kathie Odom's second mentoring session on Thursday. It will be interesting and helpful to see the suggestions she makes for this painting and also for the painting I did from the class last week.

Later note: Kathie had lots of suggestions for that painting. I don't think she found anything positive about it. Very disappointing. So much "critique" that it was more than I could deal with or even remember.  So I decided to just chuck it. I would rather wait till spring and take a pretty spring photo of that scene and paint that.

Much later note: Although looking at it again, it's not THAT bad. I think it can be salvaged.  I will work on it again eventually.