State Fair Plein Air paint out

Today I am painted out. I went to the fair grounds at 9 and checked in for the paint out. Duane King was there when I was walking in so that was good seeing him. He took second place in the professional division. After check in it was hard to decide a place to paint so I walked around the entire fair. The first place I decided to paint was the Pepsi coliseum from across the track. It was all right but the roof for the building looked awful so I scrapped it. The second painting was of a red trailer over on the very north fence. It was under a tree with a bunch of chickens and guineas running around it. I set up in the shade of the tree and listened to a lumberjack competition while painting. After loosing track of time I booked it across the entire fairgrounds in about 8 minutes to arrive with a few minutes to spare. Anyway I stuck around until the judging and I won the non-professional division. That was exciting and now I am painted out and will pick up tomorrow. Also I forgot to take a picture of the painting so that will be up at the end of the fair.

Field Study turned pastel

Today I started the pastel leg of this adventure. This is from an earlier watercolor under painting and today I applied pastel over it. I learned quite a few things today. I've used this surface before for watercolor and it has been sitting around a while. The paper is arches 140 lb cold pressed although it has far more texture than the 300 lb rough paper. Next pastel that is done on watercolor paper will be on something with far less texture. I'm not a fan of textured paper and as soon as I see the pattern start to emerge my instinct is to fill it in. This can lead to some major problems with pastels. Thankfully I was only using hard pastels and you can keep applying but that could be a real problem with soft pastels. Anyway like I said yesterday value scale and relative shape value are my main focus points right now and this painting did an alright job with that. This is a very simple landscape with four total shapes. There are three horizontal bars and a tree line shape. With such a limited amount of shape variation it is easy to focus on value. The sky holes in the tree need work so that is on the agenda next time but other than that I like the trees. The thing that I liked the best about the painting is right under the foliage on the trunk of the tree I used a vibrant violet purple. Typically this would stick out like a sore thumb in a painting. When I applied it all the colors around it shared the same value which helped it settle into the shape instead of popping out. Perhaps next I will look at chroma alongside value scale. This was a good exercise and will definitely help with my larger paintings.

Back from an extended break

Today is the first post in eight days and it feels much longer. I've been busy since my last post and would like to share with you my recent news and happenings. I've got bad, good and great news. I will start off with the bad since its the shortest. August 5th and 6th was the paint out at the Indiana Dunes and I made the drive up there. It was a good experience but as far as painting is concerned, I haven't had such a dry streak in a long time. Nothing was clicking, it all just fell to pieces shortly after beginning. The only thing that kept me from hurling all my art supplies into the lake and marshes was the possible fines. It was extremeley frustrating seeing so many good artist produce amazing work and to just not have anything to show for two days worth of painting. But the good news about the trip is I met a lot of artist that I hadn't been aquainted with, and got a lot of great information from people that I admire their work. 

After that trip was over I headed down to southern Indiana to my parents farm and decided I couldn't end the week on a bad note. I set out to paint on Sunday morning. After finding a spot in Ripley county on the grinsted farm I got to work.The two paintings from sunday morning turned out far better than I was expecting after the abysmal showing at the dunes. One thing I've been pounding into my brain is value scale and relative value among a shape. These two paintings nailed it and are final paintings. The rest of the time I was at my parents I produced 4 more paintings. One of the three is completely done and the other 3 are in need of some attention but will end up being good paintings as well. That is the good news.

The Great news comes from the Indiana State Fair. I entered four paintings into the non-professional show. All four of the paintings made it into the show and three of the paintings are ribbon winners. I took first place in pastels with the painting from the Richmond paint out. In watercolor I took 5th place and got an honorable mention. The painting I like best turned out to be the only goose egg. It is strange how that happens, but regardless I was excited. And that is the great news

Anyway Im back home and back to painting so I will see you tomorrow.