Trying out Yupo!

Sheila came over today to paint with me. She's doing lots of work on Yupo and brought some for me to try. I kept it very simple, luckily, bcause the paint does wacky things on that smooth surface! I had pretty good luck with the fennel-she suggested that I use a pretty concentrated paint mixture, which was helpful advice. She left another piece for me to work with later-don't know yet what I'll do. Thanks, Sheila, for introducing me to this new material.

Return of the squash leaves

My sister visited me for 8 days so I didn't get much work done, and missed my weekly plein air session altogether. Fitting in a half hour here and there, I painted the squash leaves for a second time. On this go round, I used a limited palette of only 5 colors: viridian, Winsor green (yellow shade), green gold, perylene green and brown madder. I put a great deal more detail on the leaves, though it doesn't all show up well in the photo here. The terre verte I used on the first painting behaves very oddly-almost sits on the surface of the paper, but it did give a luminous, almost iridescent character to the leaves. This one doesn't have as much of a 3 dimensional quality as the earlier piece, but I like it better-the painting just has more life to it. This is the painting I plan to enter in the SCVWS "Anything Goes" exhibit at the Norton Gallery in Palo Alto.

My weekly plein air painting

I've kept up with my plan to paint en plein air once a week. On Sunday, July 5th, we drove down to Anderson Lake County Park in Morgan Hill. It was awfully dry-no green undergrowth in the woods or grasses in the open areas-just dirt. The creek was full, however. They likely let more water out of the reservoir for the holiday weekend; we saw lots of picnicing families.
I had a real problem capturing the rushing water-there were a few little rapids and lots of sparkles on the water. Without resorting to mask I just don't know how to interpret the movement and light on the creek.