We pause our coverage of Plein Airpril to take a look back at March.
If I thought February was a light month for me, March was even lighter, as I became distracted with a bunch of stressful life stuff. I often find that painting is the first thing to go when I’m overwhelmed, which is a shame since it helps me to de-stress. I’m hoping that the consistent, low lift of Plein Airpril will help me to get back into it.
In March, I painted 12 paintings:
- 3 Canada National Parks, but 2 were the same park
- 3 birds, including one very sketchy pigeon
- 4 #bluesandbrownsonly (not counting the junco which I also did with the blues & browns palette)
- 2 skies (1 #skieswithjt, 1 misc)
The Paintings
Technically I also painted the first day of PleinAirpril on March 31, but I’ll save that one for the April round-up!
Photo to Painting: Sunset through my window
As I don’t have enough Photo to Paintings this month for a separate post, here’s a quick Photo to Painting reflection on that final sunset. Although I began painting it when actually looking at the sunset through my window, I snapped a pic because I knew it would take me longer to paint than the colors lasted.
I was mindful that I wanted to keep the sky color light, since I always make it too dark to try to sell the idea of nightfall coming; actually, the color of the sky remains light blue for a good long time, even as the increasing difficulty of seeing the foreground makes it clear there’s less light in the world.
I used a combination of DS Quin Red (PV19) and DV Quin Red (PR209) to make the pink color, which in context I think looks really bright – no need for Opus here! And my good ol buddy Naples Yellow Deep is the yellow. I surprised myself by turning to Cerulean Blue for the sky, since I usually like smoother colors – I’m not entirely happy with the granulation, but it was easier to softly dab into little corners than a Phthalo would be. When I use Phthalos, I always end up with unintended gray blends at the cloud edges.
Here’s a pic of the sunset I took a few minutes earlier. Sometime I’d like to paint this sort of gentler, pre-sunset color scheme.
