Painting in the Great Outdoors

We've had a few nice days this week and since today was a forecast of rain, I decided to lug my easel, paints and brushes outside onto my back deck yesterday. I have a nice shaded spot to paint there and the scenery is so much nicer than in my cluttered studio.

I worked on the lower sky to soften it up and bring a brighter glow in one area to show where the sun was going down. The yellow sky was toned down as were the lower blue and purple clouds.

I also worked on the trees to tweek their shapes and their colours. Since they are almost silhouetted by the sun going down, they are very dark, however I still wanted to differentiate the middle section of trees from the trees on either side since they are further back. I have to do this with colour. The trees closer should have more detail and more vibrant colour and the further back trees are grayed a bit or have a bluer hue. This will be tricky.

Working on the rock on the left of the painting proved to make it too light for the time of day so I will have to do more work on it.

This is the painting before I started today.

This is the painting when I finished for the day.

It seems this painting with never get done but I am determined to finish it so I'll keep plugging away at it.  You can't really even tell by these photos that I worked on it for 2 hours.

When you paint outside you can bet you'll have little critters walking in your paint!