The next couple of blog entries will show some of the progress on the paintings themselves. For Hyla Park and Connor Brothers Preserve, I thought about trying to complete some watercolour pencil studies first. The one you see below is a scene from Pea Point at dusk on Connor Brothers Preserve. I started this as a quick sketch of just one area (center right), but I was having so much fun with the watercolour pencils that I ended up completing the page. It is 7 x 10" on cotton watercolour paper.
For the oil painting, I decided on a 36 x 60" canvas. Unlike the study, I really wanted to capture more of the rocks around the left edge of this little pond. When I start a painting, I like to map out the composition in washes of sepia acrylic paint sometimes with a little bit of blue or black.
In many of my oil paintings, I often start with the sky. In this painting, the sky is seen as a reflection in the water. I am mostly looking forward to capturing the reflections and the orange lighting from the low lying sun at dusk.
I will come back to this one in a later blog entry. Next entry will be some progress on the Hyla Park painting...