Plein air in New England
by
I've been on a trip to New England and tried to do a bit of watercolor painting. I always try to do too much on trips, even more so when I'm visiting family, so what's also happening in each of these paintings is three other people patiently indulging me when I said I'd like to sit down and paint for a moment please, even though we have a busy itinerary, and in some cases an actual Gannt, which yes, I made for us in the dread fear of anyone being bored and not having a nice enough time. Anyway, here are some paintings from the moments I did actually pause.
A study of some apples at Buell's Orchard in Eastford, Connecticut.
These apples were such interesting colors and I wanted to try to get the feeling of the color.
Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park in Maine was pretty amazing, despite a lot of people saying that the fall colors hadn't come in yet and it would be much better. A four seasons climate has become kind of exotic to me after living in coastal California for 20 years, so I thought even just the beginning of the changing leaf colors was pretty interesting. Paul took this photo of me getting ready to paint.
I tried to do a very quick painting, just 15 minutes, and I am not particularly satisfied with it. It was too much detail to try for in a quick painting and I felt rushed. I didn't even take my usual palette plus scenery photo. The trees might have been a bad subject for a quick painting--at least at my current skill level.
For the second painting I chose a subject that I thought would work better for quick and kind of blobby and abstract painting. I also got over my initial reluctance to paint the coastal islands which I felt everyone paints and photograph. Paul took this photo of the view I was painting while I was painting it.
Normally I use more water even when I'm out and about, but I didn't want to spill anything in the park, so I tried to be a lot more restrained. Paul took this photo of me painting the second painting as well.
I deliberately used wet on wet techniques to make the paint feather and run, and tried to remember the advice I read in a watercoloring technique book that you should use the subject to create your watercolor painting instead of trying to use the watercolor painting to depict the subject.
I like how this one came out best of all. If I want realism, I'll take a photo.