Jan 31 - All finished and Delivered!

One hour and twenty minutes... finished and framed.
I spent the last ten minutes both studying the stage of the painting from yesterday's blog, and also wanting to place more emphasis on that steeple. So I went over the sky again with another layer, blending the brushworks away with a glaze, and then highlighting the area around the steeple with lighter values of that lemon yellow tinted sky (all Color Boot Campers know what I mean when I say Lemon Yellow in morning skies!)

The last act was to put in one of the lamp posts that are so characteristic of Riverside, on the left. No doubt where this scene is with that unique lamp post!

So in sharing the ten minute stages of a plein air quick draw, I hope that I've been able to show how one of my paintings develop to a finished stage. I look at all of the earlier ones and say, "Yipes! Ugggg-LEEs!!" But not out loud. It is just a fact that paintings in process have to go through ugly stages to get to a finished state. And in a nutshell, the finished state is focusing the viewer's eye on those areas where we want interest, and downplaying those areas where interest is much lower on the priority list.

Yes, I know some artists go the mile in detail and focus, but I like to think my painting style is more the way the human eye sees--what is of interest to us is where our eyes focus and thus we get detail at that area. The rest of the scene/critter/person is then less detailed.

No signature, a requirement for these juried events (makes it fair to the judge), and here's the nicest reward a painter can receive--honors for honest effort! Thanks for sharing the journey with me. The painting is now hanging in the Riverside Art Museum, and the opening for that show is February 7.



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