'Wild Mountain' - oil/linen/bd - 6x9
This was a wild session too. Knowing the dangers of being anywhere near the bunny hill at a ski area ( I used to teach skiing....), I set up at what I thought was a safe distance from the activity. Big mistake, double the distance, no...triple the distance! But I was 6" from the parking lot and really thought it was going to be a good night. I was about 5 minutes or so into the painting, just laying things in, when I hear this loud, high pitched screaming little 8 or 9 year old girl, as it turned out to be. As soon as I lifted my eyeballs up, I could see the tips of her skis about to impact my legs. She was flat on her back and going full speed...out of control. My first instinct was to grab the tripod and OpenBoxM, but I wasn't fast enough. In a split second thinner container, brushes and all were airborne!!! It was loud. Fortunately she was fine, I was fine except for a broken Bogen tripod leg....I didn't discover that until I finished and was moving to another location...out of the way for sure.
Interesting to paint there. Orange lights, yellow lights, whit-ish lights, and all throwing their influence on the snow. Makes for situations where You have to trust what you see...Not what you think should be....and paint that.


'Across The Street'

'The Malt Shop'
These are two plein air nocturnes from this past summer that I've just now managed to take photos of. One is across the street looking at a house, the other is in downtown Taylors Falls.... Schoony's Malt Shop & Pizzeria. The maylfies were so bad that there are still body parts embedded in the surface of the malt shop painting. That's one reason to paint fast. The bugs will drive you nuts at night, standing there with a light on is a magnet for them. Both are 8x10, oil on board. I'm varnishing these with Golden UVL Satin Acrylic Resin Spray varnish. Otherwise the gloss is just too much to deal with visually. They were quickly painted, maybe a half hour or so, using the Mighty Brite color corrected book light. As you can see, in these images with artificial light, I make good use of Transparent Oxide Red, Ultramarine Deep and Alizarin plus a little Viridian. I try to keep any opaque pigments out of the picture for as long as is possible. Still paying very close attention to the relative value range of the lights compared to the darks and midtones.