My favorite of the summer plein air paintings

Winter has arrived in my part of Colorado, and it is nice to have a little fall color hanging on the wall! We are supposed to get 4 to 10" of snow tonight. I know that is a large amount for many of you, but I live in ski country and we like it. Some of the ski areas are already open and others open later this week. Copper Mountain and Keystone both open on November 4th, although terrain will be limited to where they have snowmaking for a while. We need a lot more snow before there will be enough to ski on without any man made snow added to it. It will come; we don't have to worry about that!

Painting with the Plein Air Artists of Colorado

I was invited to paint with this group when they came up to Summit County this September, and I took them up on it. Now that I feel more comfortable painting outside, I will be joining them more often I hope!

I have been away too long....time to start posting again!

Somehow time flew this summer and I managed to ignore my blog. We did a plein air event as a benefit for the local Land Trust. My sister Adele was in town as Artist in Residence in Breckenridge for a month, and I spent more time painting than I thought I might be able to. I went to Westcliffe CO in September for another Plein air event that Adele and our friend Joe Garcia were involved in. In the process I managed to get better at painting outside and even did a few plein air pieces I don't mind showing other people. I have taken two workshops with Jill Carver, trying to improve my outdoor painting skills and perhaps something stuck. But then again, next time I go outside to paint, I might have to wipe every attempt off!

Joe, his wife Anne, Adele, and my husband and I also managed to set up a business doing painting workshops in New Zealand. The first one that Joe and Adele will be teaching is full, and we have scheduled Michael Chesley Johnson and Barrett Edwards to teach two in February and March in 2013. See http://www.paintnewzealand.blogspot.com/ if you would like more information. I also was juried in to Women Artists of the West and will be joining Plein Air Artists of Colorado in January. My goal is to paint even more next year and will start by joining PAAC in Taos in May for a paintout.

So do I have an excuse for not posting? Not really, but I will do better this fall and into the winter.

Before and after

I did a couple of plein air paintings this weekend in Westcliffe. They weren't particularly good, but at least I didn't turp them out. I thought I would post one here as a "before" the Jill Carver workshop, and I will hopefully post a much better one as an "after". This isn't quite finished as I thought I would tweak the fence posts after it dried a bit. I may never get around to it, as it isn't one of my favorites....maybe it should have been turped out! The two triangular shapes are too similar; I should have make one of them larger and the other smaller. Not a particularly good composition. It also needs a lighter streak of light behind the trees. Perhaps I should never have posted it, but now you know why I am taking this workshop!